LAWRENCE — Teachers are increasingly turning from print textbooks to online materials to teach their courses. But when tasked with finding information online, they can encounter questionable or unreliable material.
New research from the University of Kansas has found that some of the most used online resources for social studies education overwhelmingly present the topic of imperialism in a positive light and use a “balance sheet” approach that can ask inappropriate questions of young students.
Anna Yonas, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching, and Stephen Jackson, associate professor of educational leadership & policy studies, study how difficult topics in social studies are taught and how history standards are set. The KU researchers wanted to understand how imperialism is presented in online, open educational resources, known as OERs.
“Teachers are increasingly using textbooks because they’re really expensive, and many school districts can’t access them. So, teachers in many schools are turning instead to things they can find online. Sometimes that is because the school has approved a specific online curriculum. Sometimes it is because teachers are going to Google and seeing what’s out there. Sometimes they’re going to paid websites, which have their own pitfalls and problems,” Yonas said. “Imagine you are a high school teacher, you are planning three or four different courses, but you know you have to teach about imperialism in your next unit in one of your courses, so you hop on Google so that you can quickly find some preexisting resources. You don’t necessarily have the time to dig into those materials. You might be trusting when you see a name like PBS or C3 Teachers that it is high quality. So, we wanted to dig in and see what is actually happening in these materials that teachers are using and teachers might not have the time to do additional vetting on.”
For the study, Yonas and Jackson analyzed 46 sets of commonly used OERs for middle and high school social studies classes. They wanted to know whose perspectives were included in instructional materials about imperialism and how pervasive a “balance sheet” approach, in which students are asked weigh the pros and cons of such actions, were.
“OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, with 85.7% of primary sources recorded by colonizers with few sources recorded by colonized peoples,” according to the study. The authors wrote that OERs frequently privilege Eurocentric narratives and minimize colonial voices, thus normalizing imperial conquest and perpetuating systemic silences.
The study was published in the journal Social Studies Research and Practice.
In addition to seeing how common approving presentations of imperialism were, Yonas and Jackson studied how common balance sheet approaches were. Not all OERs included a balance sheet approach, and the approach varied by platform.
The study analyzed four platforms: OER Project, PBS, DIG and C3 Teachers. No DIG resources used such an approach, while OER and PBS used them relatively infrequently, and each of the C3 Teachers resources included them.
Such balance sheet approaches included questions for teachers to ask of their students such as “should Hawai’i be sovereign,” “was American expansion abroad justified” or asking students to perform a cost-benefit analysis of French occupation of Vietnam. There are several problems with such an approach, the authors said, namely that asking young students to debate whether people have a right to exist freely or to justify colonizing another nation is inappropriate. Further, it is academically inappropriate, as historians do not engage in such questions.
It also reduces history to hypotheticals, as it is not possible to determine how life would be if imperialism had not happened, the authors said.
“Most recent scholarship is extremely critical of this for a lot of reasons. It often brings in sort of inappropriate questions of sovereignty and human rights and pretends as if these are questions that are appropriate matters for high schoolers to be debating,” Jackson said. “Should people be allowed to be conquered? Which invites a lot of moralizing and a lot of not very deep or complex thought, and it puts things on the table, including human rights and self-determination, as basically the subject of debate, which is pretty fraught, to say the least.”
Not all examined resources took a balance sheet approach or strictly presented the perspective of colonizers.
“One of the findings from our study is that the OER Project is doing a pretty good job of providing lessons that include sources from a range of perspectives and of asking questions that are appropriate for students to engage in, like ‘how did colonized peoples resist?’” Yonas said. “We think the more that we can elevate those materials that are doing things well, we can see more teachers using them. But we can also expand that into the pre-service teacher preparation phase, how we teach teachers to identify the shortcomings in different sets of materials.”
The study helps build understanding of OERs, as little research has been conducted on the content, their sources and quality of the educational materials. Yonas, who has studied how states mandate teaching difficult topics like genocide and how young teachers approach such topics , said better understanding the materials can help schools, teachers and students ultimately have access to high-quality, reliable educational materials that address difficult topics.
Social Studies Research and Practice
Systematic review
Not applicable
Privileging an empire state of mind: imperialism in open educational resources Open Access
11-Sep-2026