The teacher who is the focus of this interpretive case study, uses primary sources regularly with her students in ambitious ways but does so less from the current reform efforts, recent history education scholarship, or the climate of accountability and more from her individual goals for history education, most significantly, to prepare her students for informed citizenry. In this study, I use Barton and Levstik’s (2004) work, Teaching History for the Common Good, as a framework for making sense of one middle school teacher’s purpose for teaching history with primary sources. One implication of this study suggests that when a teacher closely aligns her pedagogical goals with her practice, she is more likely to teach ambitiously.
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