The purpose of this writing is to explore the relationship students have with popular media as well as the call to implement a Critical Media Skills course at the high school level. The research was interested in finding what images from popular media students were taking into their personal lives and how implementing a Critical Media Skills course could make positive benefits into their lives. From casual observations, informal student interviews, and the creation of an online survey in which 72 high school students participated I was able to collect data about the extent students were consuming popular media and how they believed that skills teaching them to analyze media would be beneficial. From these findings I was able to build upon Patricia Hill Collins (2009) to develop techniques for a classroom in which critical dialogue would be a focus. This exploratory study takes into account student voices, as well research from others in the field of Education and Media Literacy.

This study describes how some members of the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama, a state recognized community, reacts to the ways in which Native peoples are represented in the social studies curriculum of DeKalb County, Alabama. Tribal members, ages 30--80 were interviewed about their educational experiences, as well as about their perspectives on the current curriculum. Social studies curricula of this school district, as well as elsewhere in the Alabama public school system, portrays Native peoples in a negative manner, and through the interviews and an extensive analysis of the curriculum, specific examples of these negative portrayals are pinpointed. This study specifically looks at the content, language and illustrations of seven state adopted textbooks, resulting in some specific recommendations on how teachers, as well as administrators, could improve the curriculum.

This study examined the use of constructivist content-area literacy methods in a community college American History survey course. The study was based in a perspective that college classroom culture is a nexus of multiple social interactions through which thinking and understanding are organized and meanings are negotiated and constructed. Interpretations of participant, researcher, and institution-generated data sources revealed several findings. Specifically, in this American History survey course, content-area literacy methods were employed as tools for organizing class participant thinking and for content understanding in a context of shared classroom power. Content-area literacy methods were used by the instructor (the study's author) as a way of reaching out to the class participants in an effort to establish a collegial relationship with them and to teach American History more effectively. I believed that content-area literacy methods would help class participants learn to organize their thinking and understanding and would facilitate their academic success in the course. The class participants interpreted my use of content-area literacy methods in the context of the collegial relationship they had established. Class participants interpreted my use of content-area literacy methods as evidence of my support for their formulation of a personal understanding of American History and their continued academic success. The class participants, in turn, were willing to participate in or support the content-area literacy methods that they believed contributed to their learning and academic success. The findings of this study support theories of literacy, teaching, and learning as socially constructed phenomena and suggest that the study of college literacy must be contextualized in classrooms and institutions of higher learning because content-area teaching and learning are influenced by social interactions between teachers and students. Resistance to such strategies among college and university academics may stem from personal and professional life experiences and beliefs that contribute to the construction, retention and adherence to discipline-specific pedagogical beliefs and practices. This study's findings imply that more research is needed with respect to how teachers and students in higher education build and maintain relationships and how those relationships influence andragogical teaching and learning decisions and outcomes.

In this study, I use aspects of ethnography to explore the role of cultural narratives in the educational experiences and daily life of the Chamorro people. The major method of collecting the data used in this study included official documents, interviews, and written surveys. These different sets of data collection allowed me to cross-check the data to triangulate the evidence and to refine and validate the study. The Chamorro culture and language still exist. However, the majority of homes are practicing an Americanized lifestyle because of the influences from the United States since their invasion in the 1800s. There has been a shift from the teaching of the history, culture, language, values, and stories of the Chamorro people from the home to the school. Data show that informants agree that teachers across all disciplines should implement cultural narratives into their teaching. The University of Guam and the Guam Community College need to add courses specializing in the Chamorro culture and make this part of the requirements for earned degrees in Elementary, Secondary, and Special Education. Participants agree that cultural narratives support Chamorro values and should be visible in all public and private schools from kindergarten through higher education. The main conclusions include (1) Guam does not have a set written policy for Chamorro cultural narratives although it is an accepted and recognized part of the Chamorro curriculum, (2) the Chamorro cultural narratives should be emphasized more and expanded across the standard curriculum for all grade levels, K-12, (3) the community, the family and the school must work more collaboratively and find more innovative ways to maintain the language and culture of the Chamorro people, and (4) Chamorro narratives should be implemented in both public and private schools.

This study addresses the importance of committing to redesigning how world history is taught at the high school level. Presented is a model for curriculum reform that introduces an approach to teaching revolving around a thematic structure. The purpose of this redesigned thematic curriculum was to introduce an alternative approach to teaching that proceeded from a "critical perspective"--that is, one in which students did not so much learn discrete bits of knowledge but rather an orientation toward learning and thinking about history and its application to their lives. The means by which this was done was by teaching world history from an anthropological perspective. A perspective that made archaeological data more relevant in learning about the past. The study presents how such a model was created through its pilot application in a high school world history classroom. It is through the experimental application of the curriculum ideas in the high school classroom that I was able to determine the effectiveness of this curriculum by following how easily it could be used and how well students responded to it. Therefore, followed in the study was the evolution of the curriculum model's development as it was used in the pilot classroom. Thus, I was able to determine the extent of its success as a tool for teaching critically and for teaching from an anthropological perspective.

<p> This qualitative study addressed the problem of students' lack of trust of and interest in U.S. history and focused on students' experiences with official and unofficial versions of history in the middle school social studies classroom. A collective case study of five African American students was conducted in an eighth grade classroom at Carroll Academy, a public, urban charter school in Ohio. Interviews, questionnaires, observations, artifacts, and logs were collected and analyzed with a critical, interpretivist lens. </p><p> The findings included: (a) the students were suspicious of the official historical story in the form of their textbook and teacher; (b) they shared similar rationales for the perceived motivations behind the dishonest accounts in their textbooks, and the rationales changed in similar ways throughout the course of the project; (c) although they had limited experience with unofficial history before the project, they preferred to use unofficial historical sources with the condition that one eventually corroborates accounts with official sources; (d) the experience of studying family histories created race-related instances of contradiction between unofficial and official accounts in the classroom, and (e) students developed productive forms of resistance to the grand narrative in U.S. history by the end of the study. </p><p> The findings of the study offer implications for teachers of social studies. By using family history projects, teachers can engage students while helping them learn critical and historical thinking skills. They can provide a more inclusive social studies curriculum and can better understand their students' backgrounds and historical knowledge.</p>

<p>Since the early 1980s Holocaust education and genocide studies programs at the primary, secondary and post-secondary educational levels have become commonplace and an accepted element of public school curriculum. As these programs and their curricula gained acceptance within public education, efforts to increase awareness of genocidal events outside and beyond the European Holocaust as well as increased attention paid to ethnic studies programs have also gained traction in public schooling. These efforts manifested themselves in the mid to late 1990s to include the Great Irish Famine (1845&ndash;1852) as a sub-study of greater Holocaust/genocide studies in both the states of New Jersey and New York. More than ten years after the formal adoption of the official state-sponsored Great Irish Famine curricula, their impact, influence and utilization remain unclear. This paper examines the history behind the creation of both New Jersey and New York Famine Curricula, compares and contrasts the two documents, examines their use in both states&rsquo; public schools, and suggests potential revisions to each Famine curriculum. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0641. Adviser: Peter Kuchinke. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-211) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2902. Adviser: Terrence C. Mason. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 14, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Education, 2008. / Title from home page (viewed on May 12, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 3014. Advisers: Mary B. McMullen; Christine I. Bennett.