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Rationale: Importance of Teaching Social Studies

Name: Joseph Smith

Professor: Dr. Alan Marcus

Class: Methods
Date: 12/13/16
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Rationale
Teachers in general have a vast amount of responsibility towards their students, however

I believe that a Social Studies teacher’s responsibilities are important in the goal of making sure

that students become participatory and forward moving citizens. A Social Studies class in

particular allows for students to evaluate moments in history and participate in inquiry processes

that can help forward a student’s decision-making ability. In order for students to reach this goal

in the classroom, a Social Studies teacher has the responsibility of providing students with

various tools that are necessary for students to progress in their understanding. Teaching Social

Studies may at times be misinterpreted as being a process in which students learn about different

events or key figures, and memorize the details of these events and figures as immobile facts. If

this is the reason that a Social Studies teacher believes Social Studies is important, then they are

missing out on an opportunity to expand a student’s knowledge and ability to participate in the

learning of history. With the expansion of this knowledge students will be better prepared to

make upright decisions in the future, and contribute in a positive way to their communities. This

idea of helping students to be molded into upstanding citizens is an overall goal of the learning

process and education, however I think that this goal places a lot of it’s responsibility on a Social

Studies classroom, in order to help students to learn about the past through multiple lenses and

through our successes and failures.

It is important for a Social Studies classroom to provide students with tools in which they

are promoted or encouraged to have their opinions valued in a place of multiple thoughts.

Thomas Levine brings up this point more eloquently in his short article titled, Social Studies as a

Community of Practice that enables Social Action. In this article, he talks about these tools that

schools should be given in order to promote students to “think objectively about their world and

decide for themselves whether and how they should resist injustice and engage in social action”
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(Levine 17). This objective thinking is definitely one of the keys that I would like to bring to my

classroom, however it is important to keep in mind that objective opinions should be welcomed,

as long as they do not offend others in the class. In order to evaluate whether an objective

opinion is harming others in class will likely be decided upon on an instance-to-instance basis.

Allowing objectivity will allow students to make decisions on if they believe injustices are

happening that need to be resisted. Giving them the tools to be objective, also allows students to

feel a special sense of worth, as Levine tells his readers that the Social Studies classroom has the

potential to have “students learn the power and joy of having a voice, having agency and being

able to change the world” (Levine 19). These ideals of social engagement and the ability to

change the world hold a special potential in Social Studies courses, specifically when thinking of

history.

History is an extremely important component of the Social Studies classroom, and history

can be used in a way that will contribute to a student’s social engagement. Sam Wineburg, author

of the book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, talks about the uniqueness of a Social

Studies classroom and its importance for students. The importance of a Social Studies classroom

and history is that it “holds the potential, only partly realized, of humanizing us in ways offered

by few other areas in curriculum” (Wineburg 5). History is the story of humanity and if teachers

are able to open the classroom to different perspectives, then students will be able to understand

and empathize with others. Another important idea that Wineburg brings up is how they are able

to make sense of the past. While Wineburg tells us that most students have a natural curiosity

about different events in the past, teachers have to be aware of ways in which their curiosity can

be cultivated in a certain way (Wineburg 153). This cultivation by a Social Studies teacher

should never be to tell students how they are expected to think of the past, instead we should be
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“shedding light on how adolescents make sense of the past…engage their historical beliefs,

stretch them, and call them into question (Wineburg 250). By shedding this light on student’s

historical beliefs, teachers are promoting students to look at different occurrences in history

through lenses that may not be all too familiar with them. There is not a better time than during

high school years to have students learn about different perspectives and have their previous

beliefs questioned. An article titled Clio in the Classroom goes into depth about expanding

perspectives and increasing a student’s ability to question the way that we have learned about the

past. A Social Studies teacher has the special responsibility and privilege of giving students

access to various perspectives in different moments in histories, which in turn encourages

students to recognize perspectives on their own terms and even start looking for different

perspectives in daily life (Berkin 283). Seeing the past through different perspectives and

questioning different moments in history is the key component in the Social Studies classroom as

inquiry allows students to search for answers, misconceptions and further questions.

Having a Social Studies classroom that is centered upon inquiry allows students to in a

sense, “do history” and be involved in the learning process. By learning about history, students

can look over various errors in our history but also look at moments that they would likely find

agreeable. Keith Barton and Linda Levstik talk about this in their article Teaching History for the

Common, in which they talk about how a Social Studies classroom is important for promoting an

analytical experience. In their essay, they prescribe to this idea that “students should be able to

review moments in history and be able to judge the justification of a moment, at times

controversial” (Barton and Levstik 38). When doing this, students are learning an important tool

of decision-making, but when doing decision-making, students should be thinking about how

they can take these decisions into the public sphere. I would like to place an “emphasis on
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teaching students to reach private decisions as well as guiding them to take public action”

(Barton and Levstik 33), something that Barton and Levstik find significant. Moving into the

public sphere is something that was also brought up in Joel Westheimer’s article, Should Social

Studies Be Patriotic? This article showed the point that patriotism should happen in classrooms

but not patriotism that is a complete commitment to the leaders or the central government itself;

rather a commitment to the citizens and democratic values such as political participation, free

speech, civil liberties and political equality. In order to promote this democratic patriotism it is

important to encourage students to ask questions rather than to just look for answers

(Westheimer 317). Helping students to know what questions to ask and how to get involved are

keys in why Social Studies classrooms are of great importance.

When going through schooling, students are provided with various goals, and one of

those goals is to become able and productive citizens. I believe that Social Studies classrooms

are of utmost importance in trying to help students reach these goals, as history can humanize the

past and humanize a student’s learning process, which other classrooms cannot. As a teacher, if I

am able to promote social engagement and inquiry processes, then students are learning valuable

decision-making skills, which can at times be lost because of the amount of details that history

provides about the past. By showing students different perspectives and trying to forward their

empathy towards various groups of people, then I believe that we can trust our students to make

strong decisions that will help to act against injustice. Engaging students in history and allowing

them to discover different questions or misconceptions they may have will hopefully lead to

more social engagement, something that is of the highest importance for why I would like to not

only teach Social Studies, but be a teacher in general.

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Reference List

Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L. S. (2004). Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Berkin, C., Crocco, M., & Winslow, B. (2009). Clio in the classroom: A guide for teaching U.S.
women's history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levine, T (n.d.) ‘A small group of thoughtful, committed citizens’: Social studies classrooms as
communities of practice that enable social action. University of Connecticut.

Westheimer, J. (2009). Social Education 73(7). Should Social Studies be Patriotic. New York:
National Council for Social Studies.

Wineburg, S. S. (2001). Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of
Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.