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.
I thought about the same questions as I read these articles... but then I thought to myself: If we really are being genuine and we want to create little "level 3" students, shouldn't we also be living up to this model ourselves? My question is, do we--as social studies teachers--need to be the exact model of what we hope our students will become? For example, should we be voting in all elections, local, state and federal? Should we be engaging in the community (beyond the classroom) to improve it? I admit that I fall short on some of the things that I hope my students will adopt in their adult lives. That's because life gets busy; between school, work and kids, it's hard to find time to make those valuable community improvements. Is it ok to be what some students might consider "hypocritical" as a social studies teacher? Can I try to have my students "do as I say, not as I do?" I tend to think that being honest is more important. If I'm not living up to the type of citizen that I hoped I would be, I think admitting that is important. I think that I would highlight where I've excelled and discuss what I could be doing better as a "citizen". I would do this to foster an open environment where students can discuss the obstacles they also forsee and how they think they might overcome them. When we have these lofty (and completely valid) goals as social studies teachers, I think we also need to be realistic. Perhaps we won't create social change leaders in every issue but as long as they work to change the things that are important to them, then haven't we succeeded?
ReplyDeleteI think we'll end up creating a mix of all three levels as we teaching civics... and I think that's ok:)