EDU 514: Teaching Elementary Social Studies (MST)

This course is designed for students in the Master's of Science in Teaching program to understand the content and pedagogical practices needed to teach elementary school social studies effectively. Much of this course's design is similar to the undergraduate course except this course also includes a community service component to it. I have taught this course during most summers since being a faculty member at Cortland. Please click here to view my most current syllabus from Summer 2009.

As I mentioned in my reflection of Teaching Elementary Social Studies at the undergraduate level, I am interested in teaching social studies methods because I find that it is natural to tie social justice topics into its content. As with my undergraduate course, I incorporate 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 begin to portray history from multiple perspectives. Students begin 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 realize that the dominate culture's story often gets told... and in our society, that is often from a European-American perspective.  Students spend some time understanding their own notions of difference and how they learned (or didn't learn) what they know about diversity. This is an important aspect to this class because I've learned that students need to have time to reflect on their own notions of differences so they can identify possible stereo-typed and biased perspectives that they might not have realized that they have about others they see as different from themselves.

This graduate course is particularly interesting because the adults who I've taught in this course often have fixed notions about differences that they were not aware that they had. For example, when talking about class differences, some students found it hard to discuss this topic because they've always lived in the same community and understanding how and why there are class differences in our society was something new to them. As with the undergraduate class, early community building activities and in-class discussions have been helpful for students to begin to feel safe talking about differences. Once differences are discussed openly, students can then begin to understand the importance of learning about social studies content from more than one perspective.

Students in this course learn about the importance of  the National Council of Social Studies, the New York State Social Studies Standards, and the NYS social studies core curriculum to create lesson plans and a social studies unit plan on a topic of their choice. I hold students to high expectations for this assignment and they've mentioned that it is very time consuming to complete. It's important that students understand how to connect learning goals and corresponding activities within and between lessons. The unit plan assignment helps students to begin to practice making such connections. To view an example of a student's assignment for this project, please click here.