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We live in an era of rapid technological change. Not only must citizens contend with social problems presented by new and more invasive technologies, but they must also make sense of older technologies that can be viewed as natural to the world. We sought to answer the question, how is technology included and framed in K-12 content social studies standards? Through coding, we identified 984 references where students are expected to learn about technology in the K-12 social studies standards of 10 states. Overall, the standards showed a preference for broad labels and neutral or positive framing, with technology often serving as a vehicle to explain social phenomena or economic growth. Production technologies were most frequent, but there was wide variance in the particular technologies referenced by each state. Even when technology was referenced, it often was not the primary focus of the standard's content. Standards rarely framed technology with critical perspectives for inquiry into collateral, unintended, and disproportionate effects. We draw on technology criticism to offer a technoskeptical framework that educators and scholars can use to question narratives of technological progress and encourage collateral thinking about the consequences of technologies for human societies.

Secondary school history textbooks in South Korea, Japan, and the United States have long struggled to give meaning and significance to the war waged on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953. Comparing commonly-used, contemporary history textbooks from each of these three nations, this analysis suggests that students on both sides of the Pacific are more likely exposed to text reflective of their society's dominant orientations toward modern-day, post-Cold War, geopolitical anxieties and arrangements than to any clear narrative of historical significance that explores the varied causes or impact of the war. Such cross-national comparisons can be especially useful for educators interested in helping students construct useful historical narratives or develop more sophisticated causal reasoning about a historically significant conflict that has sometimes been thought of as a "forgotten war." (Contains 41 notes and 1 figure.)

This article offers a typological framework for analyzing how video games make use of historical elements, shaping the ways players engage with and think about the past. Phenomenologically induced labels are posited for identifying different deployments of and experiences with historical elements in video games, illustrated by examples drawn from analysis of selected historically oriented, situated, or themed commercial video games. Building on the literature of gaming, popular media, and history education, the authors theorize specifically about the interactions between game design, player response, historical thinking, and historical representations encountered in video games. The goal is to develop vocabulary useful to researchers and educators that attends to the interface between school-based history learning and the extra-curricular influence of video games.

This case study explores potential educational tensions in historical empathy for learning about emotionally difficult topics through lessons that use dramatic feature films (movies). It investigates one case of historical empathy in the classroom by analyzing what a high-school teacher and her students do and talk about in class. The observed lesson was part of the teacher's unit on World War II and the Holocaust in a World History course using the 2002 Academy Award-winning film "The Pianist". The conclusion interprets this case as an example of how the visual and emotional power of movies may lead some students to "over-empathize" and feel that they can "really" know what a historical perspective must have been like. The "caring" aspect of historical empathy has the potential to overrun historical context and override other educational goals like learning and applying content knowledge. (Contains 2 figures.)

The National Council for the Social Studies Position Statement on Media Literacy argues that media literacy can facilitate participatory democracy if students' interest in media is harnessed. The statement conceives of media technology as neutral and under-conceptualizes socializing aspects of media technologies that foster atomized individualism. Narrowly grounded in New Media Literacies, Critical Media Studies, and Medium Theory scholarship, it offers a limited understanding of media as merely conduits for message transmission and concludes that media technology will create a more democratic society if students are encouraged to participate in it. The authors' pragmatist reconceptualization examines media not only as transmission but also as a space where common meanings are constructed. The authors offer a critical review that advances an alternative direction for media literacy in which learning for participatory democracy includes analyzing not only medium, messages, and content but also media forms and their relations to transactional tendencies within the broader society.

This study is a mixed-methods text analysis of African American representation within K-12 U.S. History content standards treating the revolutionary era, the early U.S. republic, the Civil War era, and Reconstruction. The states included in the analysis are Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia. The analysis finds that the reviewed standards devote considerable space to African Americans during the formation and development of the United States, but the nature of this inclusion is typically superficial and tends to trivialize the systemic institutional contexts of slavery and racial hierarchy. The standards also typically do not engage students in cognitively demanding historical thinking processes and avoid engaging students in critical analysis of historical racial tensions in order to promote a consensus narrative of social cohesion and national development. While the standards cannot be faulted on the grounds of numeric inclusion of African American names and events, they do not substantively promote critical thinking about the construction of racialized identities and their role in the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts of U.S. history. (Contains 1 figure.)

The Middle Ages are an immensely important era in the Western experience. Unfortunately, medieval studies are often marginalized or trivialized in school curriculum. With the approach of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the famous charter of rights from medieval England, one has a timely and useful example for considering what a focus on historical significance could look like. This rebellious document abrogated by the English king not long after it was signed represents broader significant issues in the Western experience with connections long after 1215. One gains a better understanding of its historical significance by looking at chronology, context, causation, and contingency. This historically rich way of looking at Magna Carta demonstrates how school curriculum can more meaningfully incorporate medieval studies. In this paper, the author discusses four essential elements in understanding history that, taken together, can point the way toward historical significance. For each element, the author describes what it looks like when applied to Magna Carta, informed by some recent historical literature on Magna Carta and the High Middle Ages. Cumulatively, the four elements provide a fuller picture of the relationships between King John, his realm, his people, and his world that led to the creation--and outcomes--of Magna Carta. In closing, the author offers a few ideas for lessons that could be used in the classroom to teach medieval studies with a focus on historical significance. (Contains 7 notes.)

Cinematic feature films are a big part of youth popular culture. When blockbuster movies are about historical topics, it is reasonable for teachers to be drawn to using them in the classroom to motivate students interest. This article overviews research on film in the history classroom and describes three learning functions that history movies can have fact and fiction; constructing the past and the people in it; and reacting to the past. (Contains 1 figure and 2 notes.)

This study investigates parameters affecting the likelihood of passing school facility construction bonds by local district election. Using statewide data from Michigan, this study analyzes school bond data for urban (n = 30), suburban (n = 164), small town (n = 70), and rural (n = 241) school districts that held capital improvement bond elections from 2000 to 2005. This analysis found four parameters that were significant in predicting either passage or failure of school bonds: bond amount, number of students enrolled, the number of times the bond was attempted, and district urbanicity. Examining district bond passage rates by urbanicity showed that rural districts have worse chances of passing bond elections than urban and suburban districts and that small-town districts have the worst chances of all. (Contains 3 notes, 3 tables and 2 figures.)

One influential hypothesis for what makes teachers effective contends that the best teachers share a particular set of values about education, such as commitment, caring, or persistence. To translate affective beliefs, attitudes, and values into practicable teacher selection, many schools have turned to commercial teacher hiring instruments. This article synthesizes 24 studies of the most prominent teacher selection instrument, Gallup's Teacher Perceiver Interview (TPI). Overall, we find a modest relationship (r =0.28) between the TPI and some measure of teaching quality. The article explores complications that arise for schools from using beliefs, attitudes, and values to select among teacher candidates and discusses their implications for the educational-values hypothesis. (Contains 7 notes, 2 tables, and 1 figure.)

The popularity of VHS and DVD over the past two decades has greatly expanded the influence of history movies, watched by millions of adolescents in homes and classrooms. This paper examines two secondary U.S. history teachers' instructional uses of history motion pictures in their classrooms. Ray used The Patriot (2000) to teach history as stories about the past created by people using imagination and evidence. Marie used Roots (1977) to interweave African American history as a thematic thread throughout her curriculum for her almost entirely White student population. By analyzing the cases of these two teachers, we investigate how history feature films function as instructional tools and illustrate the ways in which movies are both powerful and dangerous in the classroom.

This article examines the implications of competition between school districts in a mid-Michigan metropolitan area. Over the 10-year period after Michigan's major school-funding reform in 1994, many urban and suburban districts found themselves competing for per-pupil state funding. Suburban districts need extra students to make up budgetary shortfalls and protect instructional programs that are essential in today's political climate of school accountability. Several districts in this study built new or substantially renovated state-of-the-art high schools, possibly illustrating a space race between the districts to build bigger, better, newer capital assets that attract pupils and residential development. The central city district, surrounded by growing suburbs with higher-value taxable property, is at a disadvantage in this competition. (Contains 4 figures, 6 notes and 3 tables.)

The attacks of September 11th, followed by U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have brought greater attention to the simmering conflict between Islam and the West--a conflict most brutally played out historically during the Crusades. The series of holy wars for control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land stretched over centuries--from 1096 to 1291 (with subsequent efforts as late as the mid-1400s). Recent statements from Islamic militants denouncing U.S.-led forces in Iraq as "crusaders" show that passions still are fired in the Muslim world by the memory of the Crusades. Into this political environment, film studio Twentieth Century Fox recently released The Kingdom of Heaven, the first Hollywood movie to seriously address the Crusades and their present-day implications. The film is a timely commentary--that nearly a thousand years after the Crusades began, peace in the Holy Land remains elusive. This present-day outlook makes The Kingdom of Heaven a useful educational tool to get students to talk about the ways in which people today make use of the past to explain or critique contemporary events. This article aims to provide educators with supplementary background on the time period and to suggest ideas for using the film in the classroom. (Contains 3 notes.)

Criticizes the Grade 11 Social Studies Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), stating that it lacks incentives for all students; is not truly an exit examination; drives changes in local curriculum; and is too heavily grounded in structuralist assumptions. Appeals for a progressive redirection of the Social Studies MEAP. (CMK)