Apps-olutely Perfect! Apps to Support Common Core in the History/Social Studies Classroom

The inclusion of technology in the classroom is an increasingly important feature of effective instruction. The implementation of Common Core Standards in many states also requires teachers to consider new pedagogical strategies to support meaningful learning. This article explores the intersection between technology demands and curricular change by examining apps that can be used to support Common Core State Standards instruction in history/social studies. Specifically, the authors highlight several apps that they presented at a professional development workshop for six to twelve history/social studies teachers and discuss the teachers' feedback regarding the strengths and limitations of apps to support their instruction. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations for history/social studies teachers using apps in the classroom are provided.     

Social Justice and the Capabilities Approach: Seeking a Global Blueprint for the EPAS

The concept of social justice shapes several of the competencies and practice behaviors of the Council of Social Work Education’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Furthermore, a global perspective guides the social work profession and influences its educational programs. A number of social work scholars have adopted the capabilities approach, as defined by economist Amartya Sen and political scientist Martha Nussbaum, as a globally relevant social justice framework. This article builds on this scholarship, suggesting that the capabilities approach provides a blueprint to rethink and conceptualize the EPAS social justice pedagogy in the global context. Teaching illustrations integrating the capabilities approach in an EPAS curriculum are offered.     

Reframing a Social Studies Methods Course: Preparing Elementary Teacher Candidates for the Common Core

The emphasis on disciplinary literacy skills embedded within the Common Core State Standards requires a shift in preparing teachers to explicitly address the craft of reading and writing within social studies instruction. As teacher educators, we think it is imperative to understand the ways in which our teacher candidates integrate literacy within their social studies instruction and strive to modify our own practices to support their needs. Using practitioner research, we share the instructional changes we made to better prepare teacher candidates to meet the standards, and we consider how our teacher candidates responded to those changes in their work. Our implications suggest research-based practices must be utilized in social studies methods courses while maintaining an emphasis on key historical thinking skills. Such practices include using essential questions to guide deeper thinking, integrating appropriately modified informational texts, developing skills in close reading, using graphic organizers, and emphasizing content integration.     

Rethinking Social Work's Interpretation of ‘Environmental Justice’: From Local to Global

This article challenges social workers to expand their understanding of the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective and become more active in addressing current environmental crises. Although social work scholars have begun to explore the relationship between social work and the natural and built environment and professional organizations mandate the integration of this content into practice and education, these goals remain unrealized, particularly in the USA. To address these issues more effectively, social work educators will need to distinguish between understanding persons in their environment and environmentalism, and between environmentalism and environmental justice. This article analyzes the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the USA and other nations and its relationship to environmental racism. It presents a case study of a local environmental justice effort to demonstrate how social workers can use their knowledge and skills to make important contributions to environmental justice and sustainability. It also discusses the potential of ‘green social work’ and transformative learning theory as tools to help social work educators better equip students to make strategic alliances across professions, disciplines, and systems to address contemporary environmental crises.     

Education for Social Work in the Administration of Justice

In 1965 the School of Community Service and Public Affairs at the University of Oregon established a team of professors to examine the role that undergraduate social work education might play in the administration of justice field The program and curriculum development model that emerged from this effort over a period of six years is summarized in this paper. The design relies heavily on collaboration and mutual acceptance of competence between higher education and the juvenile and criminal justice systems.     

Social Justice,Social Policy,and Social Work

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the models underlying the conceptualization of social work functions affect the costs of integrating policy issues into practice, and, therefore, the probability that social justice goals will be pursued. An inclusive approach to policy design is seen as lowering those costs. The nature of the costs and how they vary between the models is discussed.     

Including Disability in the Social Work Core Curriculum: A Compelling Argument

In light of an impending review of the Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (2012), alongside imminent service system changes associated with the rollout in Australia of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), this article argues for urgent inclusion of disability in the Australian social work core curriculum. Although increased disability content has been debated previously, the implications of the NDIS policies for changes to the mainstream services system in Australia offer compelling reasons for revision. Recommended is a comprehensive review of how disability is presented in curriculum and development of new guidelines for essential core curriculum content.     

A High School Course in Sociology

Because of the importance that geography plays in our understanding of economics, history, and politics, it has been argued that the subject should be taught to students beginning at the early elementary level, usually focusing on the family unit and local communities. However, when the proper technology tools and strategies are used, students at the kindergarten level can learn more complex concepts of geography and other social studies ideas and Common Core Standards. This article is a narrative about how a kindergarten teacher's discovery of “website widgets” brought the world to her classroom while helping her students learn important social studies knowledge and skills.     

A Review of Social Justice and Diversity Content in Diversity Course Syllabi

Given United State's leading position among international social work organizations, it is important that its standards of practice for diversity in social work education are examined. Using a nationwide sample of syllabi (N = 174) in the United States, the purpose of this study is to measure the extent to which various facets of diversity and social justice are incorporated into social work course syllabi. The study further assesses whether social justice content is integrated into diversity courses according to the Council on Social Work Education's 2001 and 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). The goal is to better understand program adherence to diversity objects designed for social work education curriculum. An examination of course titles, syllabi content, and course objectives revealed a broad array of identified topics; however, terms such as culture/multicultural (79.2%), race (71.7%), diversity (68.2%), ethnicity (63.6%), gender (60.1%), oppression (57.8%), and gay/lesbian (56.1%) were addressed with greater frequency across all syllabi. In an assessment of adherence to 2001 and 2008 EPAS among syllabi, interrater agreement with the use of Kappa revealed modest agreement. Greater transparency in connecting EPAS with diversity course syllabi is an important step in the requirement to improve capability across programs. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Social Justice and the Research Curriculum

This article presents a study of justice as a concept and value in the research curriculum. Twelve researchers and research instructors were asked to define justice, discuss how it informed their work, and indicate whether a justice focus required special topics, theories, or methods. The conceptual literature on justice, research textbooks, and syllabi were reviewed. Most respondents defined justice broadly, and did not perceive certain topics, theories, or methods as more relevant to justice than others. Further, justice was not systematically discussed in classes, syllabi, and textbooks. Questions for future investigation and implications for social work educators are discussed.     

Reducing bias through indirect social contact: assessing the impact of student involvement with faculty-led research on unauthorized immigration

This paper explores how working on a faculty-led research project influenced the views of Master of Social Work students concerning unauthorized immigrants. Five graduate assistants worked for one year with two faculty members and one doctoral student to code data from interviews with social workers at immigrant-serving organizations in South Carolina. The master’s students then reflected on what they learned from participating in data analysis tasks, indicating that the experience had further sensitized them to the social justice concerns confronting unauthorized immigrants. Drawing on social contact theory, we argue that student participation in faculty-led research can provide a form of indirect social exposure to other groups, which reduce bias, and suggest that such experiences be included in how educators conceptualize the implicit curriculum in schools of social work.     

Social Work,Politics, and Social Policy Education: Applying a Multidimensional Framework of Power

The call to promote social justice sets the social work profession in a political context. In an effort to enhance social workers’ preparedness to engage in political advocacy, this article calls on educators to integrate a broad theoretical understanding of power into social policy curricula. We suggest the use of a multidimensional conceptualization of power that emphasizes mechanisms of decision making, agenda control, and attitude formation. We then apply these mechanisms to demonstrate how two prominent features of contemporary politics—party polarization and racially biased attitudes—affect the ability of social workers to influence policy. Finally, we suggest content that social work educators can integrate to prepare future social workers to engage in strategic and effective social justice advocacy.     

Developing a Vision for the Common Core Classroom: What Does Elementary Social Studies Look Like?

In each edition of their book Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools, Levstik and Barton (2011) encourage us to take a mental journey to imagine classrooms where students regularly “do history” (xi). The social studies experiences that many educators envision for elementary classrooms include teaching students to frame questions, read for information, and organize primary and secondary sources to share their knowledge with classmates. NCSS provides an infrastructure for social studies goals in which knowledge, skills and attitudes are developed in meaningful social studies lessons. When viewed through the lens of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (CCSS ELA), we recognize the fundamental nature of aligning social studies standards with literacy strategies for elementary teaching and learning. The purpose of this article is to examine the usefulness of CCSS ELA for teaching elementary social studies. The authors share a vision for the “common core classroom” that includes a range of literacy strategies for teaching standards-based social studies.     

Elementary Social Studies Content Integration in CCLS: An Analysis of Content Integration

While the primary focus of the Common Core Learning Standards is in improving literacy and math, elements of Social Studies topics and skills are emphasized. Primary source analysis and understanding multiple perspectives are just two examples. This article is grounded in a qualitative analysis of integrated instruction in two elementary classrooms. Through content analysis of curriculum and policy documents, I argue that current policy has made gains in elementary Social Studies instruction, but significantly more work must be done to elevate the subject to a true core content area. Data sources for this study were classroom observations, teacher interviews, and document analysis. Classrooms involved in this study utilized resources, as determined by the classroom teacher, to integrate literacy instruction with Social Studies concepts and skills. The purpose of this study was to identify progress made in recent policy toward practical application of Social Studies instruction. I also identify next steps in increasing and improving elementary Social Studies instruction. This study sought to guide the evolution of policy.     

Environmental Sustainability and Social Work: A Rural Australian Evaluation of Incorporating Eco-Social Work in Field Education

Climate change poses significant threat to the wellbeing of global society. Addressing this change has as yet generated no fixed blueprint for social work practice and education. This paper reports on a formative evaluation of one Australian initiative to address this transformative opening in social work field education. Prompted by service users' and workers' experience of the impact of drought, a rurally located social work course team amended the field education curriculum to include a focus on Environment and Sustainability. This learning goal was added to the existing learning goals derived from the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) Practice Standards. Students and field supervisors were surveyed on their experience of meeting this new learning goal. While most expressed confidence in understanding the concepts involved, they clearly lacked assurance in interpreting these in practice encounters. Considering their qualitative input suggests that this topic is making a transition from being on the margins of social work to becoming mainstream. Their open-ended responses indicate that the incorporation of environmental sustainability into practice is at a threshold stage of development. Further enactment of eco-social work at the local level is concluded to be supported by using a transformative learning framework in facilitating critical reflection and collaborative dialogue for effective change.     

Developing an Undergraduate Internship Program in Applied Sociology

In this paper, I describe the steps taken to develop an undergraduate internship program in applied sociology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I begin with an introduction to the internship program, including examples of student projects. I discuss the program's goals and leadership and the structure of the program, including scheduling, credit hours, prerequisites, admission requirements, project supervision, and curriculum. Afterward, I outline how internship opportunities were identified and describe the continued coordination of the internship program. I end with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the program.     

The Durham Family Initiative: a preventive system of care

This article describes the Durham Family Initiative (DFI), an innovative effort to bring together child welfare and juvenile justice systems to reach DFI's goal of reducing the child abuse rate in Durham, North Carolina, by 50% within the next 10 years. DFI will follow principles of a preventive system of care (PSoC), which focuses on nurturing the healthy parent-child relationship. A community collaborative of government agency directors has signed a memorandum of agreement to implement the PSoC principles. The researchers will use multiple methods to evaluate DFI's efficacy.     

Social Work Education's Role in Addressing People and a Planet at Risk

As the nature of the earth's ecological crisis becomes increasingly dire and impossible to ignore and as global concern continues to increase, social work, with its investment in issues of justice and its commitment to a person-in-environment perspective, needs to more aggressively evaluate its place in this crisis. This paper presents a study designed to explore US social work students' attitudes, interests in, and practices related to the environment, as well as their perceptions of the place for environmental issues in the social work curriculum. This study's findings suggest that social work students' attitudes toward the environment are generally consonant with those of the US population, and that there is strong interest in enhancing the amount and scope of exposure to environmental issues in the social work curriculum. A sizable majority of all social work students surveyed view environmental justice as an important aspect of social justice and a viable area of concern for social workers, and they expressed an interest in seeing more content on environmental justice in social work education. Suggestions for integrating this content into the curriculum via inter- and trans-disciplinary, and service-learning approaches are discussed.     

A Pedagogical Model for Teaching Racial Justice in Social Work Education

In the current U.S. sociopolitical climate marked by rising racial tension and civil unrest, social work students and educators are engaged in dialogues throughout the country regarding the role of the profession in combating injustice. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as well as numerous high-profile police shootings of unarmed Black men prompted the exploration of praxis-based pedagogical approaches in social work education. This article provides an overview of a cocurricular student orientation developed by a group of social work students and educators in an effort to promote racial justice. Through the emergent planning process, principles of critical race theory and liberation theory were infused throughout the orientation event and related curriculum content.     

III. Implications of the Report of the Commission on the Social Studies of the American Historical Association

In a world that is, on the one hand, determined to sustain distinct national and group identities and, on the other hand, becoming increasingly globalized, interconnected and interdependent, social studies educators are regularly faced with the challenge of supporting diversity, creating a unified national community, and promoting global perspectives through education. This paper explores how the Singapore education system addresses these disparate goals through its national social studies curriculum for secondary schools, particularly through its use of international case studies. The Singapore social studies curriculum also serves as an interesting case study of how a national social studies curriculum has been shifted away from an exclusive focus on a nation-centric paradigm to one that is more globally oriented in nature, while still being firmly anchored to the nation-state and its priorites.