Social Studies Unit Research Articles

Conflicting Discourses

This article provides micro analysis of one representative incident from a larger qualitative study to examine how third-grade bilingual students and their teacher negotiated academic disciplinary and popular culture discourses in a social studies unit on Jamestown and Pocahontas. Informed by discourse and linguistic analyses, this study explores the competing dominant and nondominant discourses as they intersected and overlapped in the complex literacy practices in this classroom. Ms. Montclair’s instruction was shaped by the textbook’s approach to social studies and accountability pressures of testing and content coverage. Yet the students drew from everyday popular resources in their thinking, taking up nonacademic discourses to understand content. This research explores the following questions: (a) What are the predominant discourses evident in the official curricular text and teacher’s enactment of it? (b) What are the discourses evident in children’s everyday resources drawn on to make sense of the school text? (c) How do specific linguistic features make possible these discourses and perspectives? Findings demonstrate that students navigated across multiple discourses that were different but represented dominant culture. As discourses intersected in class, participants provided a level of critical analyses but did not deeply take up nondominant perspectives despite their own positioning from linguistically and culturally nondominant backgrounds. By showing the complexity of literate and discursive practice, this article contributes to understandings of how bilingual and English language learner students confront the demands of academic disciplinary language, draw on their own resources to make sense of content, and require explicit instruction on language and social justice.

Process of Introducing "Unit of work" at the Elementary School Attached to Tokyo Second Normal School : The Role of Developing a Social Studies Unit Plan in Experimental Schools Designated by Text-book Bureau of the Ministry of Education

Process of Introducing "Unit of work" at the Elementary School Attached to Tokyo Second Normal School : The Role of Developing a Social Studies Unit Plan in Experimental Schools Designated by Text-book Bureau of the Ministry of Education

Using focus groups to support conceptual development in social studies

What supports students to develop their conceptual understanding? Taking part in focus groups helped the Years 9 and 10 Maori and Pasifika students in this study to focus on understanding the concepts underpinning social studies units, rather than the content. Discussions between students in the focus groups resulted in the students clarifying their understandings and gave formative information to the teacher to help plan next steps.

Developing a Social Studies Units in Experimental Schools Designated by Textbook Bureau of the Ministry of Education

Developing a Social Studies Units in Experimental Schools Designated by Textbook Bureau of the Ministry of Education

Whose Immigration Story?: Attending to Hidden Messages of Material in Social Studies

Sometimes materials used in schools with good intentions can have effects opposite from those stated. Through the microscopic analysis of a parentstudent immigration interview assignment on a social studies unit on immigration, this article aims to uncover the hidden story that underlies the questions asked. In so doing, it intends not only to problematize the promotion of a simplistic and outdated narrative but also to use this analysis as a foundation for the development of a counter-narrative of complex and up-to-date attention to immigration. The article concludes with a developing checklist for evaluating existing and new material related to immigration.

“You May Now Close Your Textbooks”

Teacher Jennifer Tyler shares her experience of creating a text set for a social studies unit on colonial America.

Universal Design: Online Educational Media for Students with Disabilities

For students with disabilities, using the online educational media employed in most general education classrooms may be challenging, since much mainstream programming is not accessible. Online educational media take the form of integrated learning modules that contain content to enhance students' learning and support teachers' instruction. For students, each integrated learning module typically includes a full-length educational video and additional educational materials (such as still images, related articles, links to relevant web sites, self-study assessments, and activities). For example, the sample integrated learning module in the Universal eLearner (the Internet-based educational materials that are discussed next) contains a vocabulary list, a story, a story quiz, a video, three student activities, and a unit quiz. These online activities are designed to provide a comprehensive learning unit on a topic or to supplement traditional classroom instruction. Research has underscored the effectiveness of integrated learning modules in improving test scores in math (Taylor, 1999) and science (Cantrell, Pekcan, & Itani, 2006), but such modules are available in almost all content areas and at all educational levels from elementary school to postgraduate programs. The Universal eLearner is an online integrated learning module, under development, that incorporates accessible technology, universal design for learning, and best practices for online education. The American Foundation for the Blind and Bridge Multimedia have just completed a three-year grant through the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education, to develop and test the latest version of the Universal eLearner. The Universal eLearner, although not a finished product, has been developed and fieldtested with students with disabilities (including those with visual impairments, hearing impairments, orthopedic impairments, and learning disabilities), as well as students who are English language and typically developing students. The evaluations conducted under the grant focused on the accessibility and usability of the Universal eLearner to provide feedback to the development team to improve the product further. An advisory board, consisting of professionals and consumers with all forms of disabilities, has also contributed their expertise to the development of the Universal eLearner. The prototype versions of the Universal eLearner are designed for an upper elementary school social studies unit using educational materials from the Pearson Digital Learning Knowledge Box series, but many of the outcomes of the testing of the Universal eLearner are applicable to integrated learning modules for any grade level and in any subject area. This report presents some of the outcomes from the grant-funded project to help professionals understand the needs of students with disabilities in relation to integrated learning modules and to offer suggestions for anyone who is developing universally accessible online educational programming. WHO BENEFITS FROM UNIVERSAL ACCESSIBILITY? When products are created using universal design, the needs of people with physical and sensory disabilities are taken into account and accessibility features and options are built into the product (Flores, 2008). In the classroom, specialized learners include not only students who are blind or have low vision, students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and students with physical disabilities, but also students with learning disabilities, English language learners, and students with cognitive impairments. Each group faces its own significant learning challenges. Traditionally, students with all forms of disabilities have been provided instructional materials that have been designed for typical students, not those that have been adapted to meet their needs. These students also often receive instructional materials that are targeted exclusively toward students in their disability group that do not match the general education curriculum in rigor and content, which increases costs for school systems. …

Using Web 2.0 tools in the K-12 classroom

From blogs to wikis, invite Web 2.0 tools into the classroom. In this invaluable resource you ll find a host of Web 2.0 tools available on the Internet today, plus teaching and learning strategies to use them in the K-12 classroom. Language arts, science, and social studies unit lesson plans included in each chapter exemplify topics at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Each chapter focuses on a specific Web 2.0 tool: Blogs high school science study; Podcasts immigrant topic for the elementary classroom; Wikis learning about novels in high school; Video/digital storytelling about energy; Google tools (e.g., Google Earth, Maps, Docs) current events in social studies; VoiceThread language learning for non-native speakers; Social bookmarking Earth Day projects. Each chapter incorporates a glossary; a description of the particular tool; examples of its use in the K-12 curriculum; how to get started, and a unit plan focused on learning strategies. Exercises in each chapter reinforce the concepts. Readers get a complete listing of all Web sites mentioned plus access to a Web site for exercises, new URLs, and more. Teachers will want to check this out of your library too!

Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture Claudia Mills (bio) Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture. By Anita Clair Fellman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Don't get her wrong: Anita Clair Fellman loves the Little House books. She shared the series with both of her sons, reading as slowly as possible, struggling against tears, willing the books never to end. She can't wait to introduce her well-worn, boxed paperback set of the books to her grandchildren. But it's also clear that the "long shadow" of the title refers not only to Fellman's assessment of Wilder's monumental influence on American culture but also to what she plainly regards as the darker side of that influence. Fellman's book is itself a monumental undertaking, many years in the making; it is an innovative blend of literary criticism, historical analysis, and reader response theory. The first half of the book engagingly recounts the creation of the Little House books, calling attention to the ways in which Wilder, and her collaborator daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, deliberately deviated from the historical truth of young Laura's life to shape the series in a libertarian and individualist direction. The second half of the book offers an extremely impressive survey of the ways the Little House books have been used in schools, read in homes, [End Page 70] and disseminated throughout popular culture. Fellman is scrupulous in making disclaimers about what she can and cannot hope to achieve through this magisterial work: her study can "never be more than suggestive"; she lacks "postelection polls in which voters tell us that they were guided by the lessons of the Little House books" (4). But the case she constructs here, in its painstaking accumulation of detail, is compelling. The book's central argumentative chapter, "Revisiting the Little House," documents the numerous ways in which Wilder and Lane reshaped events from Laura's own life to highlight the themes of individualism, self-sufficiency, and anti-statism. Although the Ingalls family socialized frequently with relatives during their time in Wisconsin, Little House in the Big Woods portrays the family as living in almost complete isolation, with holiday visits a rare treat. In The Long Winter the family lives alone, whereas they actually shared a home with another couple; Pa is praised for his ingenuity in figuring out how to burn hay and grind wheat, whereas all the De Smet families used these strategies to survive. Most shocking (to me), the Dakota Territory actually provided the funding to pay for Mary's college education, with Laura's earnings contributing only toward Mary's incidental expenses. What?! It wasn't Laura's unremitting, selfless toil that put Mary through college, but the government? Fellman notes that Wilder and Lane had valid artistic reasons for making many of these changes: "the demands of the novel form would have compelled changes, both in the interests of drama and in the convention of a focalizing character through whose eyes the reader sees the story" (117). It is not "the deviation from the facts that is noteworthy here," Fellman argues, "it is the pattern of the deviation" (117): This pattern reveals Wilder and Lane's desire to portray the Ingalls family through the lens of a Turneresque mythology about the American frontier and to transmit the libertarian, individualist values dear to their own hearts. Why this is problematic, according to Fellman, becomes clear in the second half of the book. The Little House books have become a staple of the American elementary school curriculum (less so in recent years, as concerns have been raised about the books' depiction of Native Americans); they are included in numerous basal readers, shared in classroom read-alouds, and featured in social studies units on the pioneer experience. Wilder and Lane both insisted that the stories were true, with Wilder claiming that for every story in the series, "all the circumstances, each incident are true." Lane concurred: "They are the truth and only the truth." (78). Taught in the classroom as American history, "their mythic view of the past often receives the...

Integrating science curricula in the middle school: Utilizing historical perspectives

Science curriculum outcomes at the middle school level are typically associated with the decontextualized science found in textbooks and teacher resources. However, the typical middle years classroom with a single teacher is an ideal setting for an integrated approach to learning science in the context of social studies, language arts, art, and other subject areas. In this paper, we describe the first phase of a three-phase integrated curriculum project. The curriculum uses an historical perspective, narratives, and a student-centred approach to create materials that integrate the Grade 5 Science weather cluster with the Grade 5 Social Studies unit on the Canadian fur trade. Risk factors that contribute to inadequate science teaching and learning are identified and several protective factors that contribute to teacher efficacy are advanced.

Center Stage: Arts-Based Read-Alouds

Arts-based literacy instruction can qualitatively change teaching and learning. This article opens with vignettes of two classroom teachers who use music and drama as core strategies to introduce, develop, and follow-up on a reading lesson during an integrated social studies unit. These examples introduce an expanded definition of literacy that includes use of language and the arts as equal communication partners. A case is presented for arts-based literacy, and the author cites a significant research base that connects arts integration to academic, personal, and social gains. She goes on to explain the process of collaborative arts-based literacy planning, showing how a team of teachers selects specific music, visual art, drama, and dance strategies to develop a book's “big ideas” or themes. Arts strategies are then used as processes to help students make meaning before, during, and after reading.

Renew! Take a break in kindergarten

A university child development/early childhood education professor renews her relationship with young children and with current public school teaching by spending 5 weeks in kindergarten. This article describes some highlights of her experience: the children's daily journal writing, an in‐class and take‐home math activity, and teaching the required kindergarten social studies unit on Antarctica. The experience provided renewal for the professor and fresh examples for the professor to share with her university students.

Teaching to Their Thinking: A Strategy to Meet the Critical-Thinking Needs of Gifted Students

Critical thinking is important for lessons in classes for gifted and talented students. Since definitions of critical thinking are plentiful and varied, teachers must decide what behaviors are most productive in the classroom. One viable method to promote critical thinking through productive discussion is the Dixon-Hegelian method. This paper discusses the merits of this method and describes a classroom that used it. The teacher is introduced and her growth in allowing critical thinking to take place is described. This descriptive study was conducted in a combined 4th- and 5th-grade class of identified gifted students. The students were taught an integrated language arts and social studies unit using two major texts: The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Speare, 1986) and A Girl of the Limberlost (Porter, 1986).

Teaching Students How to Think Critically: The Confederate Flag Controversy in the High School Social Studies Classroom

The racially tinged Confederate flag debate in South Carolina is viewed as a signifier of more popular struggles over the representation of "southern heritage" and under girds the social studies unit described in this paper. The unit was designed to teach the curriculum from a popular cultural, issues-oriented perspective using critical pedagogical techniques. Using the Confederate battle flag as an organizing theme, the unit's substantive components include critical and reflective exercises such as journaling, debating, writing essays, researching, and role-playing. Both traditional assessment strategies as well as alternative assessment strategies (e.g., portfolio development, free-writes, and performances) were used to determine students' learning and interests. The unit was taught in a conservative, rural, working-class, majority White, upstate South Carolina school setting. This approach enabled the students within the blue-collar population to think critically and reflectively about their own positions, privileges, attitudes, beliefs, and "heritages," as well as see that democracy in action is painful at times, messy, and even embarrassing, but necessary if society is to reach inclusive compromises.

The Effects of Cooperative Learning on Students with Learning Difficulties in the Lower Elementary School

This study investigated the behaviors, interactions, and learning outcomes of children with learning difficulties who participated in structured and unstructured group activities. Of the 152 Grade 3 children who worked in four-person, gender-balanced groups, 22 children were identified as having learning difficulties requiring up to 3 hours of specialist teacher support for their learning each week. The children worked in their groups for one 6-week social studies unit of work each term for three school terms. The results showed that the children in the structured groups were more involved in group activities and provided more directions and help to other group members than their peers in the unstructured groups. Furthermore, children in the structured groups obtained a significantly higher performance on the comprehension questionnaire than children in the unstructured groups (effect size = +1.43 standard deviations). Reasons for these differences are discussed.

The Anatomy of Memory in the Classroom: Understanding How Students Acquire Memory Processes From Classroom Activities in Science and Social Studies Units

This article is concerned with understanding how the recall required of students during typical science and social study units might shape the development of their memory. The recall required of students of a visiting speaker's talk in an integrated science and social studies unit on Antarctica is analyzed and related to the context of activities in which it was embedded. It was found that the students' recall exhibited genre-like patterning that could be related to the ways the teacher structured and guided the students' involvement in recall activities and to the interactions between the students themselves. However, the genre analysis failed to account for the continuities and discontinuities in what students recalled in successive classroom activities. An alternative schema-based model of the way students processed their experiences in working memory and created new knowledge in long-term memory was used to explain how students recalled the visiting speaker's talk. In the final section, it is argued that the processes by which students acquire and remember new knowledge are the product of internalizing the genre-like structures they use and experience during classroom recall activities. The implications of this analysis for revising and expanding our views of what students learn from classroom experiences are identified.

The Role of Memory in the Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge in Science and Social Studies Units

This article examines how students remember what they learn and how they learn. Students in science and social studies units in upper elementary classrooms were tested on unit-specific curriculum content before and after the units, and again 12 months later. They were interviewed about their memory for their learning experiences soon after the tests. The evidence suggests that students use a long-term working memory for sorting, interpreting, and integrating representations of classroom experiences as they acquire knowledge and skills from those experiences. When students recalled their classroom experiences 12 months later, details were replaced by inferences and summaries; direct recollection was replaced by deductions from related generic schemas. Memory systems for knowledge structures and activity scripts for other aspects of their classroom experiences interacted so that students' memory for what they learned was inextricably connected to how they learned. Recollection is described as a recursive problem-solving process guided by the knowledge structures and scripts that were implicated in the creation of the original representations and knowledge constructs. It is argued that the memory systems through which students process their classroom experience are acquired through the internalization of classroom activity structures.

The maintenance of cooperative and helping behaviours in cooperative groups.

This study was a full-year investigation of whether children, who had previously been trained to cooperate and help each other, were able to use these behaviours in reconstituted groups without additional training one year later. (i) To examine whether children who have previously been trained to cooperate demonstrate more cooperative and helping behaviours in their groups than children who had no been trained and (ii) to determine the effect of prior training on children's learning. The study involved 144 Grade 2 children (mean age = 94.5 months; third year of schooling), from nine schools in a similar socio-demographic area of Brisbane, Australia. Sixty-four children, who had been trained in cooperative group behaviours in the previous year, were assigned to the Trained groups and 80 children, who had not received any training, were assigned to the Untrained groups. The children worked in four-person, mixed-ability (high-, medium-, and low-ability), gender-balanced groups (2 males, 2 females) for one six-week social studies unit of work each term for three school terms. Videotaping occurred in the 5-6 week of each work unit. Videotapes were coded for behaviour and verbal interactions. Learning outcomes data were also collected. The children in the trained groups exhibited more cooperative behaviour and they provided more explanations, both in response to explicit and implicit requests for help across the three periods of time. The children in the trained groups used higher level cognitive strategies such as providing specific concrete facts and reasons in their interactions and they also obtained higher scores on the learning outcomes questionnaire than their untrained peers. Young children who have been trained to cooperate and help each other are able to demonstrate these behaviours in reconstituted groups without additional training a year later.

Issues-Centered Instruction in the Elementary Social Studies Classroom

There is discussion in the literature on issues-centered education about the desirability and feasibility of using issues-centered approaches in elementary classrooms. This article describes the experience of three 5–6th grade elementary teachers and their students with a social studies unit taught using the Engle-Ochoa Decision-Making model. The teachers and students' reactions are described and analyzed. The authors conclude with a discussion about how issues-centered education can work in elementary classrooms and suggest some topics social studies educators should discuss with their pre-service and in-service teachers as they prepare them for teaching with issues-centered approaches.

The Anatomy of Memory in the Classroom: Understanding How Students Acquire Memory Processes from Classroom Activities in Science and Social Studies Units

The Anatomy of Memory in the Classroom: Understanding How Students Acquire Memory Processes from Classroom Activities in Science and Social Studies Units