Location: Kean University - Hennings Hall
The Plight of the Social Studies
As part of my graduate curriculum, I’m studying the theory and practice of teaching social studies. I was shocked at first to find out how overlooked the subject of social studies is in primary school, but after the shock sputtered out, it became clear to me how obvious this neglect would be – mostly thanks to a very interesting article my professor handed out to my class last Wednesday.
What Elementary Students and Teachers Say about Social Studies – Yali Zhao and John D. Hoge
What is your most memorable social studies learning experience from your own school years? This is a question posed in the article – one that had me probing my own memories for those horrible history reading and writing assignments. If I may reference the dinner plate (of which I’m a big fan), social studies is like the string beans or the Brussels sprouts of many academic careers – it’s yucky, hard to appreciate, and can take a while to digest (if only mentally), so it shouldn’t be surprising that most of the answers to the posed question be of uncertainty. On the flip side of what this unappetizing subject is statistically seen to be, it can be extremely enriching and enticing if prepared properly.
I’m at an impasse concerning my position on the topic. I happen to love string beans, Brussels sprouts, and just about every other green vegacious dinner-thing on my plate (just ask my mom), but I don’t know much about them, least of all about how to cook them to my taste. On the same note, while I’ve got a great interest in the history, present and future of our societies, I, for a greater part, don’t know how I can apply myself to these fields. That is to say, I don’t know what the hell social studies has to do with me!
But I’m going to brush that though out of my head for now, because it can only keep me from moving beyond my impasse. I need to get myself moving because the professors of Kean University see the ‘academic process’ as a holistic one – one in which the different disciplines of study shouldn’t be isolated from each other. Having been ‘brought up’ by these professors, I see the process in the same light, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited about accomplishing a plan of learning in which all subjects – from science to arithmetic to history – click with each other in a way that shows clear relevances between them. I can only imagine how hard difficult that might be, but I hope for the prospect of cooperating with teachers of subjects other than English (which is my expertise) to achieve that goal.
In truth, this was supposed to be a post about Zhao and Hoge’s article, but I’ve got a bit off track. To make amends, here are some highlights from the text.
• “Most children mentioned reading, math or science as their favorite subject because ‘it is fun to learn,’ ‘I’m good at it,’ or ‘it is useful and challenging.’”
• “Most children say that they did not like social studies because ‘it is boring and useless,’ ‘it’s reading the textbook,’ and ‘it doesn’t apply.’”
• “One teacher said [concerning their most memorable social studies experience], ‘The memorable thing . . . is that I did not do anything memorable in social studies.’”
• “… many of the teachers in our sample recognized that social studies was receiving insufficient time and resources, compared to the amount devoted to reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
• “Most second- to fourth-graders indicated that social studies was important, but they did not know why. They said it was important because ‘we have to learn it,’ and ‘it affects my grade.’”
• “When asked to identify the current president and tell what they knew about him, more than half of the kindergarteners and many first-graders named George Washington. Half of the first-graders and most of the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-graders named George Bus as the president, but they knew little or nothing about him.”
• “Kindergarteners and first-graders were unable to name their region, state, and county, and many could not identify the town they lived in. Indeed, only half of those in the third grade, and one tenth of those in the second grade knew the name of the town in which they lived.”
• “Many students in the early grades (K-3) did not know the value of one hundred dollars, because they stated that they would buy a new car, a motorcycle, a big house, a pool, or a farm. About one third of the children across all of the grades elected to put the money to good use, suggesting giving the money to charity or buying things for their families.”
