Page 290 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

262 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
carries an undertone suggesting that friendship is strictly conditional. These are not values we wish to instill in our social studies teaching.
Difficult or Impossible Tasks
Ill-conceived integration attempts sometimes require students to do things that are diffi- cult, if not impossible, to accomplish. In a fifth-grade unit focusing on the U.S. economy, students were asked to demonstrate their understanding of the joint stock company by diagramming its structure to show relationships and flow among the company, stocks, stockholders, and profits. Besides being a distraction from the main ideas of the unit, this activity seems ill-considered because the operations of a joint stock company, although relatively easy to explain verbally, are difficult to depict unambiguously in a diagram.
Other examples of strange, difficult, or even impossible integration tasks that we have observed include asking students to use pantomime to communicate one of the six reasons for the U.S. Constitution as stated in the Preamble; asking students to draw “hungry” and “curious” faces as part of a unit on feelings; and role playing life in the White House as part of a unit on famous places. None of these activities reflect the key social education understandings of the units, and each will probably leave students confused or frustrated because it is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish unambiguously.
Feasibility Problems
Activities that call for integration should also be feasible within the constraints under which the teacher must work. Certain activities are not feasible because they are too expensive, require space or equipment that is unavailable, involve exceptionally noisy construction work, or pose risks to the physical safety or emotional security of students. For example, an activity attempting to integrate geography, physical education, and music called for the teacher to post the cardinal directions appropriately, then have the students line up and march around the room to music as the teacher called out “March north,” “March east,” and so on. Implementation of this activity in a classroom full of desks and other furniture would invite chaos and potential injury.
Summary
Curriculum integration should not be considered an end in itself but a means of accomplishing significant instruc- tional goals. Activities that feature integration across sub- jects should not be used anywhere in the curriculum if they lack one or more of the essential characteristics of goal relevance, appropriate level of difficulty, feasibility, and cost effectiveness. Furthermore, many integrating activities that do meet these criteria should not be included in the social studies curriculum because they do not support progress toward major social education goals. (Such activities might be appropriate for inclusion in the curriculum for literacy or some other subject.) Some topics addressed in social studies are naturally inte- grative, and others can benefit from integrated activities that involve using skills taught elsewhere to process or apply social studies content, to help make that content more concrete or personalized, or to add an important
affective dimension. We believe that most issues sur- rounding curricular integration will take care of them- selves if social studies teaching is organized around major social education goals and big ideas, because this will naturally lead to activities and assignments calling for students to use skills such as critical think- ing, data collection, and articulating and supporting arguments.
We acknowledge the value of productive forms of integration in social studies, but we suggest two caveats. First, content, skills, and activities included in the name of integration should be educationally significant and desirable even if they do not involve the across-subjects feature. Second, such content, skills, and activities should foster rather than disrupt or nullify the accomplishment of major social edu- cation goals.
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