Page 44 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

16 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
students study the ways people in each community carry out basic human activities (cultural universals), such as providing for their physical needs, transporting goods and people, communicating with one another, and governing their societies.
Children would begin with small, familiar communities and then study the same issues in larger, less familiar communities. If implemented as Hanna envisioned, the expanding com- munities approach would produce systematic social studies instruction structured around powerful ideas. However, elementary social studies texts that supposedly implement the model have been criticized as ill-structured collections of factual expositions and skills exer- cises that follow the letter but not the spirit of Hanna’s recommendations.
The expanding communities approach also has been criticized for being dull and boring; being too traditional and middle-class oriented in its treatment of families and communities; being sequenced according to adult rather than child logic (for example, a state is just as abstract a concept as a nation, so there is no reason why children must study the state before studying the nation); fragmenting the curriculum so that students do not get enough opportunity to see relationships that exist across communities; and failing to inte- grate skills instruction with instruction in content (Akenson, 1989; Frazee & Ayers, 2003).
Recently, efforts to interpret the expanding communities approach more broadly have led to shifts in content coverage (e.g., from a focus on Me and My Community to My Community and Other Communities in the Nation and World) in some of the newer curriculum documents around the country. Yet the expanding communities approach remains fairly entrenched. It is familiar to teachers and so far has proven adaptable enough to incorporate new content, embrace a range of curricular and instruc- tional approaches, and respond to some criticisms without changing its basic structure.
Whether or not the expanding communities approach as spelled out in the textbook is identified as the culprit, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the curriculum content and instructional materials associated with this framework. Most of this criticism is focused on the primary grades and the textbooks that typically define the curriculum. Critiques of instructional materials including the teachers’ guides indicate that its content is not driven by coherent social education goals (Haas & Laughlin, 2001; Howard, 2003; VanFossen, 2005). There is broad agreement that the content base of K–3 social studies is thin and redundant and that most of this content, at least as it is presented in the text- books, is trite, uninteresting, and either already known by students or likely to be learned by them through everyday experience (and thus not worth teaching in school).
A major reason for these problems is that the textbook series fail to articulate K–3 social studies as a coherent subject designed to develop connected sets of fundamental understandings about the social world and to move students toward clearly identified social education goals. As a result, many elementary teachers view (and teach) social studies as a collection of disconnected content and skill clusters rather than as a coher- ent, goal-oriented curriculum composed of connected networks of knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions to action. A different set of problems arises with upper-grade social studies as typically the content is dense, laden with isolated facts, and with few authentic connections to students’ everyday lives.
As you can see, there are many competing ways social studies is taught. In your own classroom, how you teach social studies will be guided by your position regarding your perspective and goals for social studies, by your state’s, school district’s and school’s
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Guiding Questions for Selecting an Approach to Teaching Social Studies