I have been in an 8th grade World Geography class for the past two months, and it has been a blast! The later part of the course is divided into regions, in each region you have an endless possibility of content before you, which makes planning both exciting and difficult. It has however, made the use of current events in the classroom and seamless integration. They are a great way for students to to be brought up to speed on culture and politics in each of the regions that we have studied. For example, when we were learning about the Middle East as our region of study we were able to compare news articles about the events of the Arab Spring as they were unfolding last year, to how they are portrayed in the news a year later. We also found this great game (designed by a university to teach the Arab Spring) that we were able to play with our students in the class that incorporated the Arab Spring events. The link to game and all instructions and materials can be found here: Arab Spring Game. What was neat about the news articles from last year to this year was that we could really get into some media literacy. Ask the students questions like:
"How have the Article titles changed?"
"Do the authors attitudes and opinions change over time?"
"Are the events portrayed as positive things or negative things?"
"Do the content of the articles change drastically from one year to the next?"
"How do each of the different news outlets treat the events of the Arab Spring?"
"Do online news media tell the story differently than public radio?"
Both the nytimes online and the BBC allow you to access archived news articles (simple search by title/content and plenty of information comes up) as well as NPR, which provides an alternative media source for information. To ensure that your students are exposed to a wide variety of media outlets with varying slants and opinions, also think about using the Washington Post or Huffington Post to get some of your articles.
Likewise, when doing the unit on Europe there were plenty of current events that fit seamlessly into the unit and content. For example, over the weekend the recent elections in Europe resulted in some massive upheaval of staunch EU supporters; these events played perfectly into the essential question: Is Europe unifying or dividing?
A great way to introduce students to media bias would be to discuss the case of Turkey and the EU. There are a whole host of videos that you could use demonstrating the EU's position and likewise Turkey's position. You could also use political cartoons, and EU advertisements to enrich the content with a variety of resources. The discussion of Turkey and the European Union is a great way to integrate geography, history, government and sociology into your classroom, and tie Europe to the Middle East.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Application to Practice 2: Law can be Powerful
As social studies educators we are aware of how powerful the Supreme Court is and how important it is for our students to understand it, and to want to learn more about it. As educators it is our job to find the thing that will motivate and engage them, when it comes to the Supreme Court that is not easy to do. However, to inspire their legal desires beyond just your own classroom I recommend introducing the students to the Innocence Project. Note, I believe that this content is appropriate for seniors, I recommend caution if you plan on using it in lower grade levels.
The Innocence Project was started in 1992 to assist attorneys through DNA testing of the innocence of wrongfully convicted men and woman in America. To date 289 people have been exonerated including 17 who were on death row. It is a very powerful organization and most law schools have their own chapter. There is also a way for Youth to get involved. If you visit the website, Youth Take Action you can see how students have gotten involved and made a difference. It is also a great way to introduce the project to your class and get them motivated to do something. Often times the cases in The Innocence Project deals with the much larger issue of race; this can be a useful tool for teaching social justice, the supreme court, and also ethical economics. Even if your classroom decides not to get involved further, it is still a highly engaging way to teach your students about the Supreme Court.
The Innocence Project was started in 1992 to assist attorneys through DNA testing of the innocence of wrongfully convicted men and woman in America. To date 289 people have been exonerated including 17 who were on death row. It is a very powerful organization and most law schools have their own chapter. There is also a way for Youth to get involved. If you visit the website, Youth Take Action you can see how students have gotten involved and made a difference. It is also a great way to introduce the project to your class and get them motivated to do something. Often times the cases in The Innocence Project deals with the much larger issue of race; this can be a useful tool for teaching social justice, the supreme court, and also ethical economics. Even if your classroom decides not to get involved further, it is still a highly engaging way to teach your students about the Supreme Court.
Application to Practice 1: The Power of Film
For a content area as vast, detailed and varied as World History, wherever a teacher can find a useful tool to enrich the content she should grab it! Film can be a powerful tool and create a more powerful image or complete picture of a subject that a typical classroom may not be able to. One area where i have found success with this is in teaching Western Imperialism in Japan in a a 9th grade World History class.
Japanese history played an important role in its eventual rise to power and understanding where Japan came from was essential for my students to be able to see just how remarkable their rise to power was. I used the video, Memoirs of a Secret Empire Episode 3 "Alien Barbarians" to provide the students with some more vivid background information. The entire episode was 40 minutes long, but I pulled only a fifteen minute segment from it. The students had a handout to follow along with, containing questions only necessary for its tie to imperialism (not too many questions and your students will not be able to watch the video). I stopped every five minutes or so to ask a check for understanding question. The video was excellent, it was narrated through letters written by visitors to the Tokogawa empire and also educated Japanese living under the empire as well. It was a great, engaging, and easy fifteen minute way to catch my students up on the long history of Japan.
In general, for a great film selection, including educational, documentary and traditional, having a netflix online account has ben an invaluable tool. You can access PBS, BBC, and the History Channel videos. Another less thought of location to find great films for the classroom is your school's library or your local county library.
Film can be a great way to bring history to life but like anything has a time and a place in a classroom. Before you present a film to a class, be sure that you have watched it several times and know exactly where you will need to pause it, and where the answers to the questions on your organizer are. The film is not meant to trick the students, its meant to supplement and enrich their learning, so be helpful wherever you can.
Japanese history played an important role in its eventual rise to power and understanding where Japan came from was essential for my students to be able to see just how remarkable their rise to power was. I used the video, Memoirs of a Secret Empire Episode 3 "Alien Barbarians" to provide the students with some more vivid background information. The entire episode was 40 minutes long, but I pulled only a fifteen minute segment from it. The students had a handout to follow along with, containing questions only necessary for its tie to imperialism (not too many questions and your students will not be able to watch the video). I stopped every five minutes or so to ask a check for understanding question. The video was excellent, it was narrated through letters written by visitors to the Tokogawa empire and also educated Japanese living under the empire as well. It was a great, engaging, and easy fifteen minute way to catch my students up on the long history of Japan.
In general, for a great film selection, including educational, documentary and traditional, having a netflix online account has ben an invaluable tool. You can access PBS, BBC, and the History Channel videos. Another less thought of location to find great films for the classroom is your school's library or your local county library.
Film can be a great way to bring history to life but like anything has a time and a place in a classroom. Before you present a film to a class, be sure that you have watched it several times and know exactly where you will need to pause it, and where the answers to the questions on your organizer are. The film is not meant to trick the students, its meant to supplement and enrich their learning, so be helpful wherever you can.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
The importance of the Supreme Court, and teaching it contents correctly
In a former life, I was a lawyer. I spent three grueling years in law school, studying for the most difficult exam I have ever taken in my entire life. I lost sleep, time, and countless relationships preparing for what I thought was really important, and was going to change my life. It did change my life, but not in the way a new law school graduate ready to take on the world would have expected. For me, the endless disappointments that lay in my path through law school and into a legal career, lead me straight back to where I had started, education. So, I do not regret those lost years in my life, it was the most valuable education I have earned thus far in my life and who knew, that in an unexpected place it would count for something again. As new social studies teachers, we were recently discussing the importance of the Supreme Court and teaching landmark cases to our students. I absolutely agree with the necessity and importance of teaching landmark supreme court cases to high school students, but I urge educators to proceed with caution.
As teachers, we worry about misconceptions and uncorrected mistakes leading our students to make quick, inaccurate judgments. For me, this fear multiplies by the 1000s when it comes to misconceptions or incorrect information regarding supreme court holdings. Supreme Court opinions are the supreme law of the land, they have been misinterpreted and misapplied countless times, unfortunately, how often are those times corrected? So many people have interpreted the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th amendment case law to mean what they want it to mean. And who can blame them? it is complicated case law, if it were easy, there would not be a string of cases cited in every supreme court holding dictating precedent and history. This brings me to my point, as teachers, it is noble to want to teach the due process clauses, or any other landmark constitutional right and decision, but we need to be supremely careful when we do so. Supreme Court cases are not decided in a vacuum, they are not simple, they are not black and white; as teachers, we need to ensure that we do not teach them in a vacuum, that we do no strip them down to meaningless to make them simple, and that we impress upon our students just how grey supreme court case law is. As teachers before we make the decision to teach something as important as the supreme law of the land, we better well informed, knowledgeable and really understand what we are teaching, and why we are teaching it. This is not meant to discourage teachers from teaching our students about these landmark cases, as informed, effective citizens, it is our duty to arm our students with this knowledge. My words are just statements of caution. Do it correctly if you are going to do it. And for those on the administrative end, proper professional development regarding supreme court opinions and cases, is absolutely necessary for all of your educators, not just social studies teachers.
As teachers, we worry about misconceptions and uncorrected mistakes leading our students to make quick, inaccurate judgments. For me, this fear multiplies by the 1000s when it comes to misconceptions or incorrect information regarding supreme court holdings. Supreme Court opinions are the supreme law of the land, they have been misinterpreted and misapplied countless times, unfortunately, how often are those times corrected? So many people have interpreted the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th amendment case law to mean what they want it to mean. And who can blame them? it is complicated case law, if it were easy, there would not be a string of cases cited in every supreme court holding dictating precedent and history. This brings me to my point, as teachers, it is noble to want to teach the due process clauses, or any other landmark constitutional right and decision, but we need to be supremely careful when we do so. Supreme Court cases are not decided in a vacuum, they are not simple, they are not black and white; as teachers, we need to ensure that we do not teach them in a vacuum, that we do no strip them down to meaningless to make them simple, and that we impress upon our students just how grey supreme court case law is. As teachers before we make the decision to teach something as important as the supreme law of the land, we better well informed, knowledgeable and really understand what we are teaching, and why we are teaching it. This is not meant to discourage teachers from teaching our students about these landmark cases, as informed, effective citizens, it is our duty to arm our students with this knowledge. My words are just statements of caution. Do it correctly if you are going to do it. And for those on the administrative end, proper professional development regarding supreme court opinions and cases, is absolutely necessary for all of your educators, not just social studies teachers.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Practicing citizenship in your classroom
So I am still working on answering this overarching question, what is my purpose in teaching social studies, and I am sticking with the creation and preparation of well informed, engaged citizens as my answer. With that in mind, I want to talk about some of the articles we have been exploring regarding the "art" of teaching civics to our students.
There are various levels of civic participation both in the classroom and in real life, beginning with the basic level, passive participant and climbing the engagement ladder to someone who is engaging in a more social justice role. For the visual learners out there, think about this in terms of a food drive. At the first level you have the people that donate food, maybe they also volunteer to work the food drive; at the next level you have the person that organized the food drive; and at the final level you have the person who took a look at why there is a need for a food drive to begin with and seeks to find a more long term solution to the problem. At all three levels there is civic engagement and participation that leads a social studies teacher to yet another question, "what level of civic engagement am I hoping to impart and teach my students?"
I am an idealist and I answer this question with the third level of course! If I had the chance I would create little revolutionaries! Students armed with the passion, understanding and know how ready to stand up for the injustice they see in their own neighborhood and take action into their own hands! (we all can dream!). But there are some many hidden hurdles to this lofty goal: how does this fit with standards? in a world where I have to prepare my students for a standardized test, how does this fit into my curriculum? Does this require too much background knowledge to really see my goal play out? Will it flop? Can I engage my students on a deep enough level to be able to set them up for success? I struggled with all sorts of questions like this as I was reading the various articles and studies on civic engagement and what this looks like or does not look like in a classroom. However, after hearing my classmates share and discuss their own very different ideas as to how to achieve this goal in a classroom, I left feeling a bit rejuvenated! I really think this can be done!
For example, take Virginia. SOLs occur in mid-late May. For some teachers, this may mean have students for almost four weeks having crammed all your content in beforehand so that they were prepared for the SOLs, so what do you do with this time? This actually a perfect time to do a mini civic engagement project. It may not amount to a social justice project, but at least as a teacher you can get them thinking about their own community, the issues it faces, the root cause(s) of the issue and how they, as students/individuals, can begin to work toward remedying the issue. Here is a sample of a four week breakdown for this mini project (which you make contingent on their final grade):
Week 1:
The Individual? Who are you? What is/are your roles in your home, school, community?
What does my community look like? Who are its members, their roles? Who are my local heroes?
What problems do I see in my community? What resources exist out there to help with these problems or issues? Are they sufficient?
Week 2-3:
The class decides which issue/s are most important to them. Can be a whole class or smaller groups depending upon interest and engagement.
-Research the issue at the local and national level. What solutions have been proposed, attempted? What was a success, what was a failure? Why does the problem still exist? What are the root causes of the problem?
Week 3-4:
What can people as individuals or a small collection of people do to help remedy the solution? Propose a plan and put it into action. What problems did you encounter? How did you work through or around them? What other resources do you need? What could you do further?
This mini civics project could fall flat on its face. However, if it does, your students will still have the opportunity to learn about their community and a problem or issue that exists on the local and national level. This connection might begin to break down the "us" and "them " wall if such a wall exists in your class. If there is no wall, its a non-voting age citizens glimpse into what it means to be a citizen. Informed, aware and engaged. Either way there is learning and no one has ever argued that learning is a bad thing.
There are various levels of civic participation both in the classroom and in real life, beginning with the basic level, passive participant and climbing the engagement ladder to someone who is engaging in a more social justice role. For the visual learners out there, think about this in terms of a food drive. At the first level you have the people that donate food, maybe they also volunteer to work the food drive; at the next level you have the person that organized the food drive; and at the final level you have the person who took a look at why there is a need for a food drive to begin with and seeks to find a more long term solution to the problem. At all three levels there is civic engagement and participation that leads a social studies teacher to yet another question, "what level of civic engagement am I hoping to impart and teach my students?"
I am an idealist and I answer this question with the third level of course! If I had the chance I would create little revolutionaries! Students armed with the passion, understanding and know how ready to stand up for the injustice they see in their own neighborhood and take action into their own hands! (we all can dream!). But there are some many hidden hurdles to this lofty goal: how does this fit with standards? in a world where I have to prepare my students for a standardized test, how does this fit into my curriculum? Does this require too much background knowledge to really see my goal play out? Will it flop? Can I engage my students on a deep enough level to be able to set them up for success? I struggled with all sorts of questions like this as I was reading the various articles and studies on civic engagement and what this looks like or does not look like in a classroom. However, after hearing my classmates share and discuss their own very different ideas as to how to achieve this goal in a classroom, I left feeling a bit rejuvenated! I really think this can be done!
For example, take Virginia. SOLs occur in mid-late May. For some teachers, this may mean have students for almost four weeks having crammed all your content in beforehand so that they were prepared for the SOLs, so what do you do with this time? This actually a perfect time to do a mini civic engagement project. It may not amount to a social justice project, but at least as a teacher you can get them thinking about their own community, the issues it faces, the root cause(s) of the issue and how they, as students/individuals, can begin to work toward remedying the issue. Here is a sample of a four week breakdown for this mini project (which you make contingent on their final grade):
Week 1:
The Individual? Who are you? What is/are your roles in your home, school, community?
What does my community look like? Who are its members, their roles? Who are my local heroes?
What problems do I see in my community? What resources exist out there to help with these problems or issues? Are they sufficient?
Week 2-3:
The class decides which issue/s are most important to them. Can be a whole class or smaller groups depending upon interest and engagement.
-Research the issue at the local and national level. What solutions have been proposed, attempted? What was a success, what was a failure? Why does the problem still exist? What are the root causes of the problem?
Week 3-4:
What can people as individuals or a small collection of people do to help remedy the solution? Propose a plan and put it into action. What problems did you encounter? How did you work through or around them? What other resources do you need? What could you do further?
This mini civics project could fall flat on its face. However, if it does, your students will still have the opportunity to learn about their community and a problem or issue that exists on the local and national level. This connection might begin to break down the "us" and "them " wall if such a wall exists in your class. If there is no wall, its a non-voting age citizens glimpse into what it means to be a citizen. Informed, aware and engaged. Either way there is learning and no one has ever argued that learning is a bad thing.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
"Civic Engagement: What are we hoping for?"
As a new history teacher, one of my main goals is to prepare my students to be citizens in a democratic society, a natural component of that is civic engagement. There are those out there that lament the lack of school instruction in civics, and have attributed our apathetic voting population to this dearth in our curriculum. (We have to blame teachers and schools for something right?) States, organizations, and teachers have been fighting the good fight to bring civics back to our students, a return the time when more than half a credit was required to graduate. I applaud their efforts and while some of those programs such as "We the People" look incredible, I am realistic in that I assume I will not have that type of curriculum at my disposal. So this got me thinking about what the every day teacher can do in their classroom to encourage civic engagement.
A little reading of Dewey brought me straight back to our original education roots (I am talking as far back as Plato) where citizenship has always been a component and at times a foundation of education. In the reading, certain things struck me, for example, Dewey stated that a goal of education should be to conduct education so that humanity may improve. Therefore, education is the social process that prepares students for the world around them; prepares them to see, react, feel, improve, change or support, whichever the situation requires (inherent in this statement is the necessity to teach them to read the situation as well). But it was this portion that got my wheels spinning so much I burned the rubber around my brain, "The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind."
The kind of society we have in mind... what kind of society do I have in mind? I have examples, the one in which I live in now where the focus is on the individual, or maybe one like Japan, where the focus is on the whole. In one country as far as civic engagement is concerned, the voter turnout ends up around 40% and the other ends up somewhere around 80%. From a social studies teacher who wants to create good citizens I think, "oh wow! What is Japan doing in their schools to to promote this type of civic engagement?! And what does that society look like culturally?" If the Japanese, are 'Japan' focused, what type of things are they voting for? Do they have controversial, time-changing issues on their ballots? Do they have a diverse population of candidates with an array of diverse issues to bring with them? I don't know. So what about the opposite, a society that places emphasis on the individual, a diverse society where politics is inherently controversial? This type of society created a unique bill of rights, celebrating the individual, which was replicated world wide.
I know this seems like a lot of rambling, but at the heart of my rambling, is how and why to teach civics in my classroom? How do you define civics first? Civics education will presumably be defined by the current society in which we live in, but can't the goal or underlying purpose of civics education be to transform that society, or improve it where necessary?
A little reading of Dewey brought me straight back to our original education roots (I am talking as far back as Plato) where citizenship has always been a component and at times a foundation of education. In the reading, certain things struck me, for example, Dewey stated that a goal of education should be to conduct education so that humanity may improve. Therefore, education is the social process that prepares students for the world around them; prepares them to see, react, feel, improve, change or support, whichever the situation requires (inherent in this statement is the necessity to teach them to read the situation as well). But it was this portion that got my wheels spinning so much I burned the rubber around my brain, "The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind."
The kind of society we have in mind... what kind of society do I have in mind? I have examples, the one in which I live in now where the focus is on the individual, or maybe one like Japan, where the focus is on the whole. In one country as far as civic engagement is concerned, the voter turnout ends up around 40% and the other ends up somewhere around 80%. From a social studies teacher who wants to create good citizens I think, "oh wow! What is Japan doing in their schools to to promote this type of civic engagement?! And what does that society look like culturally?" If the Japanese, are 'Japan' focused, what type of things are they voting for? Do they have controversial, time-changing issues on their ballots? Do they have a diverse population of candidates with an array of diverse issues to bring with them? I don't know. So what about the opposite, a society that places emphasis on the individual, a diverse society where politics is inherently controversial? This type of society created a unique bill of rights, celebrating the individual, which was replicated world wide.
I know this seems like a lot of rambling, but at the heart of my rambling, is how and why to teach civics in my classroom? How do you define civics first? Civics education will presumably be defined by the current society in which we live in, but can't the goal or underlying purpose of civics education be to transform that society, or improve it where necessary?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Take Back the Power!
In a class discussion tonight about current events, media literacy and teaching with and for newspapers in a history classroom, I was struck by how little this seemed to be occurring in an average classroom. This obviously led to a discussion of the challenges that using a newspaper in a classroom poses, for instance, it might require too much background information or context (the assumption being our students lacked this quality), where to and how to place it within the curriculum framework, the time it would take to implement this type of learning, how to choose and what to choose when it comes to newspaper articles, and how to teach about the media (just to name a few). However, when I personally sat down to think about this I was struck by an entirely different question, "why should I teach with and/or for newspapers in the first place?" I basically return again to my essential question in history, what are my goals?
There are multiple objectives to support the teaching with and for newspapers in the classroom: content, skills such as reading, and identifying bias. But I return to my current overarching goal for teaching history, the creation of an informed democratic citizen and I use this same goal to justify the use and teaching of newspapers in my own classroom. If I can begin with my students at a younger age, middle school say, and at least introduce them to newspapers on a routine basis then I am one step closer to achieving my ultimate goal in history education. Newspapers are a conduit of fact, opinion, and debate in this country; they inform decisions from a community level to a national level. A good citizen reads, understands and agrees with or disagrees with an article in a newspaper; a person interacts and engages with newspapers and at the same time participates in the broader democratic community. By encouraging, teaching and hopefully instilling a student's ability and desire to engage with newspapers, I am supporting my broader goal of creating an informed democratic citizen. Start small, begin with teaching them to read and comprehend an article, slowly build up to the more higher order skill of critically reading and analyzing. Over time this scaffolding approach will reach all of the goals previously stated regarding the use of newspapers in the classroom.
If you ask a 9th grader studying world history why people will start a revolution for independence, they will say things like, "they wanted freedoms." Push those same kids a little further to identify those freedoms and the first response, is always, "freedom of the press." Our students know how important something so basic as a newspaper is to democracy, shouldn't we model an exercise of one of the most revered rights? Show our students how important a newspaper can be and use it in our history classrooms for all the things that it is, and it is not.
There are multiple objectives to support the teaching with and for newspapers in the classroom: content, skills such as reading, and identifying bias. But I return to my current overarching goal for teaching history, the creation of an informed democratic citizen and I use this same goal to justify the use and teaching of newspapers in my own classroom. If I can begin with my students at a younger age, middle school say, and at least introduce them to newspapers on a routine basis then I am one step closer to achieving my ultimate goal in history education. Newspapers are a conduit of fact, opinion, and debate in this country; they inform decisions from a community level to a national level. A good citizen reads, understands and agrees with or disagrees with an article in a newspaper; a person interacts and engages with newspapers and at the same time participates in the broader democratic community. By encouraging, teaching and hopefully instilling a student's ability and desire to engage with newspapers, I am supporting my broader goal of creating an informed democratic citizen. Start small, begin with teaching them to read and comprehend an article, slowly build up to the more higher order skill of critically reading and analyzing. Over time this scaffolding approach will reach all of the goals previously stated regarding the use of newspapers in the classroom.
If you ask a 9th grader studying world history why people will start a revolution for independence, they will say things like, "they wanted freedoms." Push those same kids a little further to identify those freedoms and the first response, is always, "freedom of the press." Our students know how important something so basic as a newspaper is to democracy, shouldn't we model an exercise of one of the most revered rights? Show our students how important a newspaper can be and use it in our history classrooms for all the things that it is, and it is not.
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