Page 128 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

After reading this chapter, I came away with a fresh perspective. I have faced the challenge of taking a big idea, and not allowing it to become watered down with dates, events, and out-of-context details, making the big idea confusing or forgettable. To teach powerfully, we must empower students to relate to history on a personal level. We must go beyond dates and events with stories of people who faced issues and decisions that impacted those around them, much like the decisions we face today.
A Perspective on the Relationship between History and the Social Sciences
100 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
The K–12 school subjects draw much of their content from their respective foundational disciplines. For social studies, the primary foundational disciplines are history, geography, and the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology). As we explained in Chapter 1, ongoing curricular disputes are often rooted in conflicting beliefs regarding the most appropriate relationship between social studies and its foundational disciplines. We believe historical study should not dominate the social studies but instead be an integral part of it. In fact, most states place equal emphasis on their content expectations for history, civics, economics, and geography for much of elementary school.
For a variety of reasons, however, history seems to be taught more often than the other social sciences in elementary social studies, especially in the upper grades. First, history involves biographical study and is incorporated in the study of holidays, frequent topics of the elementary school curriculum. Second, of all the social studies disciplines, teachers tend to feel most comfortable with and knowledgeable about history. Moreover, of all the social studies disciplines, history (e.g., historical fiction) is most frequently used with children’s literature. During story time or guided reading, teachers are more likely to choose a history-oriented book.
History is an interpretive discipline, not an empirical science concerned with develop- ing theories meant to have broad applicability and explanatory power. Historians do seek to develop explanations, and they also follow procedures for developing and interpreting evidence. However, their explanations focus on events in the past. Concerning the draft- ing of the U.S. Constitution, for example, historians seek to establish the chronology of key events and determine the motives and intentions of the framers so as to understand how the U.S. Constitution came to be written as it did. In the process, they draw on political science concepts and develop information that political scientists will find useful for their purposes, but they do not seek to develop and test political science generalizations (e.g., about relationships between mechanisms of government as described in constitutions and the ways that these tend to function in practice).
Historical information is mostly chronological and organized according to the place or people investigated (e.g., U.S. history or the history of the Seminole tribe) or accord- ing to the aspects of the human condition addressed (e.g., the history of medicine or warfare). The content in each of these “files” consists of an enormous collection of particulars, along with a few generalizations about trends over time or common patterns observed in parallel situations. Historical interpretations often conflict, if not on issues of what happened and in what order, then on issues of cause and effect (e.g., the possible causal roles of various factors that may have led to the Civil War and the roles that the
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