There is considerable anxiety about teaching Australian history in schools. In part, such concern reflects the so-called "History Wars", which have been played out in museums and national commemorations, as well as history syllabuses and textbooks. Such concern also reveals a professional and pedagogical debate over the state of the subject in schools. This thesis problematises history education as a site of contested collective memory and argues that concern over "teaching the nation" is intensified and augmented by an educational discourse of "the child" that shifts the debate over the past to the future.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

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 Third, I presented a set of design principles for crowdsourcing complex historical documents via the American Soldier project on Zooniverse.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. / Ph. D. / 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 highquality 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 developed the 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.

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.

<p> This dissertation examines two radically different political projects in Argentina as moments in a dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution. The short-lived, progressive Peronist government of 1973 sought to construct a more egalitarian and democratic society, addressing social inequalities while fomenting political mobilization. In response, the last and most violent military dictatorship (1976&ndash;1983) aimed at suppressing social antagonisms and the perceived excesses of mass democracy. In each case, education was a means to form citizens suitable to a specific conception of society. Therefore, each political project can be understood with special clarity through an examination of civic education and pedagogic reforms. The progressive Peronist government encouraged students to participate in exploring and addressing social inequalities to bring about social justice. The dictatorship was counterrevolutionary insofar as it put forth an ideological project without precedent in previous military regimes that aimed not simply at preserving the status quo ante but at founding a new society. In order to do so, it sought to eradicate &ldquo;subversion&rdquo; and to form spiritually minded, obedient, and individualistic citizens through a broad schooling reform. Based on both archival research and oral history, this dissertation sheds light on the political uses of education, on the Cold War dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America, and on the centrality of social antagonisms for our understanding of authoritarianism. </p>

<p> Saint Frances Orphan Asylum and Saint Elizabeth Home were institutions in post-bellum Baltimore for African American orphans. Saint Frances Orphan Asylum was founded and managed by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first community of women religious of African origin. The Franciscan Sisters, whose order originated in England, directed Saint Elizabeth&rsquo;s Home. As Catholic institutions, the orphanages received support, albeit in differing levels, from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. This study investigated the two institutions and their place in the Catholic Church. Primary source documents from the Oblate Sisters of Providence Archive and the Franciscan Sisters of Baltimore Archive form the basis for this dissertation. An analysis of those documents, and others, reveals that race and gender were critical factors in Catholic support of the two institutions. Saint Elizabeth Home, run by a white order of nuns, received a great deal more backing, both financial and political, than did Saint Frances Orphan Asylum. Support for the Oblates and their institution varied depending upon the leadership of the church at a particular time and the personal beliefs.</p>

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-139).

<p> The Catholic Diocese of South Carolina engaged in an extensive preparation program to ready the Catholic community for desegregation several years before the process occurred in 1963. After the <i>Brown v. Board of Education </i> decision, the diocese took steps to work for racial justice even though Catholics made up a small minority of the state&rsquo;s population. In 1961, Bishop Paul J. Hallinan issued a Pastoral Letter that outlined the preparation process towards desegregation. The diocesan actions included integrating the first elementary school in South Carolina, challenging local politicians who were hostile to racial equality, and the development of a <i>Syllabus on Racial Justice.</i> While it took the diocese nine years to desegregate, the planning process allowed for an orderly transition. This work places the South Carolina Catholic desegregation story within the context of the struggle for and resistance to what C. Vann Woodward referred to as the Second Reconstruction.</p>

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of History, 2005. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-213).