Through my studies, as well as my diverse life experiences, I have come to believe that teaching Social Studies requires me to go beyond the idea that “the children are the future.” The children are also our present. The young people who wake up every day to join us at this place we call school are already shaping the future, and their voices are important now as we actively co-create this society together. This is not to say that they don’t have a long way to go – don’t we all! A person is a process, and as such, should be constantly engaged in the ever-changing practice of learning and growing. No one “has it all figured out,” instead we will all be collectively striving toward “figuring it out” for all our days, and what we pass on creates progress. As I stand here, simply further along the path than these young people, I feel deeply compelled to do what I can to illuminate the trail. These rooting feelings, intentions and philosophies are at the core of what I believe Social Studies education can be. As I dedicate myself to educating our students, I will also dedicate myself to my own growth to best serve them. Together, we can work to prepare them to be engaged, equipped, empathetic, equity-driven members of this truly unique democratic republic, as well as co-creators of this wildly complex 21st-century, globalized American culture.
As I heard the luminary Dr. Cornell West assert on a podcast, education is much more than getting good grades and memorizing information, it is “the formation of attention, it’s the cultivation of a critical consciousness, it’s the maturation of a compassionate soul.” Examining history, we can see that context is everything. This theme will be at least touched upon every day in my classroom. Understanding the context surrounding events, having enough, different “ways of knowing” to know that each actor held a different perception of an event is crucial. Amidst what the Michigan K-12 Standards for Social Studies aptly calls the “digital revolution” (M.D.E. 2018, 3), media literacy, critical literacy, and understanding how to “read the world” with a clear-eyed approach are crucial aspects of civic competence. To this end, I intend to help students see our nation through the lenses of the Social Studies disciplines, harvesting the value that these lenses can provide by honing the skills that the experts practice.
Knowing we are all products of our environment reminds us that we can all help shape our students’ growing hearts and minds by providing a safe, creative, enthusiastic, and positive environment that celebrates critical questioning. Democracy is an ongoing conversation just as the classroom is. While highlighting the beautiful and wonderful aspects of this human story, I hope to provide students a clear-eyed view of the hard truths of inequities in hopes that they might understand them fully, begin to heal from them and help others heal so they have a better chance of working towards a brighter future. I ground each of these idealistic goals in the practical realities of our time, and in the idea that “young people need strong tools for, and methods of, clear and disciplined thinking in order to successfully traverse the world of college, career, and civic life” (C3 Framework Writing Team 2017, 15).
In the complex whirlwind of today’s America, fraught with a myriad of crises, each of us must be endowed with a skeptical understanding of our societal systems and frameworks, as well as a healthy and determined optimism about our ability to shape those systems. To achieve this, we can practice the art of inquiry, techniques of research, engagement in public discourse, and sound decision making in the classroom. I will seek every day to help grow students’ social understanding, honing their ability to zoom out from their immediate perspectives, to recognize and honor the differences of our nation’s various subcultures. I hope to perform an example of empathy, as well as teach them the root of where empathy comes from, because a good citizen should not only care deeply, but they should also be able to listen, to put themselves in another’s shoes, and to feel the emotion that drives someone else’s conviction. A good citizen is also able to evaluate society, understand their responsibilities and possibilities within it, question norms and roles before accepting them, and communicate openly and clearly within dialogues with others to co-shape this democratic society. I understand that it is my responsibility to act as an example of these qualities every day. As America’s first Black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm famously put it, I believe that “service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth."