NCCRESt

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History Instruction

• Archaeology and Intercultural Education in the Elementary Grades: An Example from Minnesota
  Advocates the use of archaeology and anthropology as tools for delivering multicultural education in the elementary setting. Argues that archaeology demonstrates to children the ways that various cultures have solved problems related to a common set of human needs.
• Controlling Curriculum Knowledge: Multicultural Politics and Policymaking
  Utilizes New York state's development and attempted implementation of multicultural education as a case study providing a concise yet thorough examination of the principles, objectives, and controversies surrounding this issue. Delineates the people and organizations involved in grass roots organizing and media representation on both sides of the issue.
• Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History
  Asks to what extent it is possible to identify meaningful and coherent historical periods across the boundaries of societies. Argues that cross-cultural interaction must figure prominently as a criterion in any effort to establish a periodization of world history in modern times.
• Educating for Social Competence: A Conceptual Approach to Social Studies Teaching
  Maintains that the broad arenas of the social sciences bind multiple areas of study together, giving added breadth and depth to each. Identifies the basic tenets of multicultural, global, and civic education.
• Examining Children's Historical and Multicultural Understandings: The Dialectical Nature of Collaborative Research
  Describes the research process engaged in by a group of teacher researchers as they examined students' historical and multicultural understanding. Explores the complex and messy nature of the relationship of teaching and researching.
• Expressing a Global Perspective: Experiences in a Mexican Classroom
  Argues that expanding the global perspectives of students requires strategies focusing on knowledge and point of view. Provides four exercises used in a Mexican high school to allow students to identify, express, and understand their own global perspectives.
• Giving Thanks: Observing Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, and Day of the Dead
  Describes a primary-grade curriculum unit organized around the theme of "giving thanks" and encompassing the holidays of Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, and Day of the Dead. Provides historical background and cultural context for each holiday, engagement activities, investigation activities, sharing activities, and a short list of related children's literature.
• Global Connections: Where Am I? How Did I Get Here? Where Am I Going?
  Presents a series of questions designed to provoke students to think about their location in the world, the effect of global connections on their local culture, and current global problems and their implications. Includes Internet contact information for some United Nations agencies that provide information useful to students.
• Guidelines for Global and International Studies Education: Challenges, Cultures, and Connections
  Argues that the high public interest in contemporary international issues has opened a window of opportunity for effecting change in the national global-studies curriculum. Develops guidelines that summarize what concerned scholars and educators recommend as the international dimension of education for K-12 students.
• History Curriculum Face-Lift. Quebec Report
  Reports on a 1996 Ministry of Education study on the teaching of history in Quebec. Criticizes the study for perpetuating leftist biases in favor of multiculturalism and globalization while censuring the study of Western civilization as evidence of Eurocentrism.
• Hmong Paj Ntaub: Using Textile Arts to Teach Young Children about Cultures
  Argues that textile arts offer opportunities for students to explore other cultures and to illustrate themes contained in the National Council for the Social Studies Standards. Describes the use of Hmong "paj ntaub" textiles to teach elementary students about the Hmong people of Laos and Hmong immigrants in the United States.
• How Big is Africa?
  Presents three activities adapted from the "How Big Is Africa?" Curriculum Guide developed by the African Studies Center of Boston University. Includes activities designed to make students aware of the diversity extant in Africa and the vastness of the continent.
• Making the Paths: Constructing Multicultural Texts and Critical-Narrative Discourse in Literature-History Classes. Report Series 7.8
  Developing students' ability to use multicultural perspectives and knowledge to think about literature, history, and society is emerging as an important part of a pluralistic approach to education.
• More Than a Pretty Cloth: Teaching Hmong History and Culture Through Textile Art
  Argues that textile arts, often created by women, provide a valuable, but frequently overlooked, resource for learning about a culture. Describes an effort to learn about Hmong culture and history through a study of textile arts and to teach preservice teachers in a social studies methods course about this culture.
• Reflections on the American Cultures Requirement
  Examines the development and alterations in the American Cultures curriculum at the University of California (Berkeley) designed to accommodate emerging student diversity. The following course topics are highlighted: English, Anthropology, and History.
• The Contemporary World History Project for Culturally Diverse Students
  Describes the Contemporary World History Project (CWHP), a year-long, two-part program that integrates the study of world problems within a traditional world history curriculum. Outlines the two parts, historical background and a simulation, and the objectives fulfilled by CWHP.
• The Harvard Education Letter, 1996
  This document is comprised of volume 12 of the Harvard Education Letter, published bimonthly and addressing current issues in elementary-secondary education.
• The Pit Boss: A New Native American Stereotype?
  Stresses the importance of U.S. history textbooks containing information that is accurate, realistic, and comprehensive, noting that while there are increased portrayals of Native Americans in today's history textbooks, portraying them in a stereotypical manner that suggests a single type of Indian culture is inappropriate and may affect students' attitudes toward Native Americans or their own self-esteem.
• The Problem of Interactions in World History
  Accepts cross-cultural interaction as an appropriate criterion for periodizing world history, but notes implications of this scheme that may be broader than they appear. Calls for an explicit contrast of periodizations based on different criteria to illustrate their strengths and weaknesses.
• Tumacacori National Historical Park: Making History Come Alive. "Encounters" Fourth Grade Teachers' Guide.
  This 9-unit curriculum guide for 4th grade includes activities relating to the cultural and environmental history of southern Arizona, specifically the area known as the Pimeria Alta. The guide was designed by a group of teachers to be thematic and sequential, and to deal with the encounters of various cultures that are the history of the Santa Cruz Valley.
• Who Owns History? (Teaching and Learning about Cultural Diversity)
  Notes that history is always based on someone's vision of truth, expressed through a process of distillation, selection, inclusion, exclusion, reorganization, and prioritizing. Argues that the shorthand, watered-down, or warped history of mainstream textbooks regarding cultural diversity should be supplemented with original documents, fiction, and the voices of real people telling their own stories.