Page 207 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

always have at least some experiential base to bring to bear, their prior knowledge about topics addressed in these subjects is often very limited. Furthermore, this limited knowledge base is mostly tacit (not organized or verbally articulated, and perhaps never even consciously considered), and it often includes many misconceptions. Con- sequently, primary-grade teachers and upper-grade teachers who have very diverse classrooms often are faced with the task of helping their students to develop and begin to integrate an initial knowledge base in the domain. This requires taking little or nothing for granted, teaching (in some respects) as if the students know nothing at all about the topic.
In these situations, teachers usually have to assume most of the burden of conveying new information to their students. They cannot rely on texts for this purpose because kindergarten and first-grade students cannot yet read informational texts fluently, and many older students have not yet acquired a critical mass of reading fluency and study skills that would allow them to learn efficiently from reading. So, most of the content that you believe is important for your students to learn will have to be conveyed by your- self personally during lessons. You may use books, photos, physical artifacts, or other instructional resources in the process, but your students’ initial exposure to new infor- mation will come mostly from listening to what you say during teacher-led classroom discourse. Consider setting the stage for guiding the listening by providing questions to promote students’ thinking.
You will need to work within certain constraints as you construct and manage this discourse. Your students’ attention spans are limited, and they are not yet able to retain lengthy and complicated explanations, so extended lecturing is not a feasible teaching method. Also, these students do not yet possess a critical mass of cognitive development and domain-specific knowledge that would enable them to comprehend and use the dis- ciplinary content structures and associated discourse genres that are used in teaching subjects at relatively abstract and advanced levels. For example, they have experiences with money and personal economic exchanges, but know nothing of macroeconomics; they can comprehend basic ideas about rules, laws, and authority, but not about compar- ative governmental structures or other advanced aspects of political science; and they can understand stories about everyday life and key events in the past, but not abstract analy- ses of macro-level historical trends.
It is just as important for younger students as for older ones to offer curricula fea- turing networks of knowledge structured around big ideas, but you cannot do this through lengthy presentations of content organized as systematic explication of con- cepts, principles, logical arguments, or other advanced disciplinary structures that young students are not yet prepared to understand and use. Instead, you need to stick to aspects of a domain that can be made meaningful to students because they can be connected to the students’ existing knowledge, and especially to their prior experiences. In addition, it helps to convey this content using text structures and dis- course genres with which the students already have some familiarity (and preferably, some fluency).
Narrative Structures as Teaching Tools
One particularly useful tool that meets these criteria is the narrative structure because even the youngest students are already familiar with it through exposure to stories. Bruner (1990), Egan (1988, 1990), Downey and Levstik (1991), and others have noted that even very young children are familiar with and adept at using narrative modes of thinking for describing and remembering things that are important to them. That is,
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CHAPTER 8 How Can I Use Discourse Powerfully? 179