Think the feeling, Feel the thought
Let Social Studies Innovate K-12, and in turn Society
Think the feeling, feel the thought;
may your verses settle down in earthly nests,
and when they rise up in flight to the heavens
past the clouds not go amiss.
(First stanza of the poem “Poetic Creed,” by Miguel de Unamuno, 1907)
On February 14th 2,018, in Parkland, Florida, we witnessed the cruel mass shooting at a high-school made by a former student expelled from the attacked school. After mourning their classmates and teachers, the survivors of that attack were mobilized by the model “in service of the public good.” At the mass shooting, three faculty members from that school gave their lives to save students. So did Peter Wang, a 15-year-old high-schooler who was a member of the junior ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) and whose dream was to attend West Point Military Academy. Peter Wang helped fellow Parkland students escape gunfire by holding a door open for them to escape. This tragedy has elicited survivor students to join for a change against gun violence and for the regulation of the purchase and possession of firearms -that right now is being discussed in all the United States of America. I have been overwhelmed by both the indifference to avoid more gun violence and the brave, gifted and justice-loving high-schoolers. Do we have to wait for tragedies to turn into the innovators for a big change? How can K-12 education deal with reality to let students and society be able to override gun violence to progress?
It is important to stress that we, as individuals and social beings, have different experiences throughout our lives, but at the same time we have common ways to interrelate to one another in our communities. From an early age, this principle can be taught. K-12 students can learn to value themselves and others and be able to understand that each person has a role for the welfare of the community and when dealing with the real world. Social Studies is a course that compresses History, Geography, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Archeology, Linguistics, Law, Education, Demographics, Social Work and Civics. Social Studies should be the seed to develop positive attitudes towards life and the trunk of the tree that supports social-emotional skills with many branches of values. However, in the U.S. there is a tendency of not teaching this subject, especially in public schools. I have heard from teachers many times that:
1. teaching Social Studies is time consuming -mostly from first grade to fourth grade of elementary school.
2. there is a great pressure to cover mathematics and language arts that are tested in standardized testing annually.
Also a superintendent at a school district told me that there is the K-12 mandatory curriculum that “forced not necessarily a bad thing. Students can do better than ten years ago.” Here the hit is that the relevance of introducing Social Studies should be improved, let me show you a glimpse of how children are taught.
1. Read as much as possible
There are institutions like the public libraries and organizations for literacy that when advocating for reading and visiting elementary schools state the motto: “Read as much as possible and you will have more capability to understand everything that is taught at school.” I have heard this concluding statement many times from teachers and at workshops for parents too. Students unfortunately read only fiction books at schools, because there is a lack to introduce students in other types of reading.
2. Annual standardized testing
The teachers I interviewed said the reason for not teaching social studies “was that simple.” For example, a teacher of a GATE (also known as Gifted and Talented Education) class told me that “the reason is that the state places more emphasis on other subjects and tests them with more rigor. Some teachers feel more pressure because test scores are scrutinized by administrators and used to gauge teacher performance.” There is an order from governmental high circles, which is not new. Fitchett, et. al. declare in An Analysis of Time Prioritization for Social Studies in Elementary School Classrooms:
In the United States, elementary social studies has historically been placed on the instructional backburner in favor of other core subjects(…) reflecting a well-documented longstanding issue (…) Over the last decade, instructional time allocated for social studies has further diminished due to high-stakes accountability mandates in the US that have placed greater emphasis on English/languages arts (ELA), math, and science. (…) Under a narrowing curriculum, teachers eliminated social studies instruction or absorbed it within ELA as part of the literacy agenda (9).
3. Misconception of its relevance
Many teachers even think that teaching social studies is only about old things of the past and does not have any place in current events. For example, a teacher asked me “How the Revolutionary War will help them be `career ready?´ ” and “How learning about Hopi Indians can help a student who wants to be an automobile technician?” There are teachers who do not apply social studies for the construction of civic responsibility, stronger feelings of affiliation to a group neither use it as a means to teach values of solidarity and commitment, and, as Nancy Paterson, et. al. suggest (110–122), “respect for different ethnics and races.”
4. Different type of reading
Teachers do know that there is a typology of texts in English and in any human language. I can enlist very briefly some of the features any text presents depending on its type:
-Texts have their own lexical semantic features
-Texts have their own syntactic and linguistic features
-Texts have their own communicative features.
I am not against fiction books -they help to analyze reality through literature and certainly there are many with a moral, however, since children are not confronted with social studies texts, they judge social studies as boring and are not interested in reading about it. This also occurs in GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) classes, where bright minds of children do not get used to grasp the real world through a different reading.
5. Deal with reality
Janet Alleman, et. al. in Social Studies: Incorporating All Children Using Community and Cultural Universals as the Centerpiece, state that:
…students should develop basic sets of connected understandings about how our social system work (…), how and why it got to be that way over time, how and why related practices vary across locations and cultures, and what all of this might mean for personal, social and civic decision making (169).
Alleman et. al. confirm, the first learning community is the classroom, where the teacher values the ideas and information that children bring from their homes to build networks to connect students with the real world. For example, students can talk about the job of a parent and how that work contributes to the welfare of society. There are also educators that advocate for the importance of social studies. The following is an illustration:
In Kindergarten, teachers help students to develop awareness of the special space that belongs to each person.
Ms. Carreras in search of illustrating the special place that corresponds to each individual, made this poster with her students. We can see each student of the class with an effort to join hands.
This poster is at the door by the entrance of the classroom and it is the first thing any visitor can see when the door is opened.
Also Kindergarten children learn how to put into practice the following of norms and acceptable behavior when walk in the streets:
However, after the Kindergarten teacher makes the effort to improve students´ behavior and attitudes towards others, and after students start being aware of the consequences of anything they decide to do, all this job is forgotten in the next grades by putting more emphasis on students´ performance for standard tests. In this way, children´s social-emotional development is stuck.
6. Gain interest in the community as a habit
Starting in fourth grade, public schools in the U.S. teach again social studies to enrich children´s vocabulary, improve accuracy in reading comprehension and to introduce concepts of history and geography -because the annual standardized testing at this grade starts using social studies texts in the evaluation of reading comprehension in the language arts section. In an effort to improve the teaching of social studies, some states have added the course of Civics that compresses history, geography and government in seventh grade. But in general students have to wait until high-school to learn more about history, geography and government. Furthermore, some teachers of Middle School (seventh grade) told me that the texts and concepts that appear for the teaching of the course of Civics correspond to ninth grade, and that only exceptional students who have parents involved in their children´s education can pass satisfactorily the course.
7. Early stimulation to express feelings and ideas
In times of massive technology and artificial intelligence -which sometimes can promote isolation, narcissism, depression and lack of interaction in a family-, social studies can be the tool that from early ages enriches the brain architecture to connect children to themselves, the people and the real world. I have browsed school social studies books that come with their corresponding workbooks. They are written by eminent specialists and professors from famous universities in the United States. The learning-teaching materials are excellent -they have the right content to improve education. They have all kinds of activities, graphs, illustrations, tasks, etc. to be applied in a class with the inclusion of writing hints that enhance children to express their thoughts and promote critical thinking. Any teacher can explore and exploit them for the benefit of their students. The following is an example of a 4th grade social studies class:
“Dear Diary, Today I saw some strange men by our village. They wore fancier clothes than us, Indians. They took us far from home. It took us one month, but we are here. By here I mean at a mission, Mission San Juan Babtista. The men told us that here we will pray to their gods! I was very disappointed. My beliefs would be replaced by theirs! We were given jobs. They said in the morning, we will work and pray. Always work and prayer. — — In the drawing: Priest/ Me? ”
The product of a fourth-grade student expressing her thoughts in a diary contextualized according to the first impressions that a native American girl might have had when confronted with the missions more than 200 years ago.
Think the feeling, feel the thought
Should K-12 education feel involved in the construction of a better society providing ideas, analyzing social problems and inspiring students to become more participative and tolerant from early stages in education? Diana, a retired elementary school teacher that I interviewed expressed:
“We are so much in contact with differing nationalities due to electronic communication, population growth and immigration. It is very important that teachers and parents teach children from early ages to gain appreciation and understanding of all different cultures in order to live in the most peaceful and enriching way possible. Children and adults (teachers and parents) can enrich their brains to learn things outside one’s private world. The importance of social studies is not realized because we tend to focus primarily and sometimes exclusively on our private lives, such as finding and keeping a job and raising our families, which is very consuming. Social studies is important for K-High School in order to fully appreciate our fellow classmates and future friends, co-workers and potential places of employment.”
Social Studies offers a wide range of possibilities to improve and innovate K-12, which corresponds to the formal basic education in the U.S. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO, provides a full disclosure about this issue in a simple quote. In the UNESCO Operational Definition of Basic Education appears (79), “promote well-coordinated emotional, spiritual and social development of individuals” for life. In the end, we need more teachers with the spirit of Diana, the Kindergarten teachers, and more parents involved in what K-12 students are taught, so that parents, teachers and the community turn into the driving force behind initiatives while the Department of Education becomes the facilitator and catalyst to innovate society too.
Bibliography
Alleman, Janet, et. al. “Social Studies: Incorporating all Children Using Community and Cultural Universals as the Centerpiece’. Journal of Learning Disabilities Mar/Apr 2007: 166- 173. EBSCOHost. Web. 19 April 2015.
Fitchett, Paul G., et. al. “An Analysis of Time Prioritization for Social Studies in Elementary School Classrooms”. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction Dec 2014: 7–35. EBSCOHost. Web. 30 April 2015
Patterson, Nancy, et. al. “The large Work of Small Schools: Why Social Studies Teachers and Educators Should Care”. Theory and Research in Social Studies Education Winter 2008: 110–132. EBSCOHost. Web. 19 April 2015.
UNESCO Operational Definition of Basic Education December 2007: 1–80. Web. 13 March 2018.
Dear readers, I really appreciate your patience with this long reading. Please feel free to give your opinion.
Contact:
