Page 141 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

Represent historical material to students in the form of narratives that depict people with whom they can identify pursuing goals that they can understand. For example, primary-grade children can understand that the “Pilgrims” were persecuted for their reli- gious beliefs and left England because they wanted to be free to practice their religion as they saw fit, but they could not follow an abstract analysis of the theological differences between the “separatists” and the Church of England. Similarly, fifth-graders can understand that the American colonists sold raw materials to England and purchased finished products manufactured in England, but they could not follow an abstract discussion of “the rise of mercantilism.” Incorporating history teaching within strong narrative storylines is helpful for elementary students generally (relative to older students), but especially for students with attention deficits or other learning disabilities (Ferretti, MacArthur, & Okolo, 2001).
Virtually all sources of advice on teaching history emphasize fostering empathy with the people being studied. Just as there is a danger of chauvinism when we study contem- porary cultures other than our own, there is a danger of presentism when we study peo- ple from the past with benefit of hindsight. Children are especially prone to presentism, often believing that people in the past were not as smart, sophisticated, or enlightened as we are today because they did not have all of the social and technical inventions that ease our contemporary lives. You can foster their development of empathy by helping them appreciate such things as bow-and-arrow hunting, horse-drawn carriages, or butter churns as ingenious inventions that represented significant advances for their times, not just as tools that seem primitive when compared with today’s technology.
History educators also agree on the value of exposing students to varied data sources and providing them with opportunities to conduct historical inquiry, to synthesize and commu- nicate their findings and to learn from listening to or reading biography and historical fiction selections as well as conventional textbooks (Fertig, 2005; Harms & Lettow, 1994; Lamme, 1994; Levstik & Barton, 2005; Sunal & Haas, 1993). It is important, however, for you as the teacher to guide your students in their use of these varied data sources.
Elementary students lack a rich base of prior knowledge to inform their efforts at critical thinking and decision making, so they have difficulty knowing what to believe or how to assess conflicting accounts. They will need to learn that textbooks, and even eyewitness accounts or diaries, tend to emphasize aspects of events that support the authors’ biases and interests. In studying the American Revolution, for example, it is helpful to expose students to information sources that will help them realize that King George had a quite different view from that of the American rebels concerning how the events leading up to the revolution should be interpreted, and thus whether or not revo- lution was justified. Similarly, the students might come to see that the Boston Massacre would be viewed (and described later) quite differently by a British soldier seeking to avoid a confrontation than by an American rebel seeking to provoke one.
Many topics traditionally taught from a single point of view can be taught much more insightfully from a global and multicultural perspective. For example, traditional Colum- bus Day instruction typically was confined to a Euro-centric version of discovery of the New World in 1492, featuring a dramatized and largely inaccurate version of events occurring before and during Columbus’s first voyage. A more accurate and informative version would depict the initial voyage as the beginning of an ongoing encounter between previously separated civilizations that eventually led to a great deal of cultural exchange and dramatically affected events not only in Europe and America but also in Africa (via the slave trade).
It is important that students see included in history (as represented in your curricu- lum) the racial, ethnic, and social class groups with which they identify. Several studies have shown that students take special interest in and assign special importance to people and events in history that accommodate such identification (Almarza, 2001; Epstein,
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CHAPTER 5 How Can I Teach History Powerfully? 113