Final Project

As you listen to my final project podcast I hope you are inspired to further examine some of the questions for your self and ask those close to you about their opinions.  I was inspired by the amount of ideas and information I learned this semester about social studies education to know more about others experiences.  This course was able to challenge my ideas and really gave me a motivation to learn more about curriculum and the impact of outside factors on the curriculum that is in schools today.
Please enjoy my podcast to learn more!

https://sites.google.com/site/podcastte865/click-here-for-podcast

Unit 3: What is Social Studies?

        From the very start The Social Studies Wars by Ronald Evans takes the reader into the mind of many great thinkers and influential people in the education realm from throughout curriculum history.  The idea that first struck me from the very beginning was how deeply engrained teaching social studies is to our history and how much of an evolution it has had.  As a modern-day teacher, I do not spend as much time thinking about the past and path the standards I teach today have taken.  After reading, I found myself curious and wanting to know more about the evolution of the standards I teach in other subjects as well.  I feel that learning more about this would has an influence on how I view what I am teaching today. 

        The Social Studies Wars explains to the reader the ideas of some main groups interested in implementing their ideas into the curriculum that students will learn.  Those include the traditional historians, Mandarins, social efficacy educators, social meliorists, and social reconstructionists.  As I mentioned in a previous discussion, I find the connection to unit 1 and citizenship to again impact and ground my thinking when learning about these interests involved in different social studies learnings.  I feel that these ideas about citizenship can be discussed and compared to Evan’s thesis as he presented in the introduction.  Evans says, my thesis is that what began as a struggle among interest groups gradually evolved into a war against progressive social studies that has strongly influenced the current and future direction of the curriculum (Evans, 2004). 

       As it would be monotonous and repetitive to rehash the book from the Committee of Ten to the National Council for Social Studies, I wondered how do these ideas presented by these groups fit into our definitions of citizenship.  In addition, I found myself curious about what disagreements may have played out in other content areas in developing their curriculums or does the controversial nature of many social studies topics influence this.

      From reading I found that early traditional history centered curriculums seemed to have a focus on the very basic principles of American citizenship and were often reflective of ideas taught more often in personally responsible citizenship.  Evans quotes of the traditional history, the value judgment is their stock in trade: love of country, love of god, duty to parents, the necessity to develop habits of thrift, honesty, and hard work in order to accumulate property, the certainty of progress, the perfection of the United States.  These are not the be questioned (Evans, 2004).  Though as a reader, one might find these to be quite good qualities to teach students, you wonder what more could students learn beyond this. 

        As with many things, these ideas by the Seven and Ten went out of popularity and more progressive ideas were put into place by theorists such as John Dewey and David Snedden.  These ideas swung the pendulum the other direction more toward current issues and social justice, potentially creating more social justice citizens.  John Dewey was quoted saying, “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform (Dewey, 1899).  It is clear his ideas as discussed previous, focus on pushing students beyond the traditional history. 

       Harold O. Rugg became a large influence in social studies curriculum leading up World War 2 and created the textbooks that many students interacted with daily.  This created a more unified social studies plan across different states but still drew criticism from many.  As his creation of textbooks sold in mass amount came onto the scene, World War 2 was just beginning and the focus on American education changed in preparation of war bound students.  Many students were focused on life as citizens that would soon become soldiers.  Evans states, preparing students to give their lives for democracy became a real purpose for many educators (Evans, 2004).  This leads me to believe that a focus for many educators again was on creating personally responsible citizens. 

        Another large change came to social studies education following World War 2 and surrounding the Cold War.  The impact of the fear of communism changed the way many taught and interacted with their students.  The National Defense Education Act in 1958 even created a focus solely on what now we would call STEM and social studies was pushed toward the background.  Though this took place in 1958, I feel that with acts such as No Child Left Behind this often happens knowingly or unknowingly to many students today.  As focus continued on STEM, the little amount of time spent teaching social studies into the 1960s and 1970s created scared and personally responsible citizens.  Teachers taught with a fear of bringing up controversial issues of Civil Rights and Vietnam.  Evans quotes Barrow, Gross and Sobel to go so far as to say, schools were institutions of conformity that destroyed the souls of children, coerced them to sit through hours of boring classes, and neglected the needs of individuals while oppressing the culture and history of students of color (Evans, 2004). 

        Again, as I read this I wonder how much of what we do today has really changed from then as many teachers including myself find it challenging to teach controversial issues that includes a full range of ideas and opinions.  As we continued into the 1980s and 1990s it seems that again the pendulum swung to include more social studies, though the focus was on history almost entirely.  As the National History Standards in 1994 were put into place and our current view of social studies with more of a focus on character education and global education went into place teachers still struggle with the best way to teach social studies. 

       As the reader can see social studies education has taken a long road to get where it is now, but as with anything the trip is not over.  I do not feel that we are at a perfect place with social studies education currently and wonder how current events such as war or economy may change our ideals as they did in the past.  I also wonder how we will know what the best approach is or if changing with the tides is the best idea to fit the current societal ideals.  As I said after reading, I wonder how much influence current issues of the time had on curriculums other than social studies.  This makes me want to investigate content area curriculums that I thought before this were black and white and wander into what may be actually a gray area. 

Unit 2: Teaching History

After reading about history in the classroom and the impact of students’ ideas on history, I found I had many conflicting ideas in my mind about how we teach our students history.  Even after reading these articles it does not give us a clear answer about what is right and what is wrong about teaching kids history. 

One thing that stuck out to me was how interconnected the ideas of citizenship of students are to how we teach history.  It appears to me that how much of the country currently teaches history further conditions students in the path of personally responsible citizens, whereas it could stretch them to be social justice citizens.  As Greenwalt says, “The goal of teaching American history has long been the creation of citizens who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.”  This makes me think as teachers we are continuing to permeate the idea of the personally responsible citizen.  This does not give students a chance to think or question on their own. 

Again, this brings up the ideas and concerns about how to teach and confront young students with more “radical” ideas.  How do we teach young students to be social justice citizens?  How do we teach students history outside of a neatly packaged box?  As addressed in History-It Can be Elementary, not much history is explicitly taught in younger grades but often we still have the experience of discussing historical events with young students.  For example, when discussing President’s Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day we are confronted with the task of explaining why these men are important to U.S. History.  This very often leads to me glossing over the facts to present a simple and soft version of their history. 

One reason, even when I taught fifth grade, that I often felt unequipped to discuss and extend students in history was my own lack of knowledge in addition to the common constraint of time.  Having minored in math and ESL in undergraduate, my history knowledge is reduced to anything I can remember from my own schooling, which was sensationalized as many other students experienced.  As much as I was educated about many things in undergraduate education, a deep dive in the issues and topics I may be teaching was not one of them and I find myself in the same boat as many other elementary education teachers. Anderson reminds readers,  “Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that “much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun—foods and festival—approach to learning.”” How can we change our approach to teaching teachers to teach social issues?  This will continue to be a source of problem as we continue to write a difficult historical narrative. 

As we watch and reflect on the news today, history and difficult topics are not going away.  Students in the future will continue to be asked to learn about and understand issues that are not always pretty and can be simplified into a cute picture with fun type font.  As I said after reading, I still do not have a clear black and white answer about what and how to teach my students as I would a math or science concept but I do feel a renewed sense of responsibility to ensure facts like these, “among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War.” from Anderson do not continue to be  a reality for our students.

Unit 1: Citizenship in Young Students

       As I read about civic education and citizenship in our schools I found myself constantly coming back to the age of my students.  As a first-grade teacher, many of the ideas presented in the readings seemed out of reach for myself and my students to address. 

      While reading, What Kind of Citizen? about the three kinds of citizens, personally responsible citizen; the participatory citizen; and the justice oriented citizen (Westheimer, J. & Kahne, J.

2004), I found that most of my time teaching is spent teaching my students to be personally responsible citizens.  They often learn about how to put things away themselves, take care of their own needs, and follow the rules (laws) of the classroom.  As teachers, we encourage and organize ways for students to give back to the school and community through fundraisers and recycling programs but all of these are adult created and adult coordinated.  As the article says, there is a current push toward teaching students to be not just participatory citizens but also justice oriented citizens.  As I read about the studies they completed I still found myself envisioning the success of this with six year olds. 

       Once I moved to Young Children's Everyday Civics I found that I was not alone in teaching young students just to be personally responsible citizens and often for many of the same reasons that I had already encountered.  There were challenges to teaching civics and citizenship to young students, first, the field of social studies uses frames of analyzing citizenship education based on studies of older students and second, predetermined adult ideas (and ideals) of what it means to act civically dominate our conceptions of civic education for young children (Payne, 2018). So, I wondered what needed to change about practices already in place to ensure advancement in teaching young students to move beyond personally responsible citizens. 

       As I thought about my own teaching and what could be changed I found that many of the lessons and expectations for students to be personally responsible citizens do not need to change.  I would argue as well that for young students it is imperative to spend a large amount of time teaching students the expectations of being personally responsible citizens.  Without the foundations, just as anything else in learning, we cannot move onto the other steps.  Participatory citizens are personally responsible citizens with an added layer.  Without the groundwork in early years, students will not be able to successfully navigate other types of citizenship. 

       This being said, once students have a strong hold on the basics, as the article discussed we can move beyond, but not from an adult perspective.  Students are already in many ways participating as responsible citizens in a community in some form during lunch, recess, and other interactions.  Payne states, while we know that young children can and do deal with issues that face the larger public (e.g., questions about race and racism) (Doucet & Adair, 2013), we also observed how their everyday relationships and interactions highlighted a different vision of being civic and more caring and relational idea of the common good (Payne, 2018).  This tells me that we can use the systems already in place and amend them to fulfill the needs of citizenship education in some cases.  Young students must be given the opportunity to learn to be personally responsible citizens but adults can grow their understanding of citizenship by capitalizing on the systems and ideals the students already have in place.