Page 177 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 7 How Can I Teach the Other Social Sciences Powerfully? 149
Psychology
Psychology is not formally taught in the K–12 curriculum except for a single (usually elective) course in high school. However, this social science is relevant to elementary social studies in at least four respects.
First, studies of developments in children’s social knowledge and thinking indicate that children tend to think as psychologists before they begin learning to think as anthropologists, sociologists, economists, or political scientists (Carey, 1985; Brophy & Alleman, 2005). Until they start school, and sometimes for a year or two thereafter, their purviews are mostly restricted to their personal experiences within their families and communities. They are often exposed to fanciful stories and fictional worlds (e.g., Harry Potter’s), but not to factual information about life in the past or in other cultures (or, if they are, it may be through watching news that they may have trouble understand- ing). Furthermore, even what they know about their own society is focused on the goal- oriented activities of everyday living, which they make sense of by inferring people’s intentions and motives.
When asked to explain macro-level social phenomena, children tend to respond with narratives that personalize the events around the goals and motives of a few people, without reference to macro-level cultural, social, economic, or political trends or princi- ples. They are likely to say that the New World was discovered because Columbus wanted to find gold; African-Americans attained full civil rights because Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech; the government consists of the president and a lot of helpers; banks give families money to use to buy houses because the nice people who work there want to be helpful; certain native tribes built tipis because they had a lot of unused animal skins that they did not want to waste or because they could cook in them and the smoke from the fire would escape through the open top; Americans eat more bread but the Chinese eat more rice because we like bread better and have butter knives but they like rice better and have chopsticks; and so on.
Second, because of its focus on human actions related to meeting culturally universal needs and wants, elementary social studies is essentially an introduction to the human condition, with attention to its development over time and variation across cultures. Fur- thermore, much of it is rendered in narrative formats that structure the content around people’s goals and motives. Thus, its content matches up well with children’s tendency to think in micro-level psychological terms rather than macro-level social science terms when constructing understandings of why people do what they do. This matching offers initial advantages to teachers because it makes it easier for them to connect new content to students’ prior knowledge and develop it in ways that sustain interest and understand- ing. It also presents challenges, however, because instructional goals usually include not only adding new elements to students’ existing knowledge structures but constructing new ones and restructuring old ones. At least initially, students may be confused by, and may even resist, teachers’ attempts to expand their purviews. For example, children’s familiarity with narrative structures often leads to preferences for unambiguous story- lines culminating in clear conclusions and moral implications, so they may be frustrated with aspects of history that are open to multiple interpretations and unlikely to be resolved through consensus on a single “real story” (Barton & Levstik, 2004), or that a decision of which cereal to buy or where to get the best deal on a bicycle is contingent on multiple factors rather than a single answer.
Third, much of the content traditionally taught in kindergarten and first-grade involves learning about the self and developing personal identity (both basic topics in psychology).
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