College of Education Mission:

The mission of the Pacific University College of Education is to be a community of thoughtful and responsive leaders who
- inspire professionals to value and serve individuals within their unique personal, family, and community context;
- construct and disseminate new understandings through teaching and scholarship;
- advance critical evaluation of theory and practice;
- advocate for justice through outreach and service in reciprocal partnership with underserved communities; and
- cultivate learning in and through our inclusive and diverse communities.

Never doubt that a small group of concerned teachers can change the world, Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.   - With liberties, from Margaret Mead.

A primary focus of this particular course is to nurture the further development of our community of adult learners as we come to understand how to create and support learning communities in classrooms of young children. We will deconstruct traditional models of curriculum delivery and explore issues of equity and social justice in the context of instructional methods that can support the diversity of students we serve.

Required Texts:

-Brophy, J, & Alleman, Janet (2018) Powerful Social Studies For Elementary Students (4th Ed.). Wadsworth: Belmont, CA. Amazon Link

-Cherry-Paul, S, Reynolds, J, Kendi, I X, (2021). Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. (ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316167581) Amazon Link  

- Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne  (2019) An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People  (ReVisioning History for Young People)  (ISBN-13: 978-0807049396)  Amazon Link 

Click here to link to our Course Google Doc

Educational Philosophy:

I cannot simply teach you what you need to know about early childhood, and elementary school curricula, social studies content and instructional methods. In order for you to effectively learn this material you must be willing to be an active participant in the learning process; constructing an understanding of this material that is personally relevant and meaningful. Therefore I see my role more as that of a facilitator and a co-learner than as a lecturer. What I will do is provide you with a variety of resources that can assist you in learning, and your job will be to work with your peers, utilize these resources, ask questions, and help me to know what you do and do not understand. I have set aside time for office hours so that I can help. You may also drop in unannounced any time I am in the office. Furthermore, I have included my email address in order to encourage your questions and comments. The bottom line is that the amount you learn in this course will be directly proportional to your level of involvement, both temporal and cognitive.

Course Description:

This course is designed to guide aspiring multiple subjects teachers in developing skills to design and organize lessons and units that: involve students in appropriate learning activities, require thinking at a range of levels, and use a variety of assessment methods. Course content will include an examination of curriculum foundations, a variety of specific curricular models, instructional skills and strategies, assessment methods, and classroom management (guidance) systems. Throughout this course, social studies concepts will serve as the content and provide a context around which treatments of general teaching methods will be organized.

The integrating essence of the course will be a focus on issues of educational equity and social justice. Another important element will be observations and experiences in schools. As such the course will be structured to utilize a student-centered, collaborative, guided discovery approach. Each week we will address questions central to the study of educational methods and together we will seek out resources, learn the material and share what we have found with each other. Because of the nature of this course I have already compiled many resources that will assist the process, however these are simply to be viewed as a starting point. One of our critical goals will be to help us better understand how to design, write, and implement a unit of study. While we will review research on best practices regarding pedagogy and curriculum design to discuss in class, an applied focus will be on helping you to think about, plan, write, and be reflective on the development of professional lessons.

Tentative Course Goals and Objectives

As a result of participating in this course, prospective teachers will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a functional understanding of the fundamental elements of curriculum for multiple subjects teachers in early childhood through middle school.
2. Formulate educational goals and objectives that are appropriate and require working at higher cognitive levels.
3. Experience a variety of instructional strategies, including cooperative learning, center-based learning, and identify appropriate applications for multiple subjects classroom.
4. Explore a number of student-centered learning strategies including the project approach and emergent curriculum approach.
5. Prepare lessons and units that use a variety of instructional strategies and skills, incorporate learning theory, Bloom's Taxonomy, universal design for learning, styles of learning and intelligences, and are appropriate to developmental levels, goals and objectives.
6. Design lessons with activities and learning centers that allow children to move at their own pace in acquiring important skills in all developmental areas: physical, social, emotional, and cognitive.
7. Recognize and use effective instructional practices.
8. Understand a variety of foundational single subject curricular models and appropriately incorporate aspects of these models into curriculum design.
9. Explore classroom organizational systems including discipline, management, and guidance structures.
10. Review a variety of methods for assessing student learning and performance.
11. Explore a variety of emergent ideas in education and analyze their effectiveness in the early childhood, elementary, and middle school settings.
12. Consider child developmental theory and the principles of educational psychology when making curricular decisions
13. Identify appropriate social education and social studies goals and use as a guide to select content that teaches social understanding and civic efficacy.
14. Understand and apply content in each of the areas of social studies education including geography, history, political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology.
15. Recognize fundamental social studies concepts and benchmarks, and demonstrate the ability to integrate them into lessons and thematic units.

Course Requirements

This course will utilize only a few formal requirements. It is expected that you will attend class, help to complete suggested readings and outside readings, and contribute to class and small group discussions and projects. There will be multiple concrete assignments: lesson plans, unit design, a podcast (also part of the tech course), an emergency curriculum box, and an independent social studies project of your own choosing.

Attendance.  You are expected to attend each class in person and it is important that you do so.  Because some materials that will be presented and discussed in class are not contained in the listed resources, and because we will be a small group, it is important that you attend every class. Please contact me prior to class if you will be absent for any reason.

Reading Assignments. This is a student-centered course, which means that each class will revolve around the interests and ideas that you bring to the class, and the work you do outside of class. Therefore it is important that you come prepared to contribute to discussions. You are expected to read the assigned material before class so that you can come prepared to contribute. While generally this will simply be the assigned work, sometimes the topics will necessitate independent readings. I have compiled readings from the Pacific Library that are linked through Google Drive, have listed chapters in the required texts, and will provide links to online readings that will be helpful for your work. Reading carefully and thinking about the material before class will give you time to formulate questions and ideas that you may have about the readings and allow you to more fully participate during that class period

Writing Assignments. All writing assignments will be assessed on three basic criteria:
1. Clarity of expression. It is expected that papers and projects will be well written following the guidelines for appropriate grammar and style. Papers should be double spaced and printed using a #12 font.
2. Level of critical analysis and depth of thought. It is expected that your papers, projects and presentations will go beyond simply describing and applying information, and will include analytical thinking and the synthesis of ideas. This will be especially important when you are developing lesson plans and your work sample.
3. Specific assignment criteria. Each assignment has specific criteria and papers will be evaluated on how well those criteria are met.

All writing should be considered a work in progress. After I have assessed and returned any of your work, you have the option of making whatever changes that you would like and resubmitting your paper for a new assessment. When you resubmit a paper please be sure to submit your original version along with the new version.

A. Lesson Plan. The object of this assignment is to allow you to select some component of the ece/elem social studies curriculum that interests you, investigate it more fully, and design an original lesson plan  around this component (template). You are free to select any social studies component and design any curricular application that interests you and that is relevant. You may pick any level: age 3 through grade 8 as long as the lesson is designed for a multiple subjects classroom. I expect your work to be founded on theory and research, and references to scholarly work are required. This lesson plan will be a bit different than most you will write in that rationales are expected to be included for each individual element of your plan where noted. Here is a rubric for the lesson plan. Lesson Plans are Due no later than March 12th.

B. Primary Source Research. In your Technological Learning Environments course, you will be producing a Vodcast. In preparation for that Vodcast, you will be exploring the Working For Justice page to select an individual whose life you will be describing in your Vodcast. The Page contains the names of  well over one hundred individuals who were advocates for equity and justice, as well as links to one or more sites containing descriptions of their life's work. Your job is to select one of these individuals, and then explore many more sites containing  primary source materials relevant to their work.  The authentic assessment for this portion of the course will be the manner in which it empowers and elucidates your Vodcast with regards to images, video, stories, and other artifacts that you will describe in the script you prepare for the Vodcast. 

C. Framing a Social Studies Unit - The object of this project is to build on your skills designing lessons, and begin to explore the process of developing a unit of study within the field of Social Studies. You are free to select any discipline you would like within this field of social studies: history, geography, archaeology, etc. , and within that discipline you may pick any topic that you would like.  This must be of your own creation, you are not allowed to take something from your cooperating teacher or in a book or online and adapt it for your own use. This must be entirely original in its creation. This will not need to be a fully developed and ready-to-teach unit, but rather the outline of the unit including goals, ideas for lessons, pedagogical approaches and assessments as described in the Unit Guide (under revision).  This project will also require that you submit rationales for the choices you make for each of the elements of your unit as a means of allowing your thinking to be transparent.   Here is the PDF template and a Microsoft Word Template to assist your process.  This framing of a unit is due no later April 9th.

D. Individual Project - The object of this project is to allow you to select an aspect of Social Studies that interests you and investigate it at depth, and then submit a representation of your deepened understanding of this content in the form of a paper or other approved format. Citations and references are required. One recommendation I have for this project would be conducting an historical interview with a person who has a unique story to tell about their life. We will be collecting these interviews and potentially posting them on a special corner of the Pacific University Website. You are welcome and encouraged to come up with a project idea of your own. This project is due no later than April 23rd. Please include a narrative self assessment of this independent project.

Assessment:

Your grade in the course will be based on a final assessment on your work throughout the term. Throughout this course I encourage you to embrace the power of being a mastery-based learner focused on learning goals rather than performance goals. Work hard to challenge yourself and let go of any ego involvement in grades. What is important is your level of learning and understanding in this course: the more the better. In this framework, grades are not the criteria by which you should evaluate your value as a student (in terms of self concept or self esteem), but simply a metric by which to mark your process in meeting the goals of becoming a professional educator. Disequilibria are the catalyst for new learning, embrace them and challenge yourself to do and learn great things. “Beware the A, it says that you have made it, that you are done...” Because practicing teachers need to be skilled at reflecting on the quality of the lessons they design and teach, one element of this course will be the honing of that self-reflective competence. When you submit an assignment to me, you will use the rubric connected with that project to self-assess your work and submit that assessment to me along with the assignment. At the end of the course you will review the sum total of assessments and propose a final grade for yourself. If you would like to explore some of the reasons for using an alternative method of grading, please see Alfie Kohn's treatise on grading, or Jesse Strommel's work addressing ungrading.

Throughout the course, assessments will be based on rubrics that are developed and posted as part of this course. A basic guideline for evaluation is as follows.

A score of 5 will be given when the work is comprehensive, designed to foster high-level student learning and creativity, and demonstrates intentionality in the use of specific pedagogical approach, or content.
A score of 4 will be given when the work is thorough, designed to foster student learning and creativity, and demonstrates understanding of the the use of a specific pedagogical approach, or content.
A score of 3 will be given when the work is adequate, designed to fosters student learning, and demonstrates a basic understanding in the use of pedagogy, or content.
A score of 2 will be given when the work is not quite adequate, fosters limited student learning or creativity, and demonstrates a weak understanding of the uses and strengths of pedagogy or content.
A score of 1 will be given when the work is inadequate, demonstrates misunderstanding, and/or is lacking in effort or quality.

Throughout the course, assessment will be based on rubrics developed for each specific assignment. You must accompany each submitted assignment with a brief self-assessment based on that rubric including the proposing of a score for that assignment.

On or before March 19th you will submit a mid-semester personal assessment indicating how you are progressing in meeting course goals. This should be two to three paragraphs long,  noting attendance, reading, and class participation; as well as the projects you have completed, your assessments, and feedback you have received. Submit this assessment through email with the title - "Social Studies Eval"

On or before Friday May 2nd, you will submit a final assessment of your progress. This should be at least a page or more in length, noting attendance, reading, and class participation; as well as all the course projects, your assessments, and the feedback you have received. Your reflection should address your progress in meeting the course goals. Your final assessment must include a proposed final grade for yourself. Where in most cases this will be the final grade you will receive, I reserve the right to submit an alternative final grade if I believe there is a lack of veridical connection between the work completed and your self-evaluation.

Required Assignments with their final grade weighting:

1. Lesson Plan (30 points)
2. Social Studies Unit (30 points)
3. Independent project (30 points)
4. Class preparation and contributions (10 points)

Final grades will be roughly indexed to the following scale: