4 C3 Lenses

Activity:

Below are the four lenses for the national social studies framework. Choose 1 of the 4 lenses - close read the section - and translate the long paragraph into an easy to understand synopsis.

Civics

• In a constitutional democracy with a strong civil society, civic engagement requires deliberating with others and participating in civic and democratic processes. People demonstrate civic engagement when they address public problems collaboratively and when they maintain, strengthen, and improve communities and societies. Thus, civics is, in part, the study of how people participate in governing society. Civics is not limited to the study of politics and society; it also encompasses deliberation and participation in classrooms and schools, neighborhoods, groups, and organizations. In civics, students learn to contribute appropriately to public deliberations by citing evidence and explaining why their favored processes and outcomes are constitutional, legal, fair, practical, and/or effective. Their contributions may take many forms, ranging from personal testimony to abstract arguments. They also learn how to participate in other ways through voting, volunteering, and joining with others to take action to improve society. Civics enables students not only to study how others participate, but also to practice participating and taking action themselves.

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Economics

• Economic decision-making requires that students have a keen understanding of the ways in which individuals, businesses, governments, and societies make decisions to allocate labor, capital, and natural resources among alternative uses. This economic reasoning process involves consideration of costs and benefits with the ultimate goal of making decisions that will enable individuals and societies to be as well off as possible. The study of economics provides students with the concepts and tools necessary for an economic way of thinking and helps students understand the interaction of buyers and sellers in markets, workings of the national economy, and interactions within the global marketplace. Armed with this knowledge, students will participate productively in the global economy.

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Geography

• Geographic reasoning requires spatial and environmental perspectives, skill in asking and answering questions, and applying geographic representations including maps, imagery, and geospatial technologies. A spatial perspective is characterized by questioning relationships among locations. Where is it? Why is it there? So what? An environmental perspective views humans as living in interdependent relationships within diverse environments among the planet’s many species. Thinking geographically involves investigating spatial patterns and processes and comprehending that our world is composed of ecosystems at multiple scales interacting in complex webs of inter-relationships within nature and between nature and societies. Geographic reasoning brings societies and nature under the lens of spatial analysis for interpretations and explanations necessary to make decisions and solve problems.

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History

• Historical thinking requires understanding and evaluating change and continuity over time and making appropriate use of historical evidence in answering questions and developing arguments about the past. It involves going beyond simply asking “What happened when?” to evaluating why and how events occurred and developments unfolded. It involves locating and assessing historical sources of many different types to understand the contexts of given historical eras and the perspectives of different individuals and groups. Historical thinking is a process of chronological reasoning, which means wrestling with issues of causality, connections, significance, and context with the goal of developing credible explanations of historical events and developments based on reasoned interpretation of evidence.

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