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This thesis, located in critical race theory (CRT), explores how 46 Ontario history teacher candidates were positioned to take up a history for 'unlearning racism' (Ladson-Billings, 2003). Through an eclectic qualitative approach that combined a 'mapping activity' (Seixas, 1997), a 'timeline activity' (Epstein, 1998; Peck, 2010), short answer questions and follow-up interviews, a rich body of data was gathered that revealed teacher candidates' knowledges, views on the purpose of teaching and their role as history teachers, as well as the ways that they negotiated their racial and intersecting identities' influence. The study found that a majority of participants did not possess the knowledges, political impetus, nor a sophisticated understanding of the influence of their racial identities to take up a history for 'unlearning racism'. Three teacher candidates, however, stood apart, displaying not only the knowledges but also an understanding of the intimately political and personal ways in which histories are produced, learned and taught. Additionally, drawing from their experiences as a result of their respective marginalized identities, they possessed a lived awareness of the intrinsic role of race and racism in Canadian history and its ongoing legacy. Their marginalized identities, while compelling them to teach a history for 'unlearning racism' also worked to inhibit them from doing so, their already tenuous membership in the teaching profession further at risk if they opted to 'teach against the grain'. I recommend, on the one hand, that there needs to be a radical change in the selection of history teacher candidates and the focus of the history methods course. On the other, the three participants' experiences in their placements point to the vital role played by associate teachers and hence, recommendations are made regarding their selection. It is hoped that this research will help move all teacher candidates toward a history 'for unlearning racism' and ensure that those 'already there' are supported in doing so.

Driven by the overarching objective of promoting reconciliation through education, this thesis strives to unpack the first national goal of education set out by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Education, which involves nation building and the establishment of a Sri Lankan identity through the promotion of social cohesion and the recognition of cultural diversity in Sri Lanka's plural society. Within education, history teaching in secondary school acts as the main focus of the research, due to the relevance of this goal to the subject of history as well as the ability of history to shape the attitudes and perceptions of youth. As such, the original contribution of this thesis is the development of an understanding of how the goal of nation building is being carried out through the Sri Lankan education system by focusing on the subject of history, which in turn facilitates an analysis of the identity politics of teaching history in a multicultural post-war society. With the intention of developing such an understanding, the study aims to answer three research questions: 1) What type of nation is being built through history education in Sri Lanka?; 2) How is the ethnic and religious diversity which characterises the Sri Lankan nation being dealt with through history education?; and 3) How are Sri Lankan youth being aided in understanding the sensitive matters which impeded the nation building exercise in the recent past and resulted in the break out of the ethnic conflict? The thesis draws on an inductive approach, using qualitative research and secondary literature. Findings are generated from field work and textbook analysis. Conducted in four different districts around the country chosen based on their ethnic and religious compositions, field work involves the conducting of interviews with youth, history teachers, curriculum developers, textbook writers and other academics. This thesis argues that an ambiguity regarding the composition of the 'Sri Lankan nation' is being created through history education, with it sometimes being characterised as a purely Sinhalese-Buddhist nation instead of a multicultural one. This is most likely because the prominent players involved in the development of the curriculum themselves appear to be conflicted about the monoethnic versus polyethnic nature of the nation, with their views filtering through to the educational materials they produce. It is evident that the history curriculum predominantly contains Sinhalese-Buddhist history, with little information being conveyed about the history of the minority groups. Tamils and Muslims are portrayed as invaders and outsiders since the national story is narrated through the perspective of the Sinhalese-Buddhist community who play the role of the protagonist. With respect to stakeholder reactions, there appears to be a contrast in the attitudes of Tamil and Muslim youth regarding the portrayal of minority history, with Tamils being vocal about their anger towards the perceived bias, but Muslims being reluctant to discuss ethnic matters, preferring to sweep them under the rug. Finally, in terms of the ethnically sensitive matters in recent history, while some are completely omitted from the history lessons, others are narrated through a majoritarian perspective or glossed over by leaving out key pieces of information. Youth are therefore largely unaware of the contentious matters that led to the breakdown of ethnic relations in the country, despite having lived through a brutal ethnic conflict. These findings indicate the failings of the nation building exercise being carried out through history education. Instead of building a strong Sri Lankan identity, this type of education is creating confusion regarding the composition of the nation and adversely affecting the sense of belonging of minority youth. It is also creating a younger generation who are unaware of their country's past troubles. The recent spate of ethnic and religious violence that shook the nation highlight the need to address these weaknesses in a timely manner, with a view to promoting reconciliation through education.

This study explores how young people's engagement with history outside of the classroom shapes the development of their historical consciousness. Drawing on public discourses around the First World War (WW1), I address the implications of this engagement for history teachers and young peoples' learning. Recognising the active and dynamic construction of memory and meaning by young people, I develop the concept of social remembering. Building on socio-cultural perspectives, I examine the 'lived experience' of young people's memory work. Using WW1 as a context, and adopting an innovative mixed methods approach, the research was conducted over two stages. The first stage of the research used a quiz and survey to explore the extent and nature of young people's social remembering. In the second stage of the study I examined young people's memory work outside the classroom. I worked with several small groups of students to construct their own ethnographic accounts of societal and familial remembering and their emerging historical consciousness, fashioning these into ethnographic portraits. The research highlights the role that social remembering plays in young people's identities, including the ways in which they value and use history, attribute historical significance to events and orientate themselves in time. It shows how different forms of social remembering can both include or exclude young people and impact positively or negatively on young people's historical consciousness. An understanding of social remembering outside the classroom can support history teachers in the development of pedagogies that build on students' meaning making associated with public events such as commemorations. I argue that teachers can use the intersections between social remembering and disciplinary history to engage and support students in their study of history. Although the study originated within the context of history education, it has wider value, offering a ground breaking methodological approach to exploring young people's understandings of the past and in contributing to the historiography of historical memory.

Reforming the education system to reflect a new vision of society is part of many peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict societies. Accordingly, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is currently implementing a wide range of reforms in the education system in Iraqi Kurdistan. This research is a qualitative study of the KRG’s efforts to implement a peace education curriculum. It uses critical discourse analysis to investigate the Human Rights Education (HRE) textbooks content for Grades 5 and 7 (ages 11 and 13) and the History Education (HE) textbooks content for Grades 5, 6, 7 and 8 (age 11 to 14). The study also focuses on the policy and strategies of the Ministry of Education (ME) in implementing these subjects; the teaching methods used; and how effectively the knowledge, values and skills involved have been disseminated. The approach adopted by the ME to peace education is top down and experiences significant resistance from teachers and parents. Moreover, the curriculum reforms lacked consideration of the hidden and null curricula. The research highlights how HRE contents are primarily focused on cognitive development of awareness of rights and responsibilities rather than acquiring social skills and a critical approach, and that the content was not contextualised to the reality of Iraqi Kurdistan. Furthermore, the research found that the HE curriculum focuses on the history of Iraq, Kurdistan and Islamic history and presents a message that glorifies war; it is not open to different narratives or interpretations and does not foster critical debate or an enquiry-based approach. The curriculum contents included concepts and statements that appear to instigate violence and build divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims. Despite the achievements of the ME in improving the education system there are many challenges such as weak infrastructure, lack of professional development and resistance through the wider cultural context. The methods of teaching are what Freire terms the ‘banking system’, authoritarian and not learner-centred, which largely reflects the social fabric of Kurdish society. The research identified many challenges facing teachers including the level of their commitment, skills, specialization and capacity-building. However, it also found positive support for HRE among students and teachers.

This study employs qualitative methods to investigate the types of learning that occurred when students in a single school encountered the Holocaust. The study explored the experiences of 48 students, together with two of their teachers and a Holocaust survivor who visited the school annually to talk to the students. A thematic analysis was conducted to identify prevalent similarities in the students’ responses. Three themes were identified, analysed and discussed. The three themes were: ‘surface level learning’ (their academic knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust), ‘affective learning’ (their emotional engagement with the topic) and ‘connective learning’ (how their encounter with the Holocaust fitted their developing worldview). The first theme revealed that students had a generally sound knowledge of the Holocaust, but there were discrepancies in the specifics of their knowledge. The second theme revealed that learning about the Holocaust had been an emotionally traumatic and complicated process. It also revealed that meeting a Holocaust survivor had a significant impact upon the students, but made them begin to question the provenance of different sources of Holocaust learning. The third theme showed that students had difficulty connecting the Holocaust with modern events and made flawed connections between the two. Finally, the study examines the views of the Holocaust survivor in terms of his intentions and his reasons for giving his testimony in schools. The study’s conclusions are drawn within the context of proposing a new conceptualisation of the Holocaust as a ‘contested space’ in history and in collective memory. A tripartite approach to Holocaust Education is suggested to affect high quality teaching within the ‘contested space’ of the event.

As time moves forward, events from the past become blurred in memory. People remember, honor, and learn from history. On September 11, 2001, the United States lost 2,983 civilian lives in a terrorist attack by al Qaeda. Since 2001, the United States government has made many decisions aimed at protecting those on United States soil. To commemorate the lives lost and to prevent an act of terror in the future, historians evaluate how to remember and learn from the events that occurred on September 11. Learning from the past prepares people for the future. To educate future generations, middle and high school teachers must provide students with valuable lesson plans about September 11. In the middle school and high school classrooms around the country, the process and content used to teach the terrorist attacks of September 11 has evolved over the past twenty years, from relying mostly on personal accounts to include academic articles, textbooks, online resources, and other materials to help students understand how and why September 11 happened the way it did.

Inquiry and disciplinary literacy are approaches in history and social science education that center students as active inquirers who investigate in multiple sources and come to their own conclusions regarding relevant questions and complex issues. These approaches have been gaining momentum in research and practice internationally, but have not been sufficiently explored in Mexico, where they could be helpful in addressing diverse concerns in history and social science education, as well as in general literacy. In this dissertation, I begin exploring the potential of an inquiry and disciplinary literacy approach in Mexico through a Design-Based Research framework, in collaboration with four teachers at a large, urban, public high school. In Chapter 1, I share an introduction and an overview of the project. Chapter 2 is the manuscript “Exploring Teachers’ Uptake of an Inquiry and Disciplinary Literacy Approach to History and Social Science Education in a Mexican High School.” I investigate how the teachers took up inquiry lessons and the design principles behind them throughout a 4-month design and preparation stage and a 5-month implementation stage, in which they taught 2 or 3 inquiry lessons and reflected on them. Data includes recordings, materials, and notes from meetings with these teachers; as well as classroom observation recordings and fieldnotes. The findings show that the teachers appreciated an inquiry approach and took up its core components, as well as inquiry and dialogical features embedded in the guided teaching materials. However, more class time was spent on the preparatory stages of the lessons (building connections and background knowledge), than on the disciplinary literacy practices (evaluating and analyzing sources and writing conclusions), which students largely completed on their own. Limited instructional time and the teachers’ cursory acquaintance with the approach may explain this partial uptake. An added focus on disciplinary literacy practices and pedagogies during teacher preparation and/or embedded in the teaching materials could help address this. Chapter 3 is the manuscript “Source Evaluation in History and Social Science in a Mexican High School: A Case Study of Beginners’ Engagement.” It presents a case study of the students in one teacher’s classroom (N=33), focusing on their source evaluation as novices in the context inquiry lessons with multiple sources. The study found qualitative nuance indicative of students’ incoming strengths and areas of improvement in source evaluation, as well as the ways in which this practice advanced (or had the potential to advance) their engagement with the contemporary and historical issues in their lessons. The study also illuminates the particular demands of evaluating historical sources as opposed to contemporary ones. Lastly, Chapter 4 provides overall conclusions and implications. The experiences of the four teachers and their students in this study speak to the possibilities and challenges of an inquiry and disciplinary literacy approach in their context, which helps establish a foundation for future work in a broader range of contexts within Mexico. Teachers and teacher educators seeking new ways to elevate the relevance and authenticity of their courses could draw on the core structure of inquiry and disciplinary literacy lessons, or on particular practices and pedagogies within the approach. Moreover, curriculum developers, in collaboration with educators and other stakeholders, could leverage the potential of modular, adaptable inquiry lessons to help address strategic social, disciplinary, and literacy goals of history and social science education for Mexican youth.

Modern historical instruction requires educators to cover broad expanses of history and prepare students for standardized testing. In the push to meet state standards and cover the vast curriculum in short periods of time, many educators have begun to teach to the textbook. Much to the detriment of students, this educational practice has favored periodization and content quantity over the development of crucial historical skills. Rather than adhering to popular education trends, teachers can consider implementing oral history projects within their elementary and middle school classrooms. Oral history is a methodology that employs first-hand accounts to teach about key historical events. It is well backed by research, is aligned with educational practices and principles, and its implementation in the classroom can be a useful educational tool. This research reviews existing literature on oral history, discusses how to incorporate it at the elementary and middle school level, and addresses objections to its implementation. It concludes with a case study on Dr. Matthew Fash’s Veteran’s History Project and advice for educators beginning oral history practices in their classrooms.

This paper puts forward a proposal for reorganizing the content that is presented to students over the entire course of their first- through twelfth-grade education. The sequencing and order content currently presented to students is examined, and recommendations are made for a sequence based on the chronology of history. Integrating disciplines is also an important aspect of the proposal. The educational literature pertaining to interdisciplinary education, narrative, a spiral model, historical knowledge, and enduring questions is considered in addressing the implementation of this proposal. The benefits of using a chronologically organized curriculum sequence are explained and examples provided for how this approach could be practically implemented.

One of the core dimensions of historical and social science inquiry is “[d]eveloping questions and planning inquiries” according to the National Council for the Social Studies’ College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework. Yet existing education research, instructional resources, and assessment have ignored how students frame problems in history and the social sciences or what it might look like to support students’ problem framing. This dissertation takes up this work in several ways, focusing specifically on historical and contemporary causal problems. First, the literature review identifies most historical and contemporary causal problems as “wicked” or “ill-structured” and then highlights how historians and other ill-structured domain experts reason about and represent causation. Second, the dissertation presents analysis of three exploratory case studies. The first case study analyzed how an innovative and experienced AP US history teacher represented the characteristics of historical causation for his students. In the two subsequent studies, the dissertation reports how several students worked to frame an ill-structured historical problem and an ill-structured contemporary problem. Unlike traditional document-based inquiry tasks, the task design prompted students to construct an initial problem space rather than jump to evaluate evidence, write an account, or produce a solution. Drawing on the literature and analysis of these studies, the dissertation proposes a framework for researching, teaching and assessing causal problem framing. The framework comprises three key, interrelated dimensions of causal problem framing: establishing the scale of the problem space, identifying agents and structures, and establishing the interaction of causes. Finally, the dissertation explores the implications of this research and framework, including suggested design principles for creating problem framing activities and interventions to support students in seeing the ill-structured nature of causal problems and the tradeoffs inherent in ill-structured problem spaces.

Youth's future visions are colonized by the hegemonic view of the future produced and propagated by governments and popular media. Youth often do not grapple with the concept of futures and struggle to imagine how their actions impact the larger course of events. This thesis project aims to help youth recognize the agentive capacities they hold by leading them through envisioning and analyzing futures. Specifically, building on previous research, the research examines how a design-based futures thinking curricular module might engage students in such thinking within history curricula. The module's objective is not teaching students to envision or predict but recognize the values and virtues of envisioning futures and the influence such thought has over their present. This thesis documents the methodological integration of the fields of Design and Education through the development of an interdisciplinary curricular module. The curricular module was developed in collaboration with the Equitable Futures project, a five-week project-based learning history curriculum developed at the School of Education. It was piloted in two classrooms in Michigan. The curricular module's development and implementation bring to the front the value of futures imagery for vocalizing students' hopes and fears and presents a novel method for engagement with teachers for curriculum development and professional learning.

Abstract: Achievement emotions are important in learning, as they influence learners’ cognitive, motivational, and regulatory processes. Pekrun’s (2006) Control Value Theory (CVT) of Achievement Emotions associates positive-activating emotions (e.g., enjoyment) with better learning outcomes and the opposite for negative-deactivating emotions (e.g., hopelessness). Other emotions lead to mixed results, but emotions such as anger, on average, show loss in learning performance. This thesis investigated what emotions were generated as learners interacted with a multimedia mobile app to learn about queer history in a North American city: Edmonton. I further examined whether learners’ emotional profiles were associated with different levels of learning outcomes. Emotions were measured with an automatic facial recognition software (FaceReader 7). Results indicated that learners tended to show little emotion, facially. An investigation of dominant emotion profiles revealed that learners expressed more negative-activating emotions (anger, anxiety), and negative-deactivating emotions (sadness) than positive-activating emotions (happiness). Learners that expressed anger as their dominant emotion, had the highest learning performance; one that was statistically significantly different from learners with a sad dominant emotion profile. This study adds to the field of emotions and technology-rich environments (TREs) by integrating a framework for learning-related emotions and utilizing an under-examined emotion measurement methodology. This study further highlights the importance of examining typically undesirable emotions in learning, such as anger, in subject domains such as history.

Historians, like many types of scholars, are often researchers and educators, and both roles involve significant interaction with primary sources. Primary sources are not only direct evidence for historical arguments but also important materials for teaching historical thinking skills to students in classrooms, and engaging the broader public. However, finding high quality primary sources that are relevant to a historian's specialized topics of interest remains a significant challenge. Automated approaches to text analysis struggle to provide relevant results for these "long tail" searches with long semantic distances from the source material. Consequently, historians are often frustrated at spending so much time on manually the relevance of the contents of these archives other than writing and analysis. To overcome these challenges, my dissertation explores the use of crowdsourcing to support historians in analysis of primary sources. In four studies, I first proposed a class-sourcing model where historians outsource historical analysis to students as a teaching method and students learn historical thinking and gain authentic research experience while doing these analysis tasks. Incite, a realization of this model, deployed in 15 classrooms with positive feedback. Second, I expanded the class-sourcing model to a broader audience, novice (paid) crowds and developedthe Read-agree-predict (RAP) technique to accurately evaluate relevance between primary sources and research topics. Third, I presented a set of design principles for crowdsourcing complex historical documents via the American Soldier project on Zooniverse. Finally, I developed CrowdSCIM to help crowds learn historical thinking and evaluated the tradeoffs between quality, learning and efficiency. The outcomes of the studies provide systems, techniques and design guidelines to 1) support historians in their research and teaching practices, 2) help crowd workers learn historical thinking and 3) suggest implications for the design of future crowdsourcing systems.

Current literature has suggested that despite scholars in other fields gleaning vast amounts of experimental data to use to hone curriculum decisions and support their disciplines, researchers in social studies education have failed to look at Significant Life Experiences (SLEs) of Historical Preservationists (HPs) for the same benefit. The American Historical Association (AHA) cited a twenty-one percent dip in history majors since 2012 (Townsend, 2017), historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg have been hit by a lack of interest and visitation from the public (Tiedemann & Marsico, 2017), and many local historical associations and community museums have uncertain futures due to potential problems recruiting volunteers (Birck, 1998). The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to examine the experiences and perceptions of current HPs in their lifelong advocacy of various types of historical work. The research questions for this study focused on the lifelong lived experience that these individuals deemed as significant and influential. Purposeful (criterion based) sampling was employed to identify sixteen participants who were seen as influential in different areas as HPs. Data collection included open-ended interviews, artifact collection, and reflexive journaling. The data were analyzed using traditional phenomenological methods such as bracketing (Epoche), horizontalization, coding clusters of meaning into themes, textural descriptions, structural descriptions, and the building of the Essence (Moustakas, 1994). The study revealed that the themes of (1) Family, (2) Sense of Place, (3) Historical Empathy, (4) Offering Historical Education, and (5) Career and Achievement were relevant in HP’s lives.

This project examines the Columbus legacy in U.S. history textbooks used in Texas from 1919 to 2017. This study argues that the traditional and glorified interpretation of the life of Columbus dominated his coverage in U.S. history textbooks adopted for use in junior high and high school classes in Texas during the twentieth century. The wave of scholarly criticisms of Columbus at the end of the twentieth century had only sporadic effects on textbooks published at the turn of the century. Inconsistent representations of the new debate over Columbus’ legacy in these textbooks show at best a delayed response and at worst a reluctance to change the traditional story of Columbus as an American hero.

Calls for history teachers to adopt inquiry methods continue to go unabated in educational research and curricular initiatives. In recent years, there has been increased recognition of the important role teacher reflection plays in managing the uncertainty that accompanies such pedagogy in history classrooms. Accordingly, this dissertation was situated within theories of reflection and reflective teaching, which acknowledge teaching to be endemically problematic and teachers as autonomous in their curricular- instructional decisions and thereby resistive to certainty-driven models of history teaching. This dissertation sought to investigate the reflections of inquiry-oriented history teachers by examining how and upon what they reflect throughout a unit of study. Using an interpretive multiple-case design with video-stimulated recall methodology, reflective interviews were conducted with participants in four different schools within the same urban public school district. A cross-case analysis of the data led to several key findings. First, the process of reflection for teachers in practice revealed itself to be more affective and messy than conventional rational models of reflection found in the literature. Second, the results showed that history teachers’ reflections were prioritized in accordance with their values and sense of purpose. Third, the inclusiveness of teachers’ classroom environments and curricular-instructional decisions were a focal point of their reflections. Fourth, the teachers’ reflections were influenced by their understandings of their school cultures, with three of the four teachers finding their school norms and policies as oppositional to the promotion of inquiry methods with their students. Finally, the findings showed that reflection aided teachers’ examination of assumptions embedded within their professional routines and pedagogical decisions, particulary with regard to the selection and use of the essential questions that framed their units. This dissertation highlights the need for more and better reflective opportunites for pre- and in-service history teachers and for better research that might yield further insights into the nature of inquiry-based history teaching.

Historical empathy is a topic that is decades old in history education research, but has been stunted in it’s implementation due to a lack of conceptual clarity, and a lag in balanced research grounding the term. Also, classroom practices and pedagogy have had some implementation missteps that have encouraged over identification and unrestrained emotional engagement between students of history and historical agents. These missteps run counter to the practice of quality, unbiased historical inquiry. The goal of this research study is to contribute to the field and knowledge in area of historical empathy, and to provide knowledge that help practitioners avoid such missteps. This study intends to help stabilize the term, and to investigate the dual-process (affective and cognitive) nature of historical empathy engagement. Through investigates the different conceptualizations and frameworks, especially in digging deeper into students’ affective process in historical empathy engagement, this study intends to balance the field’s understanding of the affective process in a dual-process model. The findings highlight the areas where current knowledge was echoed, where research may be misunderstood or fall short, and where further research and study is needed.

Both history and education courses comprise a significant portion of certification requirements for prospective history teachers. Teaching ambitiously requires mastery of many practices and bodies of knowledge, including disciplinary, pedagogical, and pedagogical content knowledge, learned in that history and education coursework. However, researchers have often treated history and education coursework separately. Missing from our understanding is how history and education courses impact each other’s depictions of teaching history, and what prospective teachers learn about history and teaching history in each setting. This study examines the intersection of history and education coursework by investigating what prospective teachers learn about how to teach history in different contexts. It follows instructors and prospective teachers in three courses offered in one semester at Indiana University: an American history survey, a social studies methods course, and a writing-intensive history seminar. Indiana University has a long history of historians interested in teaching, a School of Education with strong commitments to disciplinary literacy, and active cooperation across these two departments. As such, it presents a telling case for effective practices of preparing prospective history teachers across history and education courses. While at Indiana University, I observed and filmed courses, collected instructional materials, and regularly interviewed instructors and focal prospective teachers. I asked prospective teachers what they noticed from the courses and what they could imagine using from courses in their teaching. I coded transcripts of interviews and class sessions for the types of knowledge and practices presented by instructors and recognized by prospective teachers. I employed three frameworks of apprenticeship to analyze how instructors presented knowledge and practices: apprenticeship of observation, cognitive apprenticeship, and the framework of representation, decomposition, and approximation for teaching practice. In analyzing patterns of what prospective teachers noticed, I found that they often fell into a pitfall of experience: over-contextualizing based on the type of course. Even though historians used and discussed many laudable pedagogical practices, prospective teachers tended to focus on disciplinary knowledge in history courses, not viewing historians’ pedagogical practices as something they could or should adopt for their own classroom. Conversely, education instructors frequently presented disciplinary knowledge. However, in the context of an education course, prospective teachers tended to focus on pedagogical moves, while not focusing on the disciplinary knowledge. Additionally, I found actions that supported broadening prospective teachers’ professional vision to notice more in each type of course. Instructors employed metacognition in their teaching, explaining reasons for presenting instructional activities and how they aligned with instructional goals. Instructors reminded students frequently of their future careers as teachers. Education instructors thoughtfully selected historical knowledge to demonstrate pedagogical techniques and reinforced its importance. Finally, regularly asking prospective teachers what they noticed from courses led them to notice more. These findings suggest practices other institutions could use to strengthen teacher training and collaboration between schools of education and history departments, as well as practices that could improve history instruction at elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels.

Change all but defines the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in American history. In the midst of these tumultuous times, America experienced a revolution of reform meant to develop and enhance all areas of life from politics to society, which led historians to call this time period the Progressive Era. However, the progress of the nation was not always the winning ideology. At times, the backlash against progressive ideas restrained innovators and caused them to disappear into the mires of history. One reformer who experienced this backlash was Fred Morrow Fling. Although he was an internationally-known historian, he remained a rather invisible history education reformer because his ideas were overshadowed by the enormous human events of his lifetime, including the work of other reformers and his unexpected death in 1934. As a trained scientific historian, Fling was a pioneer of historical method and the application of what became known as “source method” in the classroom and he espoused a radical approach to critical education that sought to embed a scientific approach into the teaching of history that has clear parallels with best teaching practices today. Thus, using traditional historical research methods and archival records from both Bowdoin College and the University of Nebraska, the author presents in this dissertation a biographical portrait of Fling’s life. Through the analysis of these historical documents and the evidence of his life recorded in publications and the public press, this portrait will serve to uncover both how Fred Morrow Fling’s conception of history education influenced his practice as a history professor and researcher and how Fred Morrow Fling’s philosophy of education formed and developed over his lifetime. Specifically, this author will consider: how can the philosophy of history education created by Fred Morrow Fling inform our current history education practices today? By investigating Fling’s life, researchers will finally be able to acknowledge Fling’s myriad contributions to history education, which are vital to composing a fuller picture of the history of social studies education.

Both France and the U.S. have witnessed extensive immigration in the twentieth century, and today, more than ever since World War II, the world's population is in dramatic flux. Currently almost fifty-four million people worldwide are identified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as displaced people. If and how France and the U.S. should accommodate displaced peoples has agitated political debate in France and the U.S. with conservatively aligned political parties in both countries rejecting calls to resettle displaced peoples in France and the U.S. At the center of this dissertation is the following research question: how are immigrants rhetorically constructed in high school French and U.S. history textbooks? Rhetoric is not just about persuading an audience; it is about using identifications that program the audience not to think, but to automatically believe that one thing is associated with another. In this dissertation I use Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric as identification to examine how immigrants are rhetorically constructed in four high school French history textbooks and two high school American history textbooks, all of which are widely distributed in their respective countries. I disarticulate rhetorical constructions of immigrants in these history textbooks by interrogating the interactions of their political, economic, social, and cultural structures. In Burke’s rhetoric as identification "social cohesion and control" are realized through apposition and opposition. In the following quotation Burke explains a salient element of his rhetoric as identification: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.” Why are so many people in France and the U.S. persuaded that peoples displaced by war and poverty should be locked outside their borders? Through a Burkean analysis, I locate answers to this question in the historical master narrative evidenced in the high school French and U.S. history textbooks selected for this study--a narrative that rhetorically constructs skewed characterizations of immigrants.

Empathy is critical to reconciliation efforts in conflict environments, as well as to effective functioning of diverse democratic societies. Helping students develop empathy is considered a responsibility of schools, and of history/social studies educators in particular. However, fostering empathy in history classrooms remains controversial, and how to do so poorly understood, particularly when the historical perspectives being discussed challenge aspects of students’ identities. This study investigated students’ empathic and historical thinking in a unique K-12 bilingual school in Jerusalem, Israel where contrasting Palestinian and Jewish narratives of national history are taught side-by-side to students of both identity backgrounds in the context of an intractable conflict. In addition to students’ thinking, I examined how their teachers reconcile classroom empathic, identity, and critical thinking goals and address pedagogical challenges posed by such an approach. Data sources included teacher interviews, classroom observations, and five original written tasks. Contrary to expectations derived from the literature, study findings suggest that students can think empathically, even regarding highly contested historical issues. They also suggest that strong identity affiliation may not inhibit (and might even encourage) empathy. Furthermore, also in contrast to much of current theory, findings suggest empathic and identity instructional goals may be reconcilable with historical thinking, and that a dual-narrative instructional approach may foster such reconciliation. However, teaching for empathy in this way presents numerous pedagogical challenges including how to affirm students’ identities without essentializing identity differences and how to personalize narratives while depersonalizing responsibility for the conflict. I describe strategies that the teachers have developed to address these and other challenges. I conclude that if pursued carefully, a dual-narrative instructional approach may have significant benefits for in-conflict societies where reconciled narratives are impossible and where such an approach may contribute to rehumanizing the Other, an essential first step in reconciliation. Furthermore, this study contributes to the history and conflict education literatures by reconceptualizing narratives as legitimate instructional tools and history instruction as involving two distinct dimensions of decision making – narrative approach and pedagogical approach. Choices along each dimension reflect epistemological assumptions and contribute interactively to students’ empathic, identity, and historical thinking outcomes.

This case study has sought to examine degrees of nationalist bias found in Irish secondary school history textbooks over an 80 year period (1922-2002). Specifically, this study will be examining textbook narratives of four major topics in eighteenth century Irish history: the Penal Laws, "Grattan's Parliament", the Rebellion of 1798, and the 1801 Act of Union. The eighteenth century was selected for study, as opposed to more comparatively recent and controversial events, such as the Easter Rising of 1916 or the partition of Northern Ireland, to look at an era that would be outside the living memory of textbook authors. These are topics that are also susceptible to distortion or appropriation by later generations of Irish nationalists to fit a teleological narrative of a centuries-long struggle for Irish independence from Britain. This study has sought to determine: whether nationalist bias is present in the narratives of the selected textbooks, whether levels of bias have changed over the course of the period studied, and whether bias found was found pervasively throughout textbook accounts or limited to isolated passages that do not reflect the rest of the text's account. A total of seven Irish secondary level history textbooks were selected, published at different times during the 80 year period. To conclude the extent to which the textbooks displayed levels of nationalist bias, the narratives were compared with a current historical consensus that was established through a comparison of relatively recent academic and popular works on eighteenth century Ireland. A theory forwarded in similar studies (Janmaat, 2006; Mulcahy, 1988) supports a relation between the age of a state and the nationalist tone of its historiography, with levels of nationalist bias decreasing as a state matures. The trajectory of textbook narratives found in this study does seem to show a trend toward more moderate accounts of the past. Pervasive nationalist bias was found in only one textbook, while the other textbooks evaluated saw only isolated passages that seemed colored by an Irish nationalist perspective.

Between 1960 and 1996 Guatemala experienced a horrific civil war and genocide that left the country divided. In the years after the conclusion of this war, Guatemala's history of conflict has remained the subject of intense debate, particularly among those who hold political and social power. To consolidate the narrative of the civil war and its causes, the government passed a series of education reforms that highlighted the importance of social studies education for building a new and peaceful nation. This study examines the impact of the education reforms on Guatemalan schools using historical scholarship and ethnographic research. Based upon personal observations of three high school, social studies classrooms in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this study finds that despite political efforts to silence Guatemala's histories of war and inequality, social studies teachers do, in fact, teach these contentious histories in subtle and sometimes unexpected ways. In these moments, the social studies classroom becomes as a space for teachers to insert their own voice and perspective into dominant narratives of the past, thereby bringing the "past" into the "present."

The author examined the motivation for why, and methods of how, some secondary social studies teachers incorporate women’s voices into the traditional history framework. A multi-layered qualitative methodology was employed for this study using survey, case study, and phenomenological approaches, including interviews and classroom observations of participants. The researcher discovered the percentage of teachers who claim to incorporate women’s history/perspectives into their lessons; how teachers incorporate women’s history/perspectives into their lessons; and, the factors that contribute to teachers including women’s history/perspectives into their classes.

This qualitative study (n=17) uses a multiple case studies design to interrogate how and why students understand events contained within "heritage histories." By this I mean that the students are too young to have been involved in the events, but that their parents, grandparents, other family members, or other members of an affinity group (racial, ethnic, national, religious) to which they belong were involved. Prior research (e.g., An, 2009; Epstein, 1998, 2000, 2009; Peck, 2010; Wills, 1996) has demonstrated that students' racial, religious, ethnic, national, and socioeconomic class backgrounds impact and influence students' historical thinking, yet, as Barton (2008) astutely notes, "much more research is needed to illustrate the specific ways in which students of given backgrounds learn history both in and out of school" (p. 250). Therefore, I focused on the ways that three selected heritage groups learned about specific and meaningful heritage events in and out of their public school history classrooms: four Hmong students in St. Paul, Minnesota studying the Vietnam War; eight Chinese students in Los Angeles, California studying the Cultural Revolution; and five Jewish students in Chicago, Illinois studying the Holocaust. Through this work, I show that the students engaged in complex historical thinking as they worked to make sense of histories to which they all felt some degree of a heritage connection. While several of the students learned information at school that was dissimilar to what they had learned at home, they were able to critically evaluate both sources and develop narratives that incorporated the first and secondhand accounts of the past they had heard from their families with the official knowledge presented in their public school history classrooms. Additionally, by including these heritage histories in their curricula, the three teachers worked to also include their students' histories within the official knowledge of the classrooms. In so doing, the teachers sent a message to their students that the students' families' pasts are part of a history that has relevance and import beyond the three heritage communities; which tells the students that they, too, are important, relevant, valued members of the classroom communities and society in general.

In this study I explore one cohort of secondary history and social science preservice teachers’ conceptions of disciplinary literacy in history and the extent to which these ideas influenced the reading instructional approaches they used with their middle and high school students. I investigate how these preservice teachers’ conceptions developed over the course of their teacher education program, considering the influence of several factors, including their disciplinary and education coursework, their field-based experiences, and their orientation toward students. Although my analysis includes sixteen preservice teachers, I highlight the conceptions and instructional approaches of those preservice teachers who worked in schools that primarily served students who were low-income, minority, and/or English language learners. The main data sources include a series of interviews and assessments that occurred over the duration of the preservice teachers’ training. My investigation reveals that all sixteen preservice teachers enhanced their understandings of disciplinary reading and texts in history by the end of their teacher education program. The preservice teachers who were most likely to use discipline specific reading instructional approaches with their students were those with history specific conceptions of reading and texts. However, for some preservice teachers, their orientation toward students, particularly their perception of their students’ literacy abilities, mediated to what extent their conceptions influenced their reading instructional approaches. With limited longitudinal research on preservice teachers’ understandings of disciplinary reading and texts in history – and on the extent to which these conceptions influence their instructional decisions – this study extends the knowledge base on teacher learning.

I use ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and survey research to investigate the potential of history curricula both to foment inter-ethnic animosity and to further reconciliation in conflictaffected societies. I take Burma's sixty-year-long civil war and ethnic conflict as a case study, conducting research in collaboration with Burmese migrants and refugees in Thailand. I also address the dynamics of international aid to education and the ethics of conducting research in this setting. This dissertation includes four distinct articles, each concerning an aspect of these issues. In the first article, I argue that Burmese history textbook discourse from the dynastic era to the present illustrates the "ethnification" of Burmese (myanma) identity and the classicization of Burman monarchies as a basis for nationalism. In the second article, I conclude that a high school curriculum based on primary source documents juxtaposed to reveal multiple perspectives has the potential to delegitimize violence and promote critical thinking. I also find that history curriculum revision workshops are most likely to function as "intergroup encounters" promoting reconciliation among participants if a) individuals from outside the "party line" mainstream of all sides are included; b) there are structures in place to ensure the participation of people of lower status; c) participants analyze the discourse of textbooks written by opposing sides in the conflict alongside primary source documents; d) participants conceptualize reconciliation and critical thinking as major purposes of teaching history; and e) parties outside the conflict fund and support, rather than directly control these efforts. In the third article, I argue that the interventions of international actors in the education of Burmese migrants and refugees constitute a process of neo-colonial "missionization" in which ideas about schooling are negotiated and hybrid subjectivities particular to post-colonial, postconflict settings emerge. In the fourth article, I explain why the written consent process mandated for human subjects research by Institutional Review Boards was not well suited to the cross-cultural, collaborative, ethnographic education project that I conducted. I present an alternate model for ethical relations in research based on a Levinasian face-to-face consent process that cannot be preformulated or proceduralized.

This study investigates two high school social science classrooms in order to better understand the pedagogical relationships among teachers, students, and disciplinary content, and how teachers can influence students’ opportunities to learn disciplinary literacy. Drawing on conceptual resources from sociocultural theories of learning and Lampert’s (2001) version of the instructional triangle, this study applies the idea that interpersonal and disciplinary dimensions of learning are intertwined. I collected data using ethnographic methodologies over the course of a school year, including classroom observations, video and audio records, interviews with the teachers and a sample of students, and artifacts from the classrooms, including students work and teacher handouts. The investigation revealed three strategies that the participating teachers deployed in the classrooms I observed to foster pedagogical relationships, including using orienting discourses to position students relative to the content, each other, and the teacher; the design and application of simulated roles that afford students opportunities to recast their pedagogical relationships; and disciplinary scaffolds that aid students in completing the cognitive work of the discipline in the classroom. Furthermore, with both teachers there were instances in which the pedagogical relationships around the strategy were in concert or conflict, resulting in different learning opportunities for the students. This study has implications for teachers, especially of secondary social science, who want to develop disciplinary-oriented communities in their classrooms, and for teacher educators who support their learning. In particular, this study raises questions for teachers to apply to their own practice when designing and implementing instruction.

This study examines world history education in the United States from the late 19th century through 2002 by investigating the historical interplay between three mechanisms of curricular control: scholarship, curriculum recommendations, and textbook publishing. Research for this study has relied on unconventional source classification, with historical monographs which defined key developments in world history scholarship and textbooks being examined as primary sources. More typical materials, such as secondary sources analyzing philosophical educational battles, the history of educational movements, historiography, and the development of new ideologies from have been incorporated as well. Since educational policy began trending towards increasing levels of standardization with the implementation of compulsory education in the late 1800s, policymakers have been grappling with what to teach students about the wider world. Early scholarship focused on the history of Western Civilization, as did curriculum recommendations and world history textbooks crafted by professional historians of the period. Amidst the chaos of two World Wars, economic depression, the collapse of the global imperial system, and the advent of the Cold War traditional accounts of the unimpeachable progress of the Western tradition began to ring hollow with some historians. New scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century refocused world history, shifting away from the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations model which emphasized the separate traditions of various societies and towards a narrative of increasing interconnectedness. While this view has come to dominate present day historical world history research it has not yet replaced the older Western Civilization model in the education system. Curriculum recommendations continue to be undermined by partisans committed to a model based on century old scholarship which has been abandoned by the field itself and textbooks illustrate an uneven and varied approach. A closer look at the three mechanisms in the two periods (1890-1960, 1960-2002) suggests that creating a greater synergy between the mechanisms is likely necessary if the narrative suggested by contemporary world history scholarship is to take hold in the classroom of today. The development of a defined introductory narrative, supported by the scholarship, reflected in the college survey, and promoted in curriculum recommendations and textbooks are the suggested path to creating this synergy.

History is an important instrument in the shaping of identity. The way in which history is presented shapes that people’s perceptions of origin and a nation's position in the world. For centuries, governments have utilized history education as an instrument for constructing uniform national identity among citizens, creating artificial communities composed of individuals who otherwise might have little in common. The traditional method for accomplishing these ends is the dissemination of an overarching story – or metanarrative – that is common to all members of the nation, thus helping to mitigate inherent differences, unify the citizenry, and legitimize the state. While such an educational methodology perhaps succeeded in achieving the ends of post-Enlightenment nation building, critical examination reveals glaring deficiencies. The official narrative of a state has an innate inclination to relate history to the advantage of that country’s dominant or preferred group, marginalizing others and assisting in the perpetuation of class, racial, and gender inequality. Furthermore, even if originally intended to be inclusive, the national metanarrative in today’s global society is a destabilizing force that excludes from the community those who are not part of the nation.Inappropriate use of history threatens the health of democracy, community, and international relations, internally fueling unjust power relations and divisions and externally fueling xenophobia, poor cross-cultural understanding, and sometimes violent conflict. The problems of the present demand a different examination of the past that is inclusive by today’s standards, characterized by multiple perspectives, critical analysis, and the encouragement of moral response to injustices of the past and action toward those of the present. This revisionist approach offers a more honest look at the past and a more promising future for internal and external relationships, both personal and political.This thesis discusses the benefits of a revisionist method of history education and outlines the history of the debate between advocates of traditional and revisionist history education in America from the 1800s and into the present. The presentation of the U.S.-Mexico War is studied as an example as it assists in understanding the various internal and external relationships that can be affected by the way in which a particular event is presented. The war and the spirit of Manifest Destiny that influenced it affected American Indians, Mexicans in newly acquired territories, African Americans, and Anglo-American citizens in many different ways. The ways in which these events are remembered and recounted continue to influence the relationships between these groups of Americans in the present. Likewise, the perspectives of Mexicans who were deeply affected by the war have developed quite differently from what is traditionally remembered by Americans. Attempting to bridge the discrepancies between the two nations’ distinct memories of the past can help foster improved mutual understanding and healthier, more cooperative relationships in the present.

As more states require world history for students, there has been an increase in world history course work for teachers. Despite these demands, there has been little examination of world history teachers’ knowledge, or what might provide coherence in teaching this vast subject. This gap in the scholarship is compounded by confusion in the field and school subject. Few teachers who teach world history have formal training in the subject; curriculum standards vary drastically in content and usefulness; and world historians do not always agree upon the structure and scope of their field. Where, then, can teachers turn to reconcile this confusion when the very places where they might look to build coherence – standards and the field – are themselves in a state of disarray? This dissertation takes up this question by studying instructional tools, the field of world history, and teachers’ understandings about world history. My central purpose is to understand: How can we develop coherence in world history from so much time, space, and events? To address this question I engaged in three connected studies: a content analysis of the Journal of World History; an analysis of standards for world history; and card-sorting interviews with novice and experienced world history teachers. A central finding in this dissertation rests with conceptual devices I identified in the work of world historians. Explicitly and implicitly, world historians argue for and use multiple but nested units of analysis (comparison, case studies, interregional and global patterns), and different temporal and spatial schemes. In my analysis of standards I found that, although the documents utilized some of these devices, they did not make the process of engaging in world historical thinking apparent. I also found differences in how experienced and novice teachers used conceptual devices to build meaningful connections between events, construct coherent historical narratives, and relate world historical content to student understandings. By uncovering devices that make world history coherent for historians and describing how teachers thought about applying those features to their pedagogy, this dissertation has implications for teacher educators in using those features for designing instructional tools and preparing teachers.

The dissertation explores middle-school students' abilities to engage in historical thinking. I dispute the Hallam-Piaget model, which discourages analytical thinking through the assumption that children lack skills to think critically about history. My historical narrative inquiry model (1) teaches procedural knowledge (the process of "doing" history); (2) enhances interpretative skills; (3) cultivates historical perspectives based upon evidentiary history; and (4) encourages student authorship of historical narratives. In the fall semester of 2006, with a classroom of twenty-five seventh-graders, I initiated a research study designed to explore the impact of the historical narrative inquiry model through a sequence of thirty-two lessons. The lessons involved small- and large-group activities, including oral presentations, discussions about primary documents, and consideration of the relation between narratology and the creation of written history. Students generated their own historical narratives in order to articulate their perspectives. Eight students having varied reading-level proficiency served as primary participants in the study. Each of these students received pre- and post-intervention interviews. Outcomes reflected the enhancement of pedagogy intended to facilitate historical thinking and historical empathy in the classroom.

The purpose of this study is to explore high school students’ negotiation of historical knowledge in the modern Greek educational system. Both a theoretical and empirical inquiry into Greek students’ attitudes about history, the project is situated within the political context of a currently expanding European Union. Utilizing an ethnographic case study approach, data is collected in a mixed methods manner through history classroom observations, in-depth interviews, a detailed student questionnaire and photographic representations with lyceum students, teachers and administrators at Anatolia College, a private, college-preparatory school located in northern Greece. The data is analyzed using the constant comparative method and the results are considered in relation to the Greek national and International Baccalaureate teaching programs. This comparison is used to describe the ways students negotiate official and critical knowledge and how these forms of negotiation influence young Greeks’ historical consciousness. Generally, the study explores the relationship between education and identity. It is suggested that the latter be understood as engagements in various discourses, the former as a major participant in the process. Specifically, the study has been concerned with two distinct history education programs offered at the school, one constructed around a national curriculum and the other around a non-national curriculum, and how each participates in and influence students’ development of historical consciousness. The outcomes of the research reveal five discourses utilized by students in constructing historical consciousness. These discourses: common cultural heritage, burden of the past, autochthonous Hellenism, the mobiles and occidentalism, combine in complex, syncretic ways to form a collective identity among Anatolia youth that is comfortable with coexisting tensions and mixture. This analysis suggests that it is the ways in which students choose to negotiate the types of knowledge presented to them that they choose to engage in specific discourses. This implies that identities are not passive constructions of the educational process, but rather they are active choices and actively changing to suit certain conditions. Additionally, it suggests that Greek students’ cultural identity is one by which national identities are cast not as alternatives to a European identity, but as compatible with it.

2031-01-02

The debates among historians regarding the "crisis in history" have been directed to various problems. The fragmentation of historical scholarship and writing embodied in the "new history," the alleged overspecialization of historical scholarship, and recent challenges to the objectivity of historical fact and interpretation receive attention. Successive chapters attend to a general background study and description of postmodernism, the association between postmodernistic trends and historical scholarship as seen in poststructuralism and deconstruction, and the implications of postmodernistic criticism for post-secondary history instruction. Deconstruction, or the hermeneutical challenge of poetics, is a criticism of historical epistemological presuppositions and practices. Deconstruction yields insights that are useful to judge historical knowing. However, deconstruction does not present a compelling alternative to accepted standards of historical scholarship and practice