When was the last time your department had a substantial, much less multimeeting, discussion of curriculum reform?Even though history, and the humanities, are under national assault from administrators and politicians, our sense is that few departments spend much time on what is, arguably, their most important collective activity.Of all the work that drives history faculty to convene in that most cherished of institutions-the department meeting-conversations about curriculum arguably could have the most significant impact on students' experiences learning history.Fortunately, innovative departments have, over the past decade, begun to hold collaborative, productive, and surprisingly uncontentious conversations over the shape of their curriculum.This March 2024 "Textbooks and Teaching" section highlights several of those discussions.The results, we are pleased to report, are innovative and generative.First off: Why have departments started turning to more systematic dialogue over their teaching?The American Historical Association's Tuning the History Discipline in the United States project kicked off in 2012, creating widespread professional scrutiny of what students actually learn in the history major.The outcomes that developed from that project inspired participating departments, and those beyond the initial participants, to rethink their curriculum and teaching in intentional and collective ways.At the same time, data analytics burst upon the academy, inserting concerns such as retention and graduation rates, the meaning of student success, and the identification of troubling "bottleneck" courses into campus and department conversations.Current conversations about post-COVID-19 pandemic student engagement and continuing socioeconomic struggles have added a new layer to that conversation, suggesting that this is an urgent moment for reflection and intentional departmental action.And, more generally, faculty members have begun to recognize that responding to the political challenges and racial injustices of the moment, along with existential threats to the humanities, depends on thinking much more robustly about how we all teach, together,

Gregor Mendel has been at the heart of secondary school genetics for as long as I can remember. I taught Biology in schools for 40 years and we were encouraged and expected to begin with Mendel’s work on peas. It made sense. After all, in the UK it’s how textbooks introduce 14–16 genetics and where the specifications always started. Keep it simple: a single gene with two alleles, one of which was dominant, determining a single character. A nice exact 3:1 ratio every time. Post-16, we introduce dihybrid crosses, sex linkage and maybe autosomal linkage. There’s just one problem. Most of it just isn’t true in the real world of modern genetics. Little in nature behaves like that but it’s what was taught pre-war and it still hasn’t changed. Admittedly, modern GCSE specifications include references to DNA, protein synthesis and genetic engineering and A-level Biology has made progress, but the basics have not moved on. When I taught Mendelian genetics for all those years. I felt I was teaching mathematical logic rather than Biology. The pupils enjoyed solving problems because they could quickly understand the principles and apply them to novel examples. When exam time came round, they would get full marks because all the questions were basically the same. Work out the gametes, draw a Punnett square and there’s your answer. So why am I, like others over the past 15 years (Dougherty 2009; Radick 2023; Winterbottom 2016) so determined to see Mendelism removed if it’s guaranteeing examination success for my students? Firstly, most characters in the majority of organisms are not controlled by single genes but rather are polygenic, with many genes having a combined effect. Some genes are pleiotropic and many are multiallelic. I therefore feel that what we are teaching, while not a lie, is a rather peculiar example from a much bigger picture. Why is it taught like this? Radick believes that it was Bateson, who, in Mendel’s name, wanted biology and society reorganised around the recognition that heredity is destiny. Therefore, and more importantly, teaching Mendelism encourages some quite dangerous attitudes to genetics by the public. Most do not study Biology post-16, so they never get to see the bigger picture. They come to believe that ‘there’s a gene for’ every character, a concept that frequently appears in the press, and that environment plays little or no role. I believe it also encourages an acceptance of ‘Genetic Determinism”, an idea first proposed by Weissman and later made popular by Francis Galton in the early 20 century. It suggests that your fate is sealed at conception and your future is not in your hands but is simply determined by your genes. This is a very dangerous concept to be introducing to teenagers who should be allowed to feel that they are not slaves to their genomes and that humans are morally responsible agents. Galton, of course, is also associated with the term ‘nature versus nurture’ which implies that the two are somehow competing against each other. In reality, both genotype and environment contribute to the phenotype of so many characters so I suggest a better phrase would be ‘nature alongside nurture’. All teachers encounter pairs of ‘identical’ twins in their careers (I think I taught at least 10 pairs), so when discussing Twin Studies with teenagers, a useful tool in this topic, one should avoid saying things such as ‘isn’t it remarkable how similar monozygotic twins are’ but rather ‘isn’t it remarkable how different they are, considering they share the same genes’. This drives home the importance of minor changes in environment (nurture) in the determination of phenotypes. JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 57, NO. 4, 707–708 https://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2023.2243690

The Puritan cleric blamed the resistance on Satan, but in fact issues of freedom-including arguments from Benjamin Franklin's brother, who was seeking to establish a free press-fueled the opposition to inoculation even in such a fervently religious environment so long ago.2 Colgrove and Samuel's focus on the power of ideas about freedom and rights is thus highly significant and should be of substantial interest to policymakers. In their conclusion, they correctly note that "[g]iven the grave public health threat posed by COVID-19 and the safety and efficacy of the available vaccines, compulsory measures are well justified from the standpoints of ethics, policy, and law" (p. 240). If this is all that history tells us, then the only real lesson we will learn is one that we likely already know: that we will, perhaps tragically, never be able to move toward a just and effective resolution of the fundamental paradox of a collectivist-oriented public health in a land of individual liberty.10 So what does "history" reveal here, or at least strongly predict?

In any profession, the award of Chartered status indicates someone who has achieved a significant level of competence in a particular field and has therefore been recognised by a certain profession...

Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey by David A. Horowitz Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey. By David A. Horowitz. (Portland, Ore., Inkwater Press, 2015. 440 pp.) Robert D. Johnston Robert D. Johnston University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2017) 86 (3): 517–518. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.3.517 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert D. Johnston; Review: Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey by David A. Horowitz. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 2017; 86 (3): 517–518. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.3.517 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review of: From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War: Middle Class Life in Midwest America, by Timothy R. Mahoney.

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During my 40 years of teaching biology in secondary schools, I have led or taken part in more than 150 school trips. Most were biological but a few have involved other subjects, including geography...

Two historic moments from the run-up to the 2012 presidential election might well stir the interest of readers of theJournal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:December 6, 2011: President Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver what proved to be his signature speech about the economy. Indeed, former labor secretary Robert Reich called the address, “the most important economic speech of his or any modern presidency.” Obama castigated radical free marketeers, he vindicated communal bonds, and he upheld the great middle class. And the reason that the president traveled to the metropolis of Osawatomie? Because in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt had gone there to repudiate the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age and put forth his case for a progressive “New Nationalism” in an oration that White House press secretary Jay Carney characterized as “the speech that really set the course for the 20th century.”

Book Review| September 01 2014 The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. López, A. Ricardo and Weinstein, Barbara, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012xi + 446 pp., $99.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper) Robert D. Johnston Robert D. Johnston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2014) 11 (3): 127–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2687777 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert D. Johnston; The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Labor 1 September 2014; 11 (3): 127–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2687777 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.