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.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
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.
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