Bringing Social Studies alive for Elementary Education Majors

Abstract

NCSS, and other organizations concerned with civic education have announced, researched and reported that social studies is one of the least taught core four subjects in elementary school. As Elementary Education majors are weeded, screened, tested, and valued based upon literacy and numeracy skills, social studies is pushed by schools facing state accountability sanctions to the back of the priority list. Yet we have all gathered civics is crucial, and imperative in conjunction with the other four identified key social studies inquiry areas. The NCSS, and New York State have charged a new course, with the C3 (College, career and civics life) standards at the national level, and the new New York State Common Core Learning Standards aligned social studies frameworks, designed to refresh the New York State 2001 state learning standards frameworks. While the legislation, Commissioner’s regulations, and secondary testing elements of the Regents exams in Global History and Geography as well as the United States History and Geography exams weigh heavily on secondary teachers, elementary teachers found conflict with the demands of ELA and math, and limited time during the day. Further, Elementary Education majors, when surveyed, found social studies one of the least interesting subjects, and often were, in their own opinions, unprepared to teach classes after the General Education courses required for a bachelor's degree. This research is based on action research of my own instruction into the Inquiry Design Method (IDM), pioneered by the C3 teachers. Essentially, the practice asks teachers to engage their students in “big ideas” and “big questions” by deep diving into events and happenings which dramatically impact the narrative created for social studies. I take this a step further, and ask my students in methods classes to focus on the love of investigation. Over the course of the semester, we have examined how the social studies K-6 frameworks intersect with other disciplines, and their cross curricular integration and purpose. I describe this work in my now under contract work Engaging the Citizenry (Edumatch 2022). As a class we investigate centers, designed around the five senses. We examine how family histories are part of the “Grand narrative” of the past. We implemented a living history day comparing tools, cooking, and shelter of different time periods from the Paleolithic to the Civil War. As a class, we remember that subjects should not be isolated, and that the “core four” create the scaffold for every learning experience each student has. In this day and age of information overload, we stop, and we reflect on critical questions: Why do you think? What do you wonder? How can we investigate?