TEAC 451: Blog #1

I agree with many parts of the readings for this week. I think that social studies is a great discipline, but often the way it is taught is not engaging, not just in real life, but in examples in the media (just about any children's or teen's TV show has a boring teacher, and they usually teach history or social studies). All three of the articles we read this week reflect what it means to teach social studies authentically and with meaning.

The NCSS Position Statement serves as a benchmark of how social studies can be a great and powerful subject; however, it seems very idealistic. The goal of education, in my opinion, is to make everyone have an equal playing field where each student has similar educational backgrounds and can think critically about most subjects to draw their own conclusions. This article argues much the same perspective, although specifically about social studies education. While this goal is commendable, and many parts of it can be implemented, there are some issues in the feasibility of it on a larger scale. Students should be able to have a meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active experience in every social studies classroom, but with current emphasis on test scores and quantifying data, it isn't possible for every student to have it. My wish is that eventually we can use the social sciences as a way to teach "critical thinking, problem solving, and cooperative skills", but many are still teaching to the test and expecting students to regurgitate information back to them. 

This issue melds into the concepts in Scheurman's article From Behaviorist to Constructivist Teaching. I personally consider myself to be part of the constructivist point of view, however I can see the usefulness of teaching from a behaviorist perspective. Students must have a baseline knowledge of well-accepted facts on a subject before they can be expected to problem-solve and think critically about it. For example, students should know about Jim Crow laws, segregation, the history of slavery, and their atrocities before they can answer "Why was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s necessary?". 

I think that inquiry-based learning can be a great way to tie these things together. Having students discover their own curiosity about a subject and allowing them to dive in and state that desire for knowledge is a wonderful way to stimulate learning. Again, prior knowledge is needed to be able to choose a topic and understand it completely enough to form an opinion on it. 

Perhaps using all the perspectives in Scheurman's article together is the best way to get to the goal of instilling students with the knowledge to make their own decisions about subject-matter, which is a skill that can be applied outside the classroom.