Powerful Social Studies Unit Design: A Companion to Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Social studies education suffers from a distorted rendering of purpose and mission. Rather than pragmatically employ the social sciences to furnish the material for inquiry into normative and moral issues, social studies classrooms too often focus on declarative, disconnected, atomized, and meaningless content. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has responded to this problem with suggestions for Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning (PSST&L) to ensure meaningful, active, value-based, challenging, and integrative learning experiences. Yet, unless teachers consciously and deliberately coordinate learning experiences within the course and its units, the goals of PSST&L may very well be neglected. In response to this problem, this article seeks to advance the idea of Powerful Social Studies Unit Design (PSSUD), which positions teachers to work as curricularists in order to negotiate the hazards of textbooks and standards and design macrocurricula in issued-centered, project-based, thematic, and reverse-chronological ways to ultimately reclaim the social studies and citizenship education from the tyranny of the social sciences.