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Teaching American History
Inventing America: Creating the Teacher/Scholar Community in the Santa Clara Valley
Inventing America focuses on the New History Education. Through Master's coursework at San Jose State University, 35 teachers learned about United States History and historiography. Using the coursework as a foundation for learning, the teachers in teams created lessons for middle and high school students. Each of the lessons go beyond factual history
- The New History Education is an initiative to move students beyond memorizing the variety of facts in a history textbook toward engaging in doing history. Led by the work of Bruce Van Sledright, Robert Bain, Sam Wineburg, and others, the research shows students in grades 4 and above can understand the issues and work through the difficult choices that confronted people in the past. In order to grapple with the real issues students need to understand nothing was inevitable, even though most textbooks make events seem so. Each unit begins with a lesson that will help teachers anchor their students in the New History Education by helping with understanding some aspect of what historians call historiography. More than just something else to read, reading history is a unique discipline with it's own rules.
 Thinking Like an Historian Word document
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