EDU 375: Teaching Elementary Social Studies (UG)

I taught Teaching Elementary Social Studies each semester from Fall 2004 through Fall 2007. The course is currently not being offered to new undergraduate students because of programmatic restructuring. However, because I prepared the course and taught it for seven semesters, I have decided to include some course information and reflection of my teaching and learning experiences related to it in my portfolio.

This undergraduate methods course focused on elementary social studies content and the effective pedagogical practices needed to maximize all students' learning. I was and still am interested in teaching this course's content because I found it important and worthwhile to weave social justice topics in to its content. Therefore, when I prepared to teach this course, I incorporated texts such as Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1998) and Bigelow & Peterson's Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) to portray history from multiple perspectives.

I structured the organization of the course's content in the following ways: Students began the class by inquiring into the different power structures that are part of our diverse society  - including diversity topics such as race, gender, class, language, religion and ability to try to identify whose stories typically get told in traditional social studies textbooks and with traditional education methods. Students quickly realized that the dominate culture's story often gets told... and in our society, that is often from a European-American perspective.  I worked to have students inquire into their own notions of difference and how they learned (or didn't learn) what they know about diversity. This was and is an important aspect to this class because I've learned that students need to have time to reflect on their beliefs that they may hold as 'truths' so they can identify possible stereo-typed and biased perspectives that might not have been realized . Early community building activities and in-class discussions were helpful for students to begin to feel safe talking about differences. Once differences were discussed openly, students then began to understand the importance of learning about social studies content from more than one perspective. One of the goals that I have for students is to understand that, regardless of the social studies content that they would soon teach, it is critical that they teach from multiple perspectives.

In class, students also inquired into the notion of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a belief that more than one culture can live peacefully and equitably in one nation; when written in textbooks, that often seems simple to achieve. However, as we observe the world we live in, we can quickly notice many conflicts involving racial, religious, and class differences. Similar conflicts are also found in elementary classrooms today. In class, I asked students to inquire into the question: How can we use teaching materials and methods that can facilitate elementary students' understandings of multiculturalism? I've learned that it is essential that students respect and care for their classmates so they can learn from and with each other. I included cooperative learning activities in lessons that I taught so students were able to (1) identify the necessary social skills used when cooperating; and (2) interact socially so their content learning could be enhanced with the knowledge their peers shared with them.

When I began teaching this course, I was provided a syllabus with a clearly defined course description, well identified goals for students and a general outline of some assignments. I've created all of the assignment descriptions and corresponding grading rubrics for this course. To view my course syllabus, assignments and grading rubrics, please click here to visit the course website I created and click on the provided links to view my work for this course.

In class, students learned the importance of the National Council of Social Studies, the New York State Social Studies Standards, the NYS social studies core curriculum and the ways that the five social studies standards are exemplified at different elementary grade levels. I purposefully worked to make this course interdisciplinary in nature by including literacy (with the Children's Social Studies Literature Project - please click here to view a student work sample), science and health (with the Geo-Adventure activity students complete at Camp Huntington), math (with the Learning Center assignment - please click here to view a slideshow exemplifying this activity), and technology (with the Virtual Field Trip assignment - please click here to view a student work sample). This course's comprehensive assignment was for students to apply ways that social studies could be interdisciplinary in this way and created a social studies Unit Plan (please
click here to view a student work sample).

To better understand the assignments that I created for this class, please click here to view the course website's assignment descriptions you'd like to review. As you may have noticed, I added links as student references for what I considered to be excellent examples of students' assignments to this page for reference. There are also links for the course syllabus and calendar. One of the ways that I update the website was to add weekly notes for the course content discussed in class. By clicking on the Notes link, students could then choose a date to read course notes from the week. While weekly updating in-class notes took a considerable amount of time on my part, I believe that it was worthwhile. Students often told me that it was so valuable for their own review and learning. During the fall 2007 semester, I began to use WebCT as a tool to electronically publish my assignments, rubrics and in class notes. While certainly time consuming at first, I soon realized that WebCT also offered a tool for me to collect, grade and save students' work samples for future reference. This added online tool proved to be more useful to me than creating my own class website. Therefore, while I still had my course website online for my portfolio viewers, it was not advertised to students and is not currently linked to my homepage. Instead, students used WebCT to gather course information when not in class.

Teaching this course helped me to develop a new appreciation for anti-bias teaching materials. As I searched for teaching materials, I came to realize how critical it is for teacher educators to help preservice teachers learn how to carefully select teaching materials for in-class use. I took time to write about my materials selection on the Notes link of the student website so students know how to locate the materials for their own future use.

My overarching goal is to facilitate my students' transformation into becoming the most effective teachers they can become in the time that I have with them. Having more than fifteen years of elementary classroom teaching experience, I take my responsibilities of preparing future teacher very seriously because I know from experience the concerns that are part of today's classrooms and realize and view my job as a challenging and rewarding adventure.  I consider my assignments to be rigorous and demanding. Every step of the way, I find myself alongside my students, providing the necessary scaffolding that they need as they develop into an effective teachers with the ability to maximize all students' learning.