Social Studies Teaching is Interdisciplinary and Connects Students to the World Around Them

Artifact 12: Considering Real-World Questions

What makes a good president.mp4

This short video clip was taken from a lesson I planned centered on an in-class debate as to whether or not Warren Harding was a good president. In order to prepare for the debate, the class had spent the previous day compiling a comprehensive list of the qualities that we believed a "good" president or leader should portray. The clip here shows me referencing this list as a tool for students to use when creating their arguments for the debate (don't mind my student having some fun with the camera).

Questions like this transcend classroom activities, requiring students to reflect on their own values as well as what they perceive to be the values of the country as a whole. As future voters, this type of reflective thought is highly valuable, and exploring it in a classroom setting begins an internal dialogue about the relationship between politics and values that these students will (hopefully) carry with them to the voting booths.

Using the classroom as an outlet for civic discourse allows students the opportunity to feel heard while still pushing them to question their own perspectives and opinions in a respectful and safe space. I plan on using these broad, real-world discussions regularly in my teaching as a way to get students thinking about how the work we do in class relates to their life outside the walls of the school.

Artifact 13: Investigating Current Events

As a social studies teacher, I make an effort to incorporate current events into the classroom whenever possible in an attempt to prove to students how we can use history to understand the present. This artifact exemplifies that goal through a summative assessment project I assigned to my U.S. History students. Upon learning about the muckrakers of the Progressive Era and reading excerpts from some of their work, I had students become "muckrakers" themselves, investigating an issue in our world today and presenting their findings to the class. In order to maximize engagement, I let them be creative in choosing their own topic and format so that they could express their individuality.

Learning to stay up to date on current events should be a skill incorporated into an effective social studies curriculum, as these are the issues that will affect us directly over our lifetimes. I've found that discussing these events in class while using them as a tool to understand the past is an effective way for students to engage directly with the content. Social studies is not just studying people and events from the past, but using that knowledge to make sense of the present world around us. Giving students the opportunity to act as investigators of current issues connects them to these historical actors we've discussed in class, teaching them that exposing the truth and solving society's problems are valiant efforts in any time period.

Artifact 14: Analyzing and Evaluating Information

One of the instructional strategies that I practiced over the course of the semester was the A.R.T.I.S.T. method of analyzing a primary source document. Having students focus on each of these aspects of a text one by one allows them to understand the source on a deeper level, as well as identify bias and reliability. In looking at each of these components, I wanted students to be able to look deeper. For example for "author", I communicated to students not to just give the name of whoever created the text, but to tell me who that person was-- their occupation, age, background, personal and political beliefs, etc.

In order to make this strategy most useful to students, I implemented it gradually into our classwork. The first time I introduced this strategy, I modeled it for students myself, having the class share their ideas as we worked through the letters of the acronym together. The next time we practiced this reading strategy, I distributed the text and had students work in pairs to thoroughly complete the acronym. Scaffolding their practice in this way built them up to the point where they could successfully analyze a text using A.R.T.I.S.T. on their own, which turned out to be extremely helpful as our class transitioned to online learning in March and I could no longer be there to help students work through a text.

Analyzing sources like this is not a strictly social studies skill-- far from it actually. Anytime a person reads something, they should be questioning the source, wondering from who, where, and when the information came from. Teaching students to evaluate texts is a skill that they can carry with them into their other classes, college, careers, and their daily lives as informed citizens.

Example of student ARTIST analysis

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