Social Studies Today

Research and Practice

Walter C. Parker, Walter C. Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317538257
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science

Social Studies Today will help educators—teachers, curriculum specialists, and researchers—think deeply about contemporary social studies education. More than simply learning about key topics, this collection invites readers to think through some of the most relevant, dynamic, and challenging questions animating social studies education today.

With 12 new chapters highlighting recent developments in the field, the second edition features the work of major scholars such as James Banks, Diana Hess, Joel Westheimer, Meira Levinson, Sam Wineburg, Beth Rubin, Keith Barton, Margaret Crocco, and more. Each chapter tackles a specific question on issues such as the difficulties of teaching historical thinking in the classroom, responding to high-stakes testing, teaching patriotism, judging the credibility of Internet sources, and teaching with film and geospatial technologies.

Accessible, compelling, and practical, these chapters—full of rich examples and illustrations—showcase some of the most original thinking in the field, and offer pre- and in-service teachers alike a panoramic window on social studies curricula and instruction and new ways to improve them.

Walter C. Parker is Professor and Chair of Social Studies Education and (by courtesy) Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle.

1 Social Studies Education eC21

Walter C. Parker

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726885-2

Social studies is at the center of a good school curriculum because it is where students learn to see and interpret the world—its peoples, places, cultures, systems, and problems; its dreams and calamities—now and long ago. In social studies lessons and units of study, students don’t simply experience the world but are helped deliberately to understand it, to care for it, to think deeply and critically about it, and to take their place on the public stage. This, at any rate, is the goal.

It matters, for without social understanding, there can be no wisdom. Good judgment has always relied on the long view; historical understanding. This involves long-term thinking and long-term responsibility alongside an intimate knowledge of particulars. So it is with the other social literacies: without geographic understanding there can be no cultural or environmental intelligence; without economic understanding, no sane use of resources; without political understanding, no We The People, no freedom, and no common good; and without these in combination, no inventive work to build a just and sustainable society, both locally and globally.

One thing is clear: such wisdom cannot be achieved by a handful of courses in a middle or high school curriculum. Social studies needs to be set deeply into the school curriculum from the earliest grades. What results is a snowball effect: knowledge growing each year on its own momentum, empowering students with each passing year. I can remember the teachers at my junior high school in Colorado, thinking that those of us who came from Lowell Elementary School were the smart kids. We were certainly not the smart kids, just ordinary working- and middle-class children who were lucky enough to have been taught social studies daily and with good materials since kindergarten. Consequently, we knew quite a lot about the world and, for this reason, were better able (and therefore more willing) to learn new material.

Educational researchers dub this the Matthew Effect¹ after that section in the biblical Book of Matthew where we read that the rich get richer and the poor poorer. The rich get richer because they can invest their surplus—what they’re not spending to live—thereby earning still more, which they reinvest, and so on, becoming more wealthy. The Matthew Effect in education is based on the fact that prior knowledge is a powerful predictor of future learning. The knowledge and skills children already possess—the investment in learning that already has been made—enables them to learn still more. Knowledgeable students become more knowledgeable because their prior knowledge serves as a fertile seedbed in which additional knowledge can take root and thrive. Switching metaphors, knowledgeable students are building a house atop a foundation that already has been laid. This is much easier than building the house at the same time they are struggling to lay its foundation. Here’s the point: not having access to social studies learning from the earliest levels of schooling is disabling intellectually and socially.

The Book's Purpose

The purpose of this book is to help teachers, school leaders, curriculum workers, policymakers, and scholars think freshly and critically about social studies education. More than thinking about it, however, the book’s purpose is to engage readers in thinking through some of the most intriguing questions that animate social studies education today, and to do so with the help of some of the field’s top scholars. While the book’s setting is largely the United States, I believe it can be useful elsewhere, too, as a contrast, a comparison, and a reflective mirror. Some of the most important questions are hardly unique to any one country.

Why, for example, do so few middle and high school history teachers engage their students in actually doing historical work: making, supporting, and evaluating claims about historical events and forces? Is the teacher’s own historical knowledge too spotty for that? Is the school’s climate stifling? Are students simply not “ready” for the intellectual challenge of interrogating a thesis or constructing one of their own? Are they able only to listen to adults tell them a historical narrative? Furthermore, and connecting school learning to democratic citizenship, aren’t there serious consequences for democracy if high school graduates haven’t learned to distinguish between a claim that is supported by evidence, on the one hand, and one told to them by an authority figure, whether a teacher, pastor, or politician?

Consider a second question, this one involving the youngest students. Is there really a need to teach about cultural universals in the primary grades? It seems obvious that children already know so much about food, shelter, and clothing simply as a consequence of being alive—eating pizza, living in an apartment, wearing shoes and socks—that taking precious school time for it is redundant. Or, is their knowledge of these powerful concepts frail and loaded with misconceptions (e.g., people eat food because they’re hungry; they wear clothes because it’s cold), hardly the foundation needed to support later learning?

Each one of the book’s chapters opens a unique window on the social studies education scene early in the twenty-first century: eC21. “eC21” draws on Raymond Williams’ system for historical dating where e, m, and l designate the early, middle, and late thirds of a century. Williams, who had an original analytic mind, wrote Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. ² In that book, he grappled with more than 100 terms that are central to our thinking but fundamentally ambiguous. They are always in flux and, because they are important, subject to argument, for example, history, culture, educated, science, ideology, and democracy. Williams didn’t take these concepts at face value. He didn’t try simply to define them; he tried to get to the bottom of them and to place them in historical context.

His work inspired the book you have in your hands in a basic way: I wanted to present an array of contemporary thinking about social studies education so that readers could deepen their understanding of this field but also so they could look critically at how contemporary scholars are thinking and writing about social studies today in its various aspects. It is a book about social studies education, but it is also a book about how we construct social studies education, again and again, by enacting it, describing it, and debating its means and ends. Social studies is the keyword of this book. It is a concept, a social construct. It is human-made like a pyramid, not natural like a tree; its meanings change with time, place, and political context. Social studies education is contingent, buffeted by social forces, and it reflects the anxieties, power dynamics, and “culture wars” of the day.

Contentious Curricula

The term “social studies” means different things to different people. Generally, in the United States today it connotes a loose federation of social science courses: history (world, national, and state), geography, government, economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. “Social Studies,” as such, is the name of a department in middle and high schools—the department that houses courses with names like these—and of a subject in primary schools. In the latter, “social studies” is an amalgamation of these social science disciplines and is thereby distinct from two other amalgamations found in the primary school curriculum: “science” (biology + geology + physics, etc.) and “math” (arithmetic + algebra + geometry, etc.) Reading, writing, speaking, and listening—together “language arts”—are another amalgamation. The first four of the social science disciplines (history, geography, government, economics) are dominant in eC21, which is a consequence of tradition, interest group politics (historians are better organized and bigger than the others), and to some extent the standards and accountability movement that began in lC20. That movement narrowed the curriculum in some communities to the point where social studies was edged to the sidelines in favor of still greater attention to literacy and math instruction and, because of current anxieties about economic and military competitiveness, science and technology.

Defenders of the loose federation approach have sought foremost to maintain the disciplinary integrity of each of the social sciences. At its best, this approach gave birth to the “inquiry” teaching movement in social studies (still much revered if scarcely practiced). That movement aimed to help students reconstruct, by their own intellectual efforts, the central concepts and generalizations of a discipline.³ At its worst, however, the approach made more than a few scholars into rigid disciplinarians guarding the disciplinary gates and defending what they think is disciplinary purity from polluters who would scramble the disciplines into an interdisciplinary omelet. Here, the integrity of an individual scholarly discipline, often history (or in math, algebra, or in science, physics), is held to be superior to competitors (e.g., geography) and to the jumble the subject is believed to become amid the pressures of curriculum enactment in schools: not history, algebra, and physics but “social studies,” “math,” and “science.”⁴ Neo-conservative federationists in the 1980s invented the hyphenated terms “history-social studies” and “history-social science” to draw a line between the egg and the omelet. One can imagine the result were this practice to be extended to the other federations, resulting in the names “algebra-math” and “physics-science.”

In contrast to social studies as a federation of the several social sciences, there stands another meaning that is less attached to disciplinary purity than to the development of students as enlightened and engaged democratic citizens. This approach is sometimes called “social education.”⁵ It defines social studies as “the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence”⁶: not the study of the social sciences for their own sakes, note, but for a civic purpose. Its aim is enlightened political engagement, we could say, or informed civic action. Its strategy is to combat idiocy, by which the ancient Greeks meant selfishness and inattention to public issues, and to nurture civic intelligence. This is a goal rooted in republican political thought, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. Its thesis is that neither humans nor their communities mature properly until individuals meet the challenge of puberty, which to the Greeks meant becoming public persons. These are people who see freedom and community not as opposites but as interdependent. They fight for others’ rights as well as their own. As Aristotle wrote, “individuals are so many parts all equally depending on the whole which alone can bring self-sufficiency.”⁷ Idiots are idiotic because they are ignorant of this insight and indifferent to the conditions and contexts of their own freedom. Idiots do not take part in public life; they do not have a public life. In this sense, idiots are immature in the most fundamental way. Their lives are out of balance, disoriented, untethered, and unrealized. For this reason, they are a threat not only to themselves but to the community.⁸

The two models, social science and social education, overlap and exist in tension with one another. It is a useful, productive tension, like others in education (depth/breadth, knowing/doing, child/curriculum). Consequently, much better than choosing between the two is to intersect them artfully, maintaining each as a corrective and challenge to the other. The first model seems to predominate in the secondary school in eC21 while the second has more influence in the elementary school. But, does it matter?

Does it matter which model or what manner of hybrid a school decides to enact? On at least one level it does not. What matters more is that on the lived, everyday ground of educational practice what teachers do behind classroom doors largely determines the curriculum students actually receive and the sense they make of it. This is not to say teachers work in a vacuum; they don’t. They are subject to national and local policies, the expectations of the communities in which their schools are embedded, the myriad social forces that bear down on schools and teachers, and the intelligence, strength, and style of building leadership. Despite these, teachers do have agency: their choices matter, as does what they know (their reading habits, news sources, past learning, and opportunities for continuing professional development). But no matter which of the two models is enacted, social studies is likely to be boring to many students, especially in secondary schools; it is likely to be superficial rather than penetrating, and to feel irrelevant to many students. Whatever the model, coverage of a broad mass of subject matter alongside classroom control of more-or-less disengaged and potentially misbehaving students are two tacit purposes of instruction that continue to haunt the field to its bones.

Who Decides the Social Studies Curriculum?

Public schools are technologies for creating persons of particular kinds. Nations everywhere use schools for this purpose: to form subjects and citizens with particular identities, imaginations, and abilities in relation to the government, ethnic groups, civil society, church, market, family, and strangers. Schools are not asked simply to instill knowledge and skills but to “make up people.”⁹ Political scientists know this people-making process as political socialization: the largely unconscious activity of reproducing people who embody the dominant social norms, customs, beliefs, and institutions. But educators, political leaders, and parents are concerned to intervene in history and intentionally to shape society’s future, that is, they are concerned with conscious social production. Their currency is not description and explanation, as with political scientists, but planning and prescription: renewal, improvement, transformation, liberation, social justice, cultural restoration, and so forth. They don’t merely observe schooling, they create it. In doing so they specify not only what students will learn but what sorts of people they will become: responsible, knowledgeable, loyal, compliant, critical, religious, secular, competitive, collaborative, law-abiding, caring, and so forth. The list is long. It is often contradictory and always contentious.¹⁰

For this reason, public schools have been “ground zero” in the culture wars. “The struggles for the control of the schools,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1928,

are among the bitterest political struggles which now divide the nations.[. . .] Wherever two or more groups within a state differ in religion, or in language and in nationality, the immediate concern of each group is to use the schools to preserve its own faith and tradition. For it is in the school that the child is drawn towards or drawn away from the religion and the patriotism of its parents.¹¹

Witness the epic battles over the desegregation of schools, the teaching of evolution, and the multiple ways of telling America’s story, from Columbus’s expedition to today’s disputes over immigration policy. At the core of many controversies in social studies education is disagreement about the relationship between education and society: should schools serve the status quo or transform it? This is an enormously important question and the subject of the chapter that follows this introduction. Suffice it to say that there are roughly three responses to this question, and they fall on the political left, right, and center. On both the right and left are rather clear visions of society, and schools are “technologies” (in the sense used earlier) for realizing them. On the right, students are to be made into people who serve the current social order and thrive on its terms. On the left, students are to be made into people who change it in order to create a more just and vibrant democracy, one that would include the economy rather than leaving it in the hands of the market. In the center is the Deweyan positio...