Reddit and the Social Studies: Exploring the r/Democratic Curriculum

In this article the author seeks to present social studies educators with practical means for using Reddit—an emerging social media website—as a tool for providing students with a democratic education grounded in citizenship and multicultural education. The author focuses on ways in which Reddit offers students the opportunity to learn from experts, explore social studies content that may not be present within a traditional textbook, and voice their opinion in an online community that values equality and democracy among its members.     

The Social Studies Curriculum at West Point

This article illustrates the challenges of teaching curriculum within the guidelines of No Child Left Behind. Nine school teachers write and speak about their experiences, what influences their curriculum choices, and how they attempt to incorporate social studies in the elementary classroom. The teachers completed a background survey, wrote about their experiences, and talked about what they went through during a focus group discussion. Teachers believed that accountability measures taken at their schools had affected the amount of instructional time dedicated to social studies and that students’ access to civic knowledge and participatory education have been diminished along with the resources and professional development necessary to teach the subject competently.     

The Manifestation of Campbell's Law: Consequences of Eliminating of Social Studies From the Curriculum

The manifestation of Campbell's Law is examined in light of the current era in American public schools of high stakes testing inclusive of narrowed curriculums and teaching to the test. The decades-long practice of reducing instructional time of non-tested subjects, which includes social studies fundamentals, has resulted in a less informed citizenry. Social studies instruction promotes citizens who are able to make informed decisions that are inclusive of differentiating between facts, generalizations, and opinions without bias. The construction of individual viewpoints through a narrow lens without discrimination between opinions and historical facts is of concern today as Americans form opinions regarding controversial social issues and engage in social activism.     

Integrating Computational Thinking into Social Studies

Abstract

Computational Thinking (CT) has recently been addressed as one of the key skills for the twenty-first century. Integrating CT into different subject areas of K-12 education is also now widely accepted to improve the quality of instruction. In that sense, it is important to enable educators and researchers to recognize how to integrate computational thinking into K-12 classrooms and to study how students learn to think computationally in social studies courses. Besides, providing good practice on CT helps to develop common ground for the teaching of computational thinking in social studies subject areas. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for social studies teachers with regard to how CT can be integrated into K-12 classrooms for social studies. Moreover, a practical implementation idea is also suggested based on this framework. This paper is expected to provide an insight to social studies teachers who want to integrate CT into their classroom in the future and support them in teaching context.     

Recent Happenings in the Social Studies

This article details the “journey box” project process enacted by two elementary preservice teacher cohorts. Engaging in activities and projects that promote a sense of investment in not only consuming but producing historical narratives, preservice teachers potentially become interested in sharing this type of learning with their students.     

Values,Morals, and Religion in the Social Studies

Methods for facilitating students' standards-based consumer literacy are addressed via the use of problem solving with food and product labels. Fifth graders will be able to: (1) provide detailed analysis of food and product labels; (2) understand large themes, including production, distribution, and consumption; and (3) explore consumer decision-making skills.     

Game Theory in the Social Studies Classroom

This article explores using game theory in social studies classrooms as a heuristic to aid students in understanding strategic decision making. The authors provide examples of several simple games teachers can use. Next, we address how to help students design their own simple (2 × 2) games.     

Achieving Objectives in the Social Studies

To promote content literacy, students have to be actively involved. This article focuses on strategies that stimulate student interest by involving them with the content during pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading activities. these processes provide students with optimal opportunities for comprehension. The authors recommend the use of a variety of materials to supplement the social studies text, recoginizing, however, that the text, because of its breadth of knowledge will always play an important role.

The three instructional activities delineated reinforce the idea that social studies learning is promoted through literacy, just as language acts learning is developed through the social studies. All of the strategies include a form of graphic organizer. They are examples of ways teaches can adapt instruction to promote student interest in social studies. Social studies doesn't have to be boring!     

The City: A Social Studies Class

Teaching for economic justice can be challenging for upper elementary and middle school teachers. Many teachers may feel uncomfortable with the subject matter and thus avoid addressing sensitive social issues related to economic/financial inequities. This article describes how selected songs and works of visual art, expressions of social protest and social commentary from past and present, can be used appropriately as starting points for introducing the concept of economic justice. By using principles and strategies of Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE) and employing works of art as organizing centers for instruction, potentially sensitive social issues are simultaneously personalized and depersonalized. Music and art provide a relatively safe and comfortable means for teachers to promote student awareness and sensitivity towards economic injustices. Two sample lesson plans, the first for upper elementary students and the second for middle school students, are provided and discussed.     

Carl L. Becker and Secondary Social Studies

The author discusses how high school social studies teachers can have their students investigate local history topics and share their findings by producing Web pages, using a cooperative learning structure. The author discusses his firsthand experiences using this approach with high school students at Warrensburg High School. He emphasizes the need to rethink how technology is being used in the social studies classroom—in particular, by having students share their local history findings with others beyond the walls of the classroom rather than being passive learners with the Internet. In addition, he emphasizes the benefits of having students work together to collaboratively construct knowledge using technology—specifically, by using the PIES cooperative learning structure to ensure there is positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction among group members. Examples of Web pages, produced by his students using the PIES cooperative learning structure, are discussed in the article.     

Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Cultural Studies and Sociology

This essay proposes that sociology can learn from social theory developed in the humanities. In the face of recent challenges to sociological explanations of social outcomes (from rational choice and economic theory, cognitive psychological theories of intelligence, and communitarian social philosophy), social theory should specify the constitutive force of social signification. After identifying a key weakness in theoretical approaches currently available in sociology, the inadequacy of various conceptions of the social, I analyze three significant new works in cultural studies in order to sketch out alternative ways of defining and measuring the force of social signification. The essay concludes with an attempt to establish the basis of a dialogue between cultural studies and sociology.     

Cast from the Past: Using Screencasting in the Social Studies Classroom

This action research study followed a social studies educator as he developed and implemented screencasts in three ninth-grade world history classes. He focused on ways to increase student-centered learning and meeting the needs of broad ranges of learners. The study revealed an increase in student engagement, instruction in career and college technological skills, and facilitation of special education students’ needs. Few studies investigate the use of screencasting in social studies education. This study reveals the benefits and some of the drawbacks to using this technology in the social studies classroom.     

Community Study for Social Studies Teachers

The absence of social studies curriculum is a problem because it undermines the essential purposes of schooling: to prepare participatory, contributing members of a democratic society. In this article, we argue that integrating the literacy and social studies curricula is one meaningful way to support such civic-minded social studies instruction in elementary classrooms. As 2 teacher educators working with teacher candidates placed in their final clinical before student teaching, we saw the potential to model meaningful integration in literacy and social studies. In this 2-year qualitative study, we highlight how 14 teacher candidates engaged in the integration of literacy and social studies during their yearlong placement in a professional development school program and what factors influence their implementation of integration. Findings from this study revealed that effective integration required a strong vision of the complexities of integration and the importance of intentional planning. To get past the constraints of traditional compartmentalized scheduling, teacher candidates needed high-quality modeling of integration within their clinical placement. We offer implications for teacher educators and school/university partnerships.     

Powerful Social Studies Teaching With Poetry and Primary Sources

Given the current marginalization of the social studies within elementary classrooms it is vital that elementary educators seek integrative techniques that promote the social studies. This article explores one such example of integration taught by the authors within an elementary classroom. The three-day lesson taught to fifth-grade students aimed to teach a justice-oriented conception of citizenship through the use of historical biographies, found poetry, and primary sources. By the end of the third day, the students had used both general literacy practices (e.g. shared reading, visual literacy, close reading) and disciplinary literacy (e.g. sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating), demonstrating that integration can be a powerful means to teach the social studies while also maintaining the integrity of the disciplines.     

Progressivism in Social Studies Teaching

Contemporary global events of the War on Terror, the War on ISIS, and the United States contentious relationship with Muslim societies make it crucial to teach about Islam and Muslims in school. However, negative representations of Islam and Muslims often impede this process. Overcoming these challenges is critical for the development of compassionate and informed students who are capable of thinking critically in a complex and globalized world. This article shows the importance of addressing Muslim representation in the media, debunks myths about Islam and Muslims, and provides concrete classroom recommendations for teachers.     

A Challenge to Teachers of the Social Studies

When teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms portray history as an immutable sequence of certain facts, dates, and events, young learners tend to view the past, and by extension the future, as something fixed and inevitable. Learning about the past through investigating biographies can help counter this tendency by teaching students to recognize that individuals and groups have the agency to make history and shape the future. In this article, the author presents three instructional strategies in which learners make use of graphic organizers to investigate the historical contexts and chronologies of individuals' lives. Students learn how people have effected historical change and worked together to preserve continuity with the past. They also learn that the values and attitudes that motivated individuals and groups to act as they did were in large measure the result of historically specific social structures and institutional arrangements.     

Teaching Elementary School Social Studies Methods under edTPA

This article reports a self-study that analyzes my experience as a teacher educator navigating a turbulent educational landscape with the advent of edTPA. The data consist of my journal entries, the syllabi, handouts, work submitted by my students, and course evaluations. Data were analyzed by using an inductive process to describe how the edTPA compounds my work of teaching future elementary teachers for social studies for social justice. I discuss challenges associated with my teaching and the ways that I have grappled with these challenges. Implications for teacher educators are discussed, because we all must deal with important issues in the current era of accountability and testing.     

Social media,political expression,and participation in Confucian Asia

This study reviews and analyzes the published empirical research on the role of social media in promoting political expression and participation in Confucian Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to providing a narrative review of the literature, our analyses show clear numerical estimates of the relationships among different types of social media use (i.e., informational, expressive, relational, and recreational), political expression, and participation in Confucian states. The findings reiterate the importance of the expressive use of social media, showing its moderately strong relationship with participation. The findings also show weak positive relationships with informational and relational uses. We also examine the role of political systems in these relationships and conclude that the strongest relationships are in democratic states, followed by hybrid and authoritarian systems.