Page 289 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 12 What Is the Role of Curricular Integration? 261
accomplishing constructions instead of understanding and appreciating the impact of climate and local geography on living conditions.
Cost-effectiveness problems are also embedded in collage and scrapbook activities that call for a lot of cutting and pasting of pictures, but not much thinking or writing about ideas linked to major social education goals. We encourage you to think about all “hands-on” activities as also being “minds-on.” Instructions for such activities are often given in ways that focus students on the processes involved in carrying out the activities rather than on the powerful ideas that the activities are supposed to develop, and the final products often are evaluated on the basis of criteria such as artistic appeal. For example, one activity called for students to cut out pictures of clothing and paste them under categories such as wool, linen, cotton, and polyester. Students could spend a sub- stantial amount of time on this “hands-on” activity without learning anything important about the history, origins, or economics of different fabrics.
We believe that the time spent on integrated activities must be assessed against the time quotas allocated to the subject in ways that reflect the cost effectiveness of the activities as a means of accomplishing the subject’s major goals. Ask yourself, “Is this integrated activity the best choice given the limited time allocated for social studies?” Also, keep in mind that cognitive/affective engagement need not be “hands on;” in fact, “hands-on” doing can sometimes be a hindrance to “minds-on” learning.
Content Distortion
Attempts at integration sometimes distort the ways that social studies is represented or developed. For example, a unit on clothing included a lesson on uniforms that called for students to make puppets of people dressed in uniforms. The teacher was to set up situa- tions where two puppets would meet and tell each other about the uniforms they were wearing. This activity is problematic because it is time consuming, emphasizes art activi- ties instead of social studies content, and calls for knowledge not developed in the lesson (which provided only brief information about the uniforms worn by firefighters and astronauts). Most fundamentally, however, it is problematic because it results in a great deal of social studies time being spent on uniforms, a topic that at best deserves only passing mention as a basic human need in a unit on clothing.
Content distortion was also observed in a unit on pioneer life that included a sequencing-skills exercise linked to an illustration of five steps involved in building log cabins. The last three steps in the sequence were arbitrarily imposed rather than logically necessary, and in any case they did not correspond to what was shown in the illustration. It appeared that the text authors wanted to include an exercise in sequential ordering somewhere in the curriculum, and they chose this lesson as the place to include it rather than seeing the exercise as important for developing key knowledge about pioneer life.
Often when literature is inserted into social studies textbooks, selections run several pages and exceed the space allotted for covering the content, causing many units to look more like language arts than social studies. Worse, the selections often focus on trivial and peripheral aspects of social studies. We encourage you to always keep in mind the social studies content you wish to teach when using children’s literature.
Some even contradict intended goals or create stereotypes. For example, The Little Red Hen (Galdone, 1991) is a poor choice for a unit on friendship because it conflates personal friendship with prosocial and Golden Rule behavior. In the story, the Little Red Hen calls her friends to solicit their help in planting and harvesting a field of wheat. Her friends refuse to help her, so when it is time to eat the fruits of her labor, she refuses to share. The story features characters that are unhelpful and spiteful and
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