Page 288 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

260 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
studies curriculum (although you might want to include it as part of the curriculum for the other subject involved, if it promotes progress toward that subject’s major goals). The following are examples of integration activities that we view as inappropriate for use in social studies.
Activities That Lack or Mask Social Studies Education Goals
Most of the ill-conceived forms of integration that we have seen suggested for social studies classrooms involve activities in which the content or skills from other subjects dominates (Brophy & Alleman, 1991). Often these activities lack significant value in any subject and are just pointless busywork (alphabetizing state capitals, counting the number of states included in each of several geographical regions). Others may have value as literacy activities but do not belong in the social studies curriculum (e.g., exercises that make use of social studies content but focus on pluralizing singular nouns, finding the main idea in a paragraph, matching synonyms, using the dictio- nary). Others are potentially useful as vehicles for pursuing significant social education goals, but are structured with so much emphasis on the literacy aspects that the social education purpose is unclear. We believe that these activities are not cost effective uses of social studies time.
One fourth-grade social studies manual suggested assigning students to write research papers on coal. The instructions emphasized teaching the mechanics of doing the inves- tigation and writing the paper. There was little mention of social education goals or major social studies understandings such as “humans have unlimited wants but limited resources,” or “policy issues such as conservation of natural resources or development of energy alternatives need to be considered in order to protect our existing resources.” With the task conceived narrowly and the focus on research and report writing, it is unlikely that the 25 or so individual reports would yield enough variety to allow students to benefit from one another’s work. Consequently, the social education value of this assignment would be minimal and its cost effectiveness would be diluted further because of the considerable time required to obtain and read content sources, copy or paraphrase data, and make presentations to the class.
Cost-Effectiveness Problems
A lesson you will learn early on as a teacher is that often activities (especially hands- on activities) take far longer than you think. These kinds of activities require a great deal of time preparing the materials, setting up the materials for use, enacting the activity, cleaning up the materials, and displaying the final products. Sometimes activities become so hands-on that there is little time left for learning the social studies content. We encourage you to think carefully whether the activity you are planning to do is a good use of time, especially social studies time, which is often limited in the classroom.
Similar masking of social studies education goals and ignoring the time factor occurred in a unit on families, in which students were asked to recreate their families by portraying each member using a paper plate decorated with construction paper, cray- ons, and yarn. The plates were to be used to “introduce” family members to the class, and then later combined to make murals. Although this activity might lead to an attrac- tive display for the classroom wall, it is time consuming and also structured to emphasize the artistic dimensions rather than the social studies dimensions. We doubt that art teachers would support this activity as appropriate for art classes either.
In a unit on shelter, students were asked to construct examples of homes in tropical areas of the world. Again, such an activity would take a great deal of time, especially if authentic building materials were used. We fear that the emphasis would focus on
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