Using the 2008 Presidential Election as a case of curricular controversy, the author describes how six high school government teachers responded to the racial, gender, and religious diversity included on the presidential tickets of the two major political parties. Teachers had to decide whether the issue of Americans challenging the tradition of electing White males to the federal executive branch would be deemed "open" or "closed" in their classes, and if they were deemed open, whether they would disclose their own opinions on the issue. The findings suggest that Obama's race was a closed issue in each of the classes in terms of his eligibility for the presidency; however, the teachers and their students implicitly recognized the openness of the issue within both a broader societal context as well as their own political decision-making. Similarly, Palin's gender was also a closed issue in terms of her eligibility for the vice presidency, but the sexist comments made by students and teachers at each school suggest that although they may not have found Palin's candidacy controversial, her gender was an open issue with respect to how they judged female politicians in comparison to their male counterparts. Finally, Obama's religious background was a largely closed issue, although individual teachers positioned it as an open issue in their classes and used it to justify their belief that non-Christians should not be elected president. These findings offer implications for the teaching of controversial issues that are contextualized within traditionally taboo topics of race, gender, and religion.
The rise of state-mandated standards in public education have allowed legislators to answer the question of what constitutes a proper civic education, a debate that has existed in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. Through the content they employ in their standards, states may indirectly influence the type of citizenship education students receive in the classroom. The present study focuses on the Virginia Standards of Learning for two courses, civics and economics and U.S. and Virginia government, which are commonly taught to eighth graders and high school seniors, respectively. A content analysis of the essential knowledge found in the standards for these courses categorizes instructional content into seven forms of citizenship: civic republicanism, character education, deliberative, social justice, participatory, transnational, and cosmopolitan. Although the results are specific to the Virginia Standards of Learning, the nature of how citizenship is portrayed within the standards may transfer to other states with similar forms of standards-based education within their social studies curricula.
This article reports findings from a 3-year study on preservice middle and secondary social studies teachers' common content knowledge of politics and current events. Surveys showed that both groups were generally uninformed about these issues, and on almost all measures, the middle-grades preservice teachers performed worse than those in the secondary program. Interviews were conducted with preservice teachers in both groups, and although they articulated a vision of teaching social studies that included relating content to politics and current events, most of the preservice teachers admitted that their habits related to acquiring this type of content knowledge were not sufficient to enact that vision in their classrooms. The author argues that these preservice teachers' lack of political and social awareness is a product of their intellectual dispositions as opposed to a deficiency in their content preparation.
This manuscript uses interview data collected during a qualitative study in 2007 of a secondary US history elearning course. The teacher, Mr. Harding, and 11 of the 13 students in the class were interviewed about their general perceptions of e-learning and the ability to effectively learn content online. The findings of the study show that nearly all participants maintained a belief that e-learning was best used for information transmission and rote memorization rather than active or social learning. Further, Mr. Harding seemed to characterize elearning students as uninterested in engaging in social interaction online, a perception that was refuted, at least partially, by his students. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of the findings and implications for secondary e-learning programs.Keywords: e-learning; secondary education; perceptions
Abstract:Since the development of the first correspondence courses in the late nineteenth century,
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