EDU 378: The Social and Academic Curriculum I

This course is for undergraduate students who are enrolled in the first professional block courses. The course includes social skills and social studies curricula content focusing primarily on early childhood education. The course provides time for students to explore topics necessary for creating a democratic classroom and understanding the value in carefully planning instruction and classroom management. It also includes components of early childhood social studies instruction including teaching early childhood students about geography, history, economics, and civics, citizenship and government. Please click here to view my syllabus.

Since I was an early childhood educator for so many years myself, it was exciting for me to be able to create course assignments that I believed were meaningful and worthwhile to preservice teachers. To highlight one of the assignments, students were to create a social skills lesson and implement it in their 50 hour practicum placement. Please click here to view the assignment description and click here to view a student's work sample. This assignment was well received by the students because they were able to focus on (1) observing their class to identify one social skill that could be improved upon; (2) identifying and/or creating activity that would require the social skill to be 'practiced' and; (3) teaching a lesson that required students to use the identified social skill; and (4) reflect with the students on how the social skill was used in the lesson.

This course and its curriculum is understood differently by different faculty members. I deem this course to be one of the most important in our current Childhood Education program (CED) because social studies education is a content area that is most often 'pushed aside' in elementary classrooms. I believe that this happens because many educators have not been taught about the importance of learning about democracy and the social studies themselves as students or as adults. Early Childhood social studies content is often viewed as something that can 'easily' be merged or integrated into other 'more important' curricular areas and is often claimed to be 'just community building or just about getting along with others'. My viewpoint is different than that. My argument is that our nation and our world need elementary educators who are grounded in understanding the importance of social studies curricula from a very early age. All too often, our young people fail to know what is meant by the term democracy, are unsure of historical events that have led to today's governmental decisions and on the most basic levels, don't see the value in true shared decision making. A course such as this can facilitate future teachers' understanding of these ideas with the intention of them infusing this content into their future early childhood classes.