Discovering the Power of Influence.
Current events and contemporary social issues can be used to anchor teaching practices by showing students why social studies is relevant to their daily lives. Often social studies are taught from either the perspectives of those of the past, or of those that seemingly have little to do with students lives. Incorporating current events is a way for teachers to allow students to develop and voice their opinions on topics occurring in the world around them. Additionally it allows students to make connections between their local community and communities across the world. It is common for students to think social issues like Catalonia declaring its independence from Spain has nothing to do with them. However, some aspects of this fight for independence can be compared to social protest around the United States for racial equality. Obviously, secession and the fight for equality are two different social issues, but at their core, both of these social issues are fighting for the same rights. Giving students the opportunity to see that allows them to make connections between the mistreated citizens in Catalonia and the mistreated Black citizens in the United States. In my opinion making these connections allows students to develop greater sympathy for local, national, and international social issues, which in turn will produce students who fight for the rights of all, not just those who are in their direct line of sight. This is an important part of teaching social studies because students need to know that injustice reaches beyond the borders of their country, and recognition of worldwide injustice is a step in the right direction of curing injustice everywhere.
I am currently doing my fieldwork in a ninth grade Civics course, meaning that current events are always a subject of debate in the classroom. One that comes to mind is the class discussion of Colin Kaepernick’s NFL kneeling protest. The lesson was framed around the constitutionality of protest, and how they influence change. The essential question of the lesson was, how do people influence change? This lesson took place several weeks prior to this blog post, so it was taught just a week or two after the beginning of the NFL season. My cooperating teacher began the lesson by showing pictures of different forms of protest that have taken place throughout the United States. Each represented a different decade, as a class, the students were asked to match the image with the protest. The images included Colin Kaepernick, the Tinker children, images of the 1968 Olympic protest, and several other images. The students were able to place all the images with their corresponding title with the exception of the Tinker children who were the subject of the famous Tinker v. Des Moines Supreme Court case. This was what my cooperating teacher had hoped for; she assumed that the students would know very little about this case.
Her intention was to teach the students about the Tinker case in hopes that they would make connections between the details of this protest and the details of Colin Kaepernick’s protest, which would allow them to further develop their opinions on whether or not Kaepernick was justified in his public protest. The curriculum that she’d based this lesson on was civics standard 12.14 which states “ Explain and analyze how different political and social movements have sought to mobilize public opinion and obtain governmental support in order to achieve their goals.” The big idea she wanted students to take away from this lesson was that anyone has the ability to influence change. Though I believe the intended goal of this lesson was well thought out, I don’t believe students walked away from the lesson with the ability to think critically about their and others constitutional right to protest.
The activities for the lesson didn’t do a good job at complementing the ideas that my cooperating teacher was trying to get students to understand. The previously mentioned matching activity was the introduction to the lesson, next students spent some time discussing the protests that were displayed on the board. She went over causes and effects of each protest going into depth about the three named above. Students were given the opportunity to discuss what these protest accomplished and why they were so important. This portion of the lesson went well because it hooked students into the topic and maintained their interest for the transition into the next activity. Students did a good job at connecting the protest at the 1968 Olympic games with Colin Kaepernick’s current NFL protest. My cooperating teacher did this on purpose, to show students how they can make connections between past and contemporary events. While discussing she made sure not to provide too much detail about the Tinker protest because that was the subject of the lesson. After about ten to twelve minutes of classroom discussion, students transitioned to the main activity of the lesson, which required them to answer ten questions based on a page in their textbooks that went into further detail about the Tinker v. Des Moines case. The questions, which were created by me, required the students to pull factual evidence from the text as well as use it as a guide to answer questions that weren’t fact-based. Completing the textbook Tuesday questions was the summative assessment for the day. Though I created the questions for this particular textbook Tuesday, this was not my lesson. I was asked by my cooperating teacher to create questions on the document that students were reading that were similar to the questions that she creates every Tuesday. I am of the opinion that this activity didn’t do an adequate job of getting students to think about the role that protesting plays in a person(s) ability to influence change, and though Colin Kaepernick was the current event tying this lesson together, it appeared that students had forgotten about him by the end of the lesson.
In order to influence higher-level thinking and hammer in big ideas, I would change most aspects of this lesson. Beginning with the opener, instead of focusing on several different protests alongside Kaepernick’s protest I would choose to focus specifically on the Kaepernick and Tinker protest.
At first, I was tempted to compare the Kaepernick protest with the ’68 Olympic protest, but because those events are so similar they wouldn’t allow students to understand different forms of protesting by different types of people. Therefore, I would stick with my cooperating teachers choice of Tinker. Like her, I would post both images on the board with titles of each. Instead of having students match the protest, I would ask them what each protestor is protesting for. Knowing that they are probably unfamiliar with the Tinker case I would accept guesses to the question. After about three minutes of answering what are the protesters protesting for we will then move into a discussion about Tinker. This would take the form of a short lecture in which I would provide students with some background information about the case. Students would have a worksheet that asks them to pull out important facts about the case that they learned from the power-point. This would serve as additional notes for the subsequent activity. The facts they would be asked to pull out would be: What were they protesting? How did they protest? And What was the result of their protest? After answering these short questions students would then be split into two groups. One group would be tasked with justifying Kaepernick’s protest using evidence from the Tinker protest to justify their answers and the second group would be tasked with refuting Kaepernick’s protest also using evidence from the Tinker protest. The information that I would have given them in the power point wouldn’t have been enough for them to thoroughly complete the assignment. This would be intentional because I want students to further research the Tinker case as well as the Kaepernick protest. Being that I know that my students don’t fully understand how to identify unreliable sources I would provide them with ten pieces of evidence and ask them to use at least six of the sources to justify the stance they have been assigned. I feel that this assignment would inspire more inquiry than simply asking students to answer questions based on a text they read from their textbooks. This activity would take them beyond their textbooks, which are known to be historically biased, and into the world of research. I recognize that this isn’t true research because they would be using sources that I provide to them, but it would be the beginning of them learning how to research answers to a proposed question and justify their answers with evidence they find in the text. These are all steps needed to write a research paper at both secondary and collegiate levels. Completion of this assignment would presumably take an entire class period, meaning the closing of this lesson would take place during the following class. To close this lesson I would have my students participate in a series of debates. One student from each side would go in front of the class and argue their points based on the information they found in the previous class period. After the end of each debate the class would get to vote on the side they think won. After the debates are over we would tally the points to see which side as a whole won. Finally, we would have a discussion about why they believe a certain side won and what are the greater implications of that win. I believe these activities are better designed to get students to think about big ideas and how current events mimic events of the past. It would also allow them to look into what worked for events of the past and what didn’t allowing them to develop new ideas about how to influence change in the world around them.
