Page 147 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 5 How Can I Teach History Powerfully? 119
Technology Tips
Technology has greatly improved access to primary source materials. Websites for museums and historical sites feature digital images of primary source materials, and recordings of historical speeches and songs are also available on the Internet. Short videos that incorporate primary and secondary source materials are widely available. Discovery Education is one site that offers a variety of free materials as well as subscription access to short videos on its United Streaming page. What- ever the historical topic you are teaching, there are bound to be immediately accessible primary sources to share with your students.
Summary
Organizations and scholars concerned with history teaching have developed useful guidelines that can help you teach history in ways that promote progress toward social understanding and civic efficacy goals. Along with more detailed and subject-specific advice, these sources emphasize the value of the following:
1. Replacing parades of facts with coherent networks of knowledge structured around powerful ideas.
2. Studying people within the context of their time
and place, so as to develop empathy and avoid
presentism or chauvinism.
3. Focusing on causal explanations that will help
students understand not only what happened, but why, and what this might mean for personal, social, or civic decision making.
Much of the content of social studies is drawn from its foundational disciplines of history, and the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, geography, political science, psychology, and sociology). However, this content is blended within holistic treatments of unit topics and taught with more emphasis on citizen education goals than on goals specific to the individual disciplines. Keep this distinction in mind as you learn about the pan-disciplinary curriculum standards put forth by the National Council for the Social Studies, as contrasted with the discipline-specific standards put forth by advocates for history and the social sciences.
History is an interpretive discipline focused on particulars rather than a social science focused on developing and testing broadly applicable theories. Historians develop chronologies and explanations of events by assembling all potentially relevant evidence,
assessing sources (primary or secondary) and credibil- ity (well-informed, unbiased), and then constructing an account that best fits the most credible evidence. Even so, historians often disagree, especially when drawing conclusions about causes and effects.
Children in the elementary grades are not yet ready for detailed chronologies or abstract analyses, but they can understand basic historical sequences (such as the changes in farming or transportation brought about through inventions) and narrative accounts of events that focus on the goal-oriented actions of key figures. Most children show a pervasive presentism in their think- ing about the past, so it is important to help them develop historical empathy: considering the decisions and actions of people in the past with reference to the knowledge and technologies available to them at their time and place, rather than viewing them only from hindsight.
Children’s responsiveness to narrative formats acts as a double-edged sword in history teaching. Narrative formats make it easier to engage children’s interest in history and help them learn many aspects of it with understanding, but they prefer clean and simple story- lines with clear-cut heroes and villains. Historical events are usually much more complicated than simple stories, and different stakeholder groups often have very differ- ent views about whether a particular event was desirable and whether key participants should be viewed posi- tively or negatively. It is important to bring out these multiple perspectives as part of the larger effort to develop students’ global and multicultural awareness.
History learning in the elementary grades should begin early with students developing personal timelines and family histories that include narrative and support- ing documents and artifacts. Later they can study and
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