Page 41 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 1 Elementary Social Studies: What Is It? What Might It Become? 13
and presenting a play, producing a newspaper, creating a marketing brochure, or making a presentation to the public.
One example of project-based learning, developed by Halvorsen and her colleague, Nell K. Duke, is a project about making improvements to a community park. Students visit the park, take photographs, and make observations about what needs improvement. They learn about how both citizens and the local government are responsible for main- tenance and improvement of the park. They survey community members to determine which proposed improvements are of most importance. They then present the results of their survey and offer their suggestions for enacting the improvement to members of the city’s parks and recreation department. The teacher provides explicit teaching and scaffolding of target skills within the context of the project making teaching and learning relevant to students’ everyday lives and grounded in their prior knowledge and experiences, characteristics that appear to lead to deeper learning and engagement in social studies.
Service Learning The idea behind service learning is that students serve to learn. Their community work is related to the school curriculum (e.g., core knowledge, cultural universals, disciplinary knowledge), and as a result of their efforts they acquire insights regarding their local communities. The main distinction between service learning and community service is that service learning puts the emphasis on learning while commu- nity service emphasizes service. Service learning integrates community service into the classroom instruction. The content is drawn from the disciplines, core knowledge, cultural universals, or other specified curricular approach while community service focuses on volunteering and may or may not be connected to the school curriculum (Boyle-Baise, McClain, & Montgomery, 2010).
In 1988, the National Service-Learning Cooperative (1998) identified Essential Elements of ServiceLearning, which included clear goals for learning, interaction with community members, collaboration, reflection and diversity. In 2001, Rahima Wade (2001) added a set of guidelines known as Principles of Social Justice Oriented Service Learning. In her recommendations, students are at the center; issues must be relevant to them, and they should participate in the development of the service learning project. Boyle-Baise (2002) has proposed still another way of approaching service learning, emphasizing social justice through a multicultural lens. It empha- sizes service-for-change that builds community, affirms diversity, and questions inequality. Boyle-Baise’s stance regarding multicultural service learning embodies the notion of working with, not for, community people on projects they define; values diversity in its topics, relationships and partnerships; and promotes service projects that are anti-racist, inclusive, and socially just (Boyle-Baise, McClain, & Montgomery, 2010, p. 41). For more information on this example of service learning, examine the Banneker History Project (Boyle-Baise & Binford, 2005). Service learn- ing is not monolithic. Academic goals are primary, and while the focus is on integrating service and classroom instruction, it includes service as charity, for civics, and for change. The challenge is to engage students in ways that can make a differ- ence in the world.
Table 1.1 displays the ways in which a curricular approach can be taught in conjunc- tion with two instructional approaches, with a focus on a basic human need: food. In the first column, we explore the powerful ideas associated with food through the curricular approach, cultural universals. In the second and third columns, we show how two instruc- tional approaches, narrative and service learning, can be used to teach the powerful ideas about food.
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.