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Published Research

Research & Scholarship by Dr. Kason Kendall

Peer-reviewed studies on how textbooks and curriculum materials shape what students learn about war, empire, media literacy, and contested claims.

7 published works 2022 – 2026 Founder & Director, History Education Foundation

Every one of these studies asks a version of the same question: what are students actually being taught — and who decided that?

Dr. Kendall's research examines how history textbooks and curriculum materials frame controversial events, and how that framing shapes what young people come to believe. The work appears in peer-reviewed journals in social studies education. Each entry below links to the publisher's own copy of the work.

All published work

Newest first.

Featured Peer-reviewed article 2026

Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Curriculum: Textbook Narratives and Georgia's Standards of Excellence

Kason Kendall & Robby Freetly

Teaching Social Studies in the Peach State, 4(2), Article 1

Examines how weapons of mass destruction and the 2003 invasion of Iraq appear in Georgia's social studies standards and in two widely used U.S. history textbooks. The authors find the textbooks stress the WMD case for invasion while saying much less about the fact that no stockpiles were ever found, and they propose three approaches teachers can use when a claim like this is still contested.

Textbook analysis Iraq War Curriculum standards Media literacy
Read at Georgia Southern Download PDF
Peer-reviewed article 2026

Spotting Power: Reframing Media Literacy in Civic Education

Kason Kendall

Democracy & Education, 34(1)

Challenges the common way media literacy is taught as a neutral 'spot the mistake' skill. The article argues that limiting media literacy to fact-checking hides the deliberate production and spread of disinformation by powerful organizations — and that students need to learn to spot power, not just errors.

Media literacy Civic education Disinformation
Read at Democracy & Education
Peer-reviewed article 2026

Teaching Empire: A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Chinese History Textbooks on 20th-Century U.S. Imperialism

Chenyu Li & Kason Kendall

The Social Studies, 1–16

Compares how U.S. and Chinese high school textbooks portray 20th-century U.S. imperialism. Textbooks in both countries serve national narratives — American texts downplay imperial ambitions while framing U.S. actions as spreading democracy, while Chinese texts emphasize American expansionism as hegemony. The authors argue for more transnational ways of teaching imperialism.

Comparative analysis U.S. imperialism Chinese textbooks National narratives
Read at Taylor & Francis
PhD dissertation 2026

An Analysis of the War on Terror in Textbooks

Kason Kendall

Doctoral dissertation, Utah State University

A doctoral study of how the War on Terror is presented in history textbooks used in the United States and Brazil — and how those narratives shape what students come to believe about who the United States is in the world.

War on Terror Textbook analysis Cross-national comparison
Read at Utah State Download PDF
Peer-reviewed article 2025

Analyzing the Portrayal of the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Textbooks and Non-Profit Curriculum Sources

Kason Kendall

The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies, 13(1), 1–15

Compares how U.S. history textbooks and non-profit curriculum sources portray the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The study finds textbook narratives often frame the bombings through a nationalist lens that emphasizes American justification while minimizing Japanese suffering and downplaying the ongoing debate about the decision to use nuclear weapons.

Textbook analysis World War II Nuclear history Curriculum critique
Read at Utah State Download PDF
Peer-reviewed article 2023

Teaching Democratic Humility to Improve Classroom Discussion

Kason Kendall

Research in Social Sciences and Technology, 8(2), 1–20

An analysis of real social media posts about the Gulf War — including posts from a prominent conservative influencer — and what they do to classroom discussion. The study shows how false and misleading information travels through social platforms, and proposes ways teachers can keep discussion honest when students arrive with claims they found online.

Classroom discussion Social media Misinformation
Read the open-access article Download PDF
Book review 2022

Book Review: Civics Education in Contentious Times — Working with Teachers to Create Locally-Specific Curricula in a Post-Truth World

Kason Kendall & Ryan T. Knowles

The Journal of Social Studies Research, 46(4), 402–403

A review of William Toledo's book on how civics teachers build curriculum in a polarized, post-truth climate — and what that means for teaching contested issues in real classrooms.

Civics education Curriculum Book review
Read at SAGE
A closer look

Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Curriculum: Textbook Narratives and Georgia's Standards of Excellence

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, in large part to stop a weapons-of-mass-destruction program that turned out not to exist. Two decades later, how do we teach the next generation about that decision — and about the claim that drove it?

What the study found

The standard leaves the hard part open

Georgia's Standard SSUSH23.a says to teach the War on Terror, but it never spells out how the disputed case for invading Iraq should be handled. That silence hands a lot of the decision to whoever writes the curriculum.

Two common textbooks lean on the WMD case

Analyzing The American Vision and United States History: Reconstruction to the Present, the authors found both emphasize WMDs as a leading reason for the invasion — and give far less space to the finding that no stockpiles were ever located.

Other materials tell a different story

Set beside the textbooks were the Zinn Education Project, the Bill of Rights Institute, Georgia's own department of education teacher notes, and teacher-made resources on Teachers Pay Teachers — a surprisingly wide range of framings of the same events.

A vague standard plus loose rules equals inconsistency

Because Georgia's standard is broad and textbook adoption is decentralized, students in different classrooms can walk away with very different understandings of one of the most consequential and disputed justifications for war in modern U.S. history.

Three ways to teach a contested claim

The study names three approaches it found in real materials. Most classrooms sit somewhere between them.

Security narrative

The threat is the story. WMDs are presented as a real danger that justified action, and the unresolved questions about the evidence get little attention.

Critical narrative

The claim is the story. Students look closely at how the case for war was made, who pushed it, and what the evidence actually showed afterward.

Deliberative narrative

The decision is the story. Students weigh competing evidence, argue more than one side, and practice reaching a judgment they can defend.

Why it matters beyond Georgia

Nearly every state writes standards that are broad enough to be taught a dozen different ways. That flexibility can be a strength — but it also means the biggest questions in a unit can go unasked, simply because nobody was told they had to ask them.

The same pattern shows up in Utah and everywhere else: when a standard names an event but not the argument inside it, the classroom outcome depends on the teacher, the textbook, and the materials that happen to be on hand. Learning which sources frame a claim differently — and asking why — is exactly the media-literacy skill civics education is supposed to build.

Citing this work

Copy-ready citations, newest first. Links go straight to the publisher.

Kendall, K., & Freetly, R. (2026). Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Curriculum: Textbook Narratives and Georgia's Standards of Excellence. Teaching Social Studies in the Peach State, 4(2), Article 1.

Kendall, K. (2026). Spotting Power: Reframing Media Literacy in Civic Education. Democracy & Education, 34(1). https://doi.org/10.65214/2164-7992.1777

Li, C., & Kendall, K. (2026). Teaching Empire: A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Chinese History Textbooks on 20th-Century U.S. Imperialism. The Social Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2026.2636515

Kendall, K. (2026). An Analysis of the War on Terror in Textbooks [Doctoral dissertation, Utah State University]. https://doi.org/10.26076/538c-de43

Kendall, K. (2025). Analyzing the Portrayal of the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Textbooks and Non-Profit Curriculum Sources. The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies, 13(1), 1–15.

Kendall, K. (2023). Teaching Democratic Humility to Improve Classroom Discussion. Research in Social Sciences and Technology, 8(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.46303/ressat.2023.8

Kendall, K., & Knowles, R. T. (2022). Book review: Civics Education in Contentious Times — Working with Teachers to Create Locally-Specific Curricula in a Post-Truth World. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 46(4), 402–403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr.2022.06.001

Full texts and PDFs are hosted by the publishers listed above. Where a work is open access, the download link is on its entry in the list. This page is our own original summary of the research — the published articles are the authoritative versions.

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Collection

Critiques of Textbooks

How textbook narratives shape what students learn — and what gets left out.

 Article + full text

Spotting Power

The media-literacy article, with the embedded PDF and full text on our site.

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Ready-to-teach lessons aligned to Utah Core Standards.