Page 285 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 12 What Is the Role of Curricular Integration? 257
Another activity in a unit focusing on early America calls for students to read a pri- mary or secondary source document of Paul Revere’s ride and compare it with the more romanticized, less accurate version in Longfellow’s poem. In addition to being a natural and useful incorporation of poetry, this document-comparison lesson is a worthwhile activity for helping students to understand some of the ways in which history and fiction differ in goals, formats, credibility, processes, and products.
If you were teaching a unit on neighborhood or community, you might introduce the poem entitled “The General Store” (Field, 1991). Have the students listen to the poem and imagine what the store looks like and determine if it is old or new. Questions to personalize the learning might include “Would you rather shop with your family in a general store or a modern one? Why? What do the two types of stores have in common? Where could we go to find a general store? Why? Why are general stores disappearing? How is the modern store that your family shops in different?”
Literature has potential for deepening cognitive and affective dimensions of the con- tent, but it may introduce problems that you would prefer to avoid. Following are several questions you can use to guide your decision making: Does the literature source:
• Match the social education goals for the lesson and unit?
• Offer sufficient value as a source for social education activities to justify the social
studies time allotted for it?
• Seem to be of appropriate length given the social knowledge that needs to be included
for adequate sense-making?
• Enhance meaning and not trivialize the content?
• Reflect authenticity and promote understanding of the content?
• Enrich social studies understandings as well as promote language arts or other
subject-matter content or skills?
• Avoid misconceptions, unnecessarily shallow interpretations, or stereotypes in its
depictions of people and events?
Visual Arts From ancient times to the present, people have expressed their thoughts and feelings through various art forms. As such, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and architecture are excellent artifacts for integration combining anthropological and his- torical studies. Geographical features have always inspired painters, and native peoples, frontier people, trappers, and others have provided fresh material as well. Early painters tended to see the land and people through their own eyes or through the places they were educated. This continues to be a pattern for some contemporary painters as well.
Activities that integrate art with social studies when connected to social education goals help to personalize the time and place being studied. For example, in a unit on France, students are asked to study Monet reprints, describe how he viewed France, identify the places he painted on a map of France, and examine other paintings of the time, and analyze why his paintings, and the paintings of other Impressionists, were so heavily criti- cized. This activity is followed by one in which students study both his early and later paintings and try to figure out the time period depicted in each painting, citing evidence (e.g., style and subject of the painting) to support or reject their hypotheses.
Integrating art into the social studies curriculum can be useful when teaching geographic understandings or a specific historical period. We suggest you provide students with paintings—usually prints—that capture significant elements of place or time. Encourage students to discuss their observations using a set of guiding questions: What do you see? What does the painting suggest about the place or the historical period or event? Is it an accurate representation? Explain. Another strategy that is useful for examining paintings (particularly those with a lot of activity going on in them) is to divide the painting into
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