Essentials of Elementary Social Studies

William B. Russell III, Stewart Waters, Thomas N. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138107168, 9781138107076
• eBook ISBN: 9781351586801
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Essentials of Elementary Social Studies is a teacher-friendly text that provides comprehensive treatment of classroom planning, instruction, and strategies. Praised for its dynamic approaches and a writing style that is conversational, personal, and professional, this text enables and encourages teachers to effectively teach elementary social studies using creative and active learning strategies.

This fifth edition has been significantly refined with new and relevant topics and strategies needed for effectively teaching elementary social studies. New features include:

• In keeping with the book's emphasis on planning and teaching, an updated chapter on lesson plans. This chapter is designed to provide elementary teachers

with new classroom-tested lesson plans and includes two classroom-tested lessons for each grade level (K–6).

• An expanded chapter on planning. This provides additional discussion about long-range planning and includes examples of lesson plans with details to help students be better prepared.

• An updated chapter on technology designed to better prepare elementary teachers to effectively incorporate technology into social studies instruction. Attention is given to digital history, media literacy, teaching with film and music, popular apps and numerous other types of impactful technology.

• An expanded discussion of the Common Core Standards and C3 Framework and

how it affects teachers.

• An updated chapter titled "Experiencing Social Studies." This chapter focuses on

topics such as teaching with drama, role play, field trips, and service learning.

• A new eResource containing links to helpful websites and suggestions for further reading.

Chapter 1
Contemporary Elementary Social Studies

LOOKING AHEAD

The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to help you see why social studies is needed in the elementary school and (2) to suggest an overall approach to elementary social studies curriculum and teaching of the curriculum. To achieve these goals, you need to understand what social studies is and how it springs out of a need in society.

To understand social studies, you must first understand the purpose that it serves in the total school curriculum. That purpose, stated in simple form, is to develop good citizens for the democratic society in which we live. Becoming a good citizen is sometimes referred to as developing civic virtue, and there is, of course, a wide interpretation of exactly what either term really means. Even so, we can say that we want students to feel positive about themselves and have a desire to be positively contributing members of the various communities of which they are a part. It also means that students will develop the desire and the ability to be economically independent, to be informed about and involved in the decision making that goes on in their communities, and to be aware of and knowledgeable about the world around them. We want students to be free from prejudice and to be fair-minded in dealing with others, to believe in a system of justice and law, to take leadership roles, and to give reasoned and fair support for legitimately appointed or elected leaders.

Because society is changing rapidly, teaching social studies is even more of a challenge today than it was in the past. Teachers really need to think about different approaches to teaching social studies. They need to work more effectively with students who have different cultural backgrounds. They need to teach in ways that involve active learning, and to find approaches that focus on solving problems. The final section of this chapter addresses the goals of social studies as perceived by different groups. Social studies itself is a product of the changing society, prevailing approaches to its teaching, and the varying conception that social studies teachers have of its goals.

CAN YOU? DO YOU?

Can you…

• describe how the field of social studies has changed since you were in elementary school?
• explain how social studies has remained the same?
• explain the goals of social studies?

Do you…

• have an understanding of a problems approach to teaching social studies?
• have an idea of what a teacher needs to know about social studies?
• think of social studies simply as history and/or geography?

FOCUS ACTIVITY

Before reading this chapter, try the focus activity below.

Take a scrap piece of paper and draw a picture of social studies. Be sure to use images and not words. Share drawings with others. Discuss the details of the drawings. Compare drawings for substance with others. Does your drawing share common themes/elements with others’? If so, what are the themes/elements?

THE GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES

What do you need to know about social studies? The answer probably seems to be more than you do know or can learn. It is certainly more than you will be able to get from any textbook. As a teacher, you owe it to the generations of students that you teach to become mindfully, curiously, purposefully alive to them, to their world, to social studies as a thick endless blanket of stories about people and events, and to the values and rules needed for people to live together.

Social studies in the elementary school has most often been regarded as a subject that should be taught—but only if time allows. Priority time in the school day, of course, is given to the basic skill areas of reading, mathematics, and language. It has not been that social studies is considered unimportant, but that the basic skill areas are seen by society, by administrators, and by elementary teachers as “fundamentals” that have to be learned first. Important as language and mathematics skills may be, they are taught only because the students will need them to live in the social world.

The “back to basics” years of the 1970s and early 1980s had a strong adverse influence on elementary social studies. Separate studies by Gross (1977) and Hahn (1977) affirmed that social studies was disappearing in the early grades. According to research, this trend continues in today’s twenty-first–century classrooms (Barton, 2011; Bisland, 2011; Heafner & Fitchett, 2012; Russell, 2009). Some researchers suggest that social studies is embedded in curriculum and is taught as frequently now as in the past (Anderson, 2009; Holloway & Chiodo, 2009). This curriculum involves an emphasis on reading stories, poems, and plays, all of which have extensive social studies content. Then, too, the school day itself consists of a rich and complex series of social situations and problems, ranging from recess to lunch to the school bus.

Educators and politicians may soon have to wake up to the fact that effective social studies curriculum is basic and fundamental in the earliest schooling. Educational reform has not had any real impact on achievement in the basic skills areas, and schools have about run out of time to take from other content areas or activities during the school day. There simply should be more attention given to help students learn about themselves and their place in and responsibility to society. The National Council for the Social Studies Task Force on Early Childhood/Elementary Social Studies (2009) stated:

The purpose of elementary school social studies is to enable students to understand, participate in, and make informed decisions about their world. Social studies content allows young learners to explain relationships with other people, to institutions, and to the environment, and equips them with knowledge and understanding of the past. It provides them with skills for productive problem solving and decision making as well as for assessing issues and making thoughtful value judgments. Above all, it integrates these skills and understandings into a framework for responsible citizen participation locally, nationally, and globally. The teaching and learning processes within social studies are uniquely organized to develop these capacities, beginning with the youngest learners in our schools.

The Task Force goes on to say that the teaching and learning of social studies “in the elementary classroom should be meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. These qualities of powerful social studies learning are foundational to the development of students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions as participating citizens.”

FYI: “Decision making is the heart of social studies instruction” (Shirley Engle, 1960).

Barth (1993) has said that one of our most basic beliefs is that “Social Studies is citizenship education.” Hartoonan (1993) adds that “our work should be to illuminate the essential connection between social studies learning and democratic values” and thus be a “liberating force in the lives of citizens” (p. 59). Put another way, the two primary jobs of schools are to help society by producing effective, contributing citizens and to help the students lead happy lives in which they are enabled to achieve their potential. That is what social studies is all about, and why social studies is so needed in the elementary school.

Though social studies educators disagree as to priorities, the following list identifies those aims that are most often associated with social studies programs:

• Preparing responsible citizens for the nation, the state, and the local area.
• Preparing students who have the knowledge and skills in social studies needed for college.
• Developing awareness and understanding of contemporary social issues.
• Developing healthy self-concepts.
• Teaching the methods of social scientists.
• Motivating students to want to learn about the social studies.
• Developing the ability to solve problems and make decisions.
• Developing culturally responsive “global” citizens.

FYI: Democratic decision making is considered a foundation of the C3 Framework.

Whatever we do as teachers is certainly done for the present, but it has to be done with an eye to the future.

In trying to help you become good elementary social studies teachers, or good teachers of anything for that matter, it is important to get you to look at what happens if you succeed as teachers. The students you teach will, in due course, become adults themselves. They will obviously be living in a different kind of society, one that teachers must try to anticipate and prepare them for. However, beyond that, the kind of impact that teachers will have on students and the kind of people they become are critical outcomes of education. The following are just a few of the areas where teachers of elementary social studies will have had an impact when your students become adults:

• the jobs they have and the way they do their jobs;
• the way they feel about themselves;
• the way they handle responsibility;
• the way they treat other people;
• how they meet and resolve problems and difficulties;
• their motivation and overall attitudes;
• what they value and how they treat the things they value;
• how they relate to their heritage;
• how they relate to their environment;
• how they relate to and deal with people of other cultures, nationalities, and ethnic groups.

In each of these and in other areas where teachers influence students, it is safe to say that most of us would happily accept a broad variety of outcomes and still feel that we had made a positive impact in a student’s life. The question is, “Just how much in each area can we expect of ourselves?”

That is not a question that can be left unanswered. A good analogy is putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It is always easier to do a puzzle with a picture of what it is going to look like when complete. The same holds true for teaching. From an attitudinal standpoint, it is useful to envision students ten or fifteen years into the future and imagine them in the most positive light.

Goals and objectives should be the first and most important concerns of any teacher, especially any elementary social studies teacher. They complement one another. Goals are distant, immeasurable, and even unattainable. They give direction to our efforts and, if we are goal-oriented and goal-driven, we constantly work toward them, yet never reach a point when they are achieved. How can one reach the goal of becoming an effective problem solver, for example, or the even broader goal of being a good citizen? The essence of goals is that they describe the person we are constantly in the process of becoming (Moore et al., 1989).

Objectives, on the other hand, are short-term, attainable, often measurable, and very specific. We can know when we achieve them, so they become for us milestones and markers of our progress. Goals determine the directions we want to go, but the accomplishment of objectives lets us know that we are getting there.

In education, we generally begin planning by defining our goals. Once goals are set, we try to describe the specific teaching and learning outcomes (objectives) for short periods of instruction that will move students toward the goals. Goals without objectives remain as only dreams. Objectives without relationship to goals are purposeless. Objectives for social studies tend to be decided based on the specific content being taught and the group to which it is being taught. The broadest goals for the field have been centrally determined and defined in the United States by various groups, given authority by still larger organizations. Regardless of the group, throughout this century and the next, social studies has and will be invariably linked to goals of citizenship education. The frameworks developed in the reports of the various commissions, task forces, and committees have served as models for textbook curricula and for those developed for state and local school districts. Reports impacting elementary school social studies in the twenty-first century include the National Council for the Social Studies Task Force Creating Effective Citizens (2001), the National Council for the Social Studies Task Force on Early Childhood/Elementary Social Studies (2009), and the Task Force of the National Commission on the Social Studies (1989).

The introductory statement of the goals section of the report of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Task Force on Creating Effective Citizens (2001) set a problem-solving focus for the social studies and emphasized thinking skills. The Task Force stated the students should have the skills necessary to “solve real problems in their school, the community, our nation, and the world.” Additionally, effective citizens should use “effective decision-making and problem-solving skills in public and private life.” The responsibility of social studies is to prepare young people to identify, understand, and work to solve problems of an interdependent world.

The NCSS Task Force on Early Childhood/Elementary Social Studies (2009) echoed that teaching and learning elementary social studies should be “meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active.” Additio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• 1 Contemporary Elementary Social Studies
• 2 Social Studies Curriculum
• 3 Character Education and the Development of Attitudes, Values, and Decision Making
• 4 Planning Social Studies Instruction
• 5 Assessment and Evaluation
• 6 Reading and Writing in Social Studies
• 7 Social Studies and Diverse Learners
• 8 Social Studies and the Acquisition of Skills
• 9 Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• 10 Experiencing Social Studies
• 11 Technology and Media in Social Studies
• 12 Lesson Plans for Elementary Social Studies
• References
• Index
• About the Authors