Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.

Emma Willard's map-drawing geographic pedagogy revolutionized early nineteenth-century American education, turning students into participants in the crafting of the new nation. This essay explores the conditions under which map drawing was transported to American missionary schools in South Asia and helped instigate a Tamil nation in British Ceylon. What did the missionaries intend the teaching method to impart? What were the consequences of this pedagogical form on dominant Tamil portrayals of space and identity in Ceylon? To answer these questions and to track the foreign career of American didactic mapmaking, this essay draws on print and manuscript archival materials, including two maps by a Tamil student at the American Ceylon Mission named Robert Breckenridge. The essay argues that the use of map-drawing pedagogy in Ceylon partially transmitted American ways of being in the world, which were consequential for local spatial knowledges and the crafting of a Tamil national identity on the island.

The reasons for peer education's ascendance as a core pedagogy in sex education are as much historical as they are reasonable or ethical. This article traces the history of peer-led sex education from the 1970s to the 1990s against the backdrop of New York City's financial ruin, social unrest, and a public health crisis. Starting with an analysis of the Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education's Peer Information Project, founded in 1974, it investigates the application of new pedagogical techniques, the interplay between pedagogy and bureaucracy, and the transformation of school culture. Peer education thrived when educators and activists agreed that young people were more likely to accept advice from other young people, a reasonable contention that was nonetheless underassessed. Yet peer education's least intriguing attribute proved to be its most important characteristic: it could be quickly and inexpensively enacted. When HIV/AIDS began to decimate New York City's adolescent population, and the Board of Education proved slow and contradictory in its actions, the city turned to peer education, henceforth coupling the concepts of sex education and peer education.