When Eric Langhorst teaches the Civil War to his eighth-graders at Discovery Middle School in Liberty, Missouri, he likes to give his students a taste of what Missouri was like in that era. In addition to teaching about the big events found in any Civil War curriculum, like the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, Langhorst incorporates materials he has created about the guerrilla-style warfare more common in his region at that time. He wouldn’t be able to localize his curriculum that way if he taught only out of a textbook.

"Some of the limitations of textbooks are they tend to be very non-interactive, kind of impersonal, and they’re not very flexible in terms of regional differences," Langhorst said. For all these reasons, he doesn’t use them anymore. Instead, he creates his own curriculum, in collaboration with the other eighth-grade social studies teacher at his school, out of materials he has found on the internet and adapted to the needs of his classroom.

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