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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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!     

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.     

Historical Experience and the Haitian Revolution in the History Classroom

The article examines a mainstream curricular unit on the Haitian Revolution, centered on a culminating role-play activity. Cultural studies, subaltern studies, and hermeneutics are applied as theoretical frameworks to read the curriculum unit and its activities. These theoretical lenses sharpen an understanding of what it means to experience history in the classroom. These lenses are used to consider the political relations of power within the historical moment being studied and the political notions of power within the production of historical knowledge itself. The author conducts an analysis of the epistemological and hermeneutic problem spaces within this curriculum, with particular attention to how this curriculum unit might be translated into an urban school setting that accounts for marginalized student positions.     

Culturally Responsive Teaching in an Oglala Lakota Classroom

In response to the widening academic achievement gap between Native American students and other students in the United States, a culturally responsive approach was used in a Native American social studies class with positive results. Eighth-grade Oglala Lakota students in an American History classroom experienced a unit infused with lessons that highlighted Native American culture, history, and values. Students' knowledge, skills, and culture were used as frames of reference for the teacher, enabling students to personally engage with the content and making learning more meaningful. By incorporating culturally responsive teaching practices into the social studies curriculum, teachers not only give students the opportunity to come face to face with multiple perspectives but students are able to come face to face with their own ancestors, bringing history home, and bringing it to life.     

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.     

Utilizing Social Media to Promote Civic Engagement in the Social Studies Classroom

The United States of America's government relies on the people. Unfortunately, research illuminates a gradual decline in the civic and political participation among youth, ages 18-29, in the U.S. since the 1970s. While the decline takes shape in multiple forms other than voting, this article argues that teachers can improve students' civic engagement through the aide of social media. In order to achieve that goal, the article begins by defining civic engagement, especially within context of a digital age. Then describes three prominent classroom techniques for using social media found in the literature: micro-blogging, backchanneling, and virtual social networks. Finally, the article provides classroom-tested examples of how teachers can utilize the three techniques to promote the kind of civic and political engagement first defined.     

Elementary ELA/Social Studies Integration: Challenges and Limitations

Adding instructional time and holding teachers accountable for teaching social studies are touted as practical, logical steps toward reforming the age-old tradition of marginalization. This qualitative case study of an urban elementary school, examines how nine teachers and one administrator enacted district reforms that added 45 minutes to the instructional day and implemented a series of formative and summative assessments. Each participant was treated as a particular case and a within-case analysis was used. Through classroom observations, interviews, time journals, and official school documents, I describe underlying perceptions and priorities that were barriers to any positive impact time or testing might have afforded social studies. Findings suggest that scheduled or mandated ELA/social studies integration does not always materialize and there are reasons for this gap.     

Literature as the Guide to History

The author presents a content integration that focuses on social studies and science knowledge and skills. The idea of using folk crafts to help elementary students learn social studies extends from John Dewey's laboratory school to the twenty-first century. Meaningful content is applied to skills, such as blacksmithing, found in the community, and students make connections between school knowledge and their lives outside of school. In this activity, blacksmithing helped students integrate ideas from multiple academic subjects, incorporating content from the social sciences and humanities. The guest content expert with a specialized knowledge base played a large role in making this experience occur for the students and teachers.     

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.     

Engaging Geography at Every Street Corner: Using Place-Names as Critical Heuristic in Social Studies

In this article I explore an often overlooked feature of everyday life that can serve as a powerful heuristic for students to engage history and geograhpy critically: everyday place-names. Drawing on scholarship in critical toponymy, I explore how the city-text—the past as it is overlaid on top of the geography of the community through place-names—serves to commemorate particular histories that are often simultaneously exclusionary and taken-for-granted. Outlining three of the city-text's primary features—its unconventional narrative structure that emphasizes a worldview, its existence as a manifestation of state control over commemoration in the community, and its exclusive focus on heroism—I suggest that social studies classrooms be sites from which students critically engage the everyday city-texts of their own communities as a way of fostering critical thinking skills and commitments to historical and geographic critique.     

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.     

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.     

Myth,Romance, Philosophizing,and Irony,and the Social Studies Curriculum

Sixth-grade students are challenged in understanding social studies content relevant to particular contexts, then connecting the content and context to their contemporary lives while communicating new knowledge to peers and teachers. Using political cartoons published after September 11, 2001, one sixth-grade social studies teacher designed probing questions and developed meaningful learning experiences relating historical events to current concerns of the students supplementing their curriculum and textbook. Through verbal and written interactions, the students demonstrated in-depth understanding of September 11, 2001, and consequential global ramifications. Subsequently, this teacher used the same strategy to engage learners in additional historical events effectively integrating social studies and literacy to introduce conflict analysis, increase critical thinking, expand text connections, and enhance literacy skills.