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.

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.

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.

"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?

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.

Learning about your past, is learning history

We have all heard that kids do not know anything about history, after my own observation experiences I too came away with that same feeling; it is discouraging, especially for history dorks like myself! After reading some of "Teaching History for the Common Good" (Keith Barton & Linda Levstik), I feel much better about that blanket statement in knowing that it is not entirely true. The various accounts of elementary and middle school students, and the phone interviews with adults even, show that kids and adults alike know a lot about history. They could point to major turning points or defining moments in American History, they understood various pieces of history, albeit the pieces taught as integral to American identity but nonetheless events of historical significance such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement. Those are important moments in history, they certainly do not encompass everything as a teacher and historian I think they should know or I want them to know, but it is a start and it is a start that I can feel good about.

So good, kids are learning history, however that is not the portion of this reading that got me really thinking. The most compelling part of these history studies and data gathering discussing what people know or do not know about history, was how emotional and excited everyone got when discussing their past, their own history. This got me thinking, do historians have it wrong? Have we too narrowly defined what history is? Isn't everyone's past, family history, personal stories, a piece of the broader history narrative? If our past and our own history is something people can cling to and connect with, then that is what we should be teaching. As a teacher, we should not be relegating the creation of family trees, coat of arms, interviewing our relatives, and learning about where we came from and who we are to lower grades. Exploration of personal history should occur at every level in every grade. After all, the older we get the more we care about the past; we get further and further from something and that innate human instinct takes over compelling us to hold on to something, to anything. As a high school history teacher, I want to tap into that, use it to motivate my students early, relate to them and find something about them somewhere in history that I can use to teach them about history.

I know the first argument against this, "we do not have time," "there are standards and tests to teach to!" I get it, but we all know that the first couple of weeks of school make or break the year, establishing routine, classroom structure and environment, outlining classroom management is vital to our success further down the road. Use studying personal past as a way to get to know your students, break down the impersonal history wall right from the start, send your students the message that you care about where they come from and who they are from the day they walk into your class! After all, ensuring that our students know that we care about them is one of those necessary components of a successful classroom.

This week I learned that learning about your past is learning history. Barton and Levstik have a very clear idea as to what the goal of history education is, "its contribution to democratic life."I think at this point in my education, the goal of history in my classrooms, is to get my students to care about the past. To do this, I will start by learning about their past.

Essential Question

While trying to think of a clever essential question to ponder deeply over and over again, I came up with nothing. Let's face it, I am not the most witty of historians. But I did keep returning to a question that my answer seems to change daily to, "What is the goal of social studies or history education?" As I continue my studies, work in the classroom and my adventures in blogging, I will return to this question. I think being able to answer my goal of social studies or history education is, is crucial to my classroom.