Years ago in the UK system, Ronnie Brown and I developed a course that we called Mathematics in Context. We used Davis and Hersh the Mathematical Experience, as one of the background texts, but the real novelty and success of the course was that we often risked letting the students determine the topic for discussion for the next session. The It worked well. We invited external speakers to talk about mathematics in various different areas, (e.g. a quality control engineer gave a training session of the use of statistics in quality control... and the problems of communicating the ideas to a non-mathematically literate workforce.)
Assessment was by essays or other material, e.g. some student wanted to prepare some exhibition boards on self-similarity and fractals. (They were excellent.) You can find various documents relating to this on Ronnie Brown's webpages. The main thing to do is to get the students thinking and discussing mathematics, not just its history but the problems that it relates to even its philosophy (but avoid the mathematical logic view of Mathl. Philosophy)
