2 posts tagged “social studies”

The research article that I read was "The 'Building Tasks' of Critical History: Structuring Social Studies for Social Justice" by Wayne Au. It was published in Social Studies Research and Practice in July of this year. In the article, Au looks at two case study lesson plans by social studies teachers who actively seek to raise the consciousness of their students around social justice issues. The author utilizes discourse analysis where people "use language to operationalize certain 'building tasks' in order to express meaning, ideology, values, and other aspects of our identities in a given situation." Au concluded that these lesson plans were quality classroom pedagogical devices due to their service as vehicles for students to critically question social relations historically and in the present-day context. In doing so, he dismissed the claims of some that lesson plans stifle the true learning process by assuming that the planning and executing instruction occurs in some sort of linear fashion to a "predetermined endpoint."

Social studies is the academic revelaing of people and their interactions near and far, throughout time and space, from minute households to expansive continents. It encompasses a wide range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, history, and geography to name but a few. Social studies is a primary means of cultural diffusion and is perhaps the most controversial of any major academic subject areas in the U.S. or abroad today. Its ability to profoundly influence not only individuals and their perceptions of self and other but groups' perceptions as well makes it invaluable to nations, academic institutions, corporations, and other large bodies in their constant pursuit of training and re-training citizens for their specific purposes.

Very often, social studies courses from the elementary to the secondary levels of education are thought of simply as history courses. This is understandable, to an extent, as the history of economics or political science or anthropology can reflect the interactions of people and groups of people both over time and at specific moments in time. However, this intransigent understanding of social studies can be highly misleading to individuals who would like to look at human interactions over time through the lens of the distribution of goods and services or the mental processes and permutations that influence human action every minute of each day. Thus, a broader definition of social studies allows us to pursue these other angles of studying people and their interactions how individuals best see fit for themselves.