A Position Statement of National Council for the Social Studies
Approved and published June 2022

Introduction

The year 2020 was a watershed year for our nation in general and for our educational, personal, and political use of technology in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated changes that were already taking place and led to an unprecedented surge in online purchases and social engagement. The largest technology companies had one of their most profitable years in the midst of an overall economic downturn. A shift from in-person to remote learning and working depopulated businesses and schools nationwide, while raising serious equity, privacy, and social-emotional learning questions. The unjust police killing of Black people gained global notoriety when Darnella Frazier recorded and posted online a video of officer Derek Chauvin choking George Floyd to death, spawning protests in scores of U.S. communities and worldwide from Rio de Janeiro to London, which led to public deliberations about systemic racism. The presidential use of Twitter and the online proliferation of dis/misinformation, along with the legal and political challenges to the presidential election results, reached a crescendo with the assault on U.S. democracy as insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. While the year 2020 rests in our rearview mirror, the challenges of how to act on lessons learned about the academic and societal use of technology lie ahead of us.

Contextualization and Rationale for Recommendations

The above events highlight several reasons why it is important to reimagine social studies in relation to technology in a civic, school, and social context.

First, the de-platforming of Donald Trump by Twitter and the subsequent criticism of Twitter’s decision to do so illustrated a tension between corporate governance systems and the nation’s democratic process, raising questions about the role of social media companies in civic society. YouTube, which was held liable by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for collecting information about users under 13 for “internet-based advertisement,” faces a similar multi-billion-dollar lawsuit in the United Kingdom. The increasing “commodification of human experience” (Zuboff, 2019) is driving the collection of users’ commercial and personal data, which companies use with predictive analytics to market a product to users before they even are aware they likely will desire it. Online lies and hate speech are weaponized to foment fear and hatred, undermining trust in a democratic society. The acceleration of the Internet of Things is expanding the applicability of “smart” technology and broadening access to critical medical and public services. In essence, the emergence of a “tele-everything” world is on the horizon as people are relying “more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions” (Anderson et al., 2021, p. 3). Given these and other trends, social studies educators need to enable youth to have a better understanding of the ongoing changes fostered by technology, so as to avoid running the risk of preparing youth for an outmoded form of civic life that no longer exists.

A second reason is the importance of discerning how best to operationalize learning environments where in-person, hybrid, and remote learning are not discrete but integral to each other. This approach both harnesses the potential of social media and offers safeguards to protect adult and youthful users. The proliferation of apps, whose applicability and quality greatly vary, serves as a cautionary tale when defining this learning environment, as no educator possesses the time to review them all, let alone field test them. If social studies educators largely are unable to process, use, and assess multiple apps, how is the field to assess and integrate emerging technologies, such as robotics, immersive learning with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the use of predictive analytics to guide student learning plans, and the incorporation of the network of things on a classroom level? (The examples continue to multiply.) How might social studies educators ground learning environments in sound principles such as those espoused in a recent NCSS Task Force report on fostering digital civic participation through critical inquiry (NCSS Task Force, 2022), while remaining nimble and sensitive enough both to integrate sound emerging technologies and to deliberate thoughtfully about their civic, ethical, personal, and societal implications?

A third reason is that, given the need to reimagine social studies and technology, educators need to pay particular attention to better defining the contours of students’ academic, civic, and socio-personal environments, realizing that the lines between in-person and digital settings quickly are losing meaning. During the pandemic, people’s homes became an extension of the classroom, raising serious equity and privacy concerns as many students lacked adequate (or any) online access and school districts struggled with whether to require students to turn on the video feed to them in their homes when attending virtual classes. The Mahanoy Area School District v. B. L. (2020) court case further illustrated the online blurring of school and social settings as school administrators penalized a young person for posting a video on Snapchat in which the person cursed those associated with the school. [1] Young people found themselves in their homes yet engaged with people beyond their physical rooms via social media. Many school districts required youth in their online role as students to use the video feed during online lessons without asking the permission of the adult supervisor(s) in the home. Unquestionably, while the pandemic proffered a potentially unique situation, requiring a visual feed into one’s home without parental permission seems like an ironic expansion of the in loco parentis legal responsibility of school districts. What are the design principles upon which diverse social media environments are founded, and what are the academic, civic, economic, and personal implications of such environments for youth? In turn, how might youth exercise agency in an empathic, reasoned, and responsible manner in such environments?

A fourth reason is that the way technology permeated virtually every facet of students’ and teachers’ academic and personal lives during the global pandemic demonstrates the importance of broadening the focus of instructional technology from a “tools” approach to one with greater curricular emphasis on civic/personal agency and inquiry. Focusing on technology as a set of tools, absent the substance of what students are learning, is like divorcing pedagogy from social studies content and skills. Imagine reducing voting to the mechanics and skills associated with casting a ballot. In turn, as illustrated by the report by an NCSS Task Force on fostering digital civic participation through critical inquiry (NCSS Task Force, 2022), acting in a civic, personal and societal setting is an integral part of students’ social studies learning, which requires not simply an understanding of how to use each tool, but also an understanding of the principles embedded in each one, the context in which one plans to use the tool, (in)appropriate ways to use each one, and the implications of doing so. The challenge becomes how to act on the “opportunity to also teach about technologies and their disparate and inconspicuous effects on democracy—within and beyond schools” (Krutka et al., 2020, p. 109).

A fifth reason relates to the importance of fostering a professional environment that both enhances social studies educators’ comfort and confidence in using technology as an integral part of their teaching repertoire and features a blend of proven and emerging technologies situated in in-person, hybrid, and online contexts. Professional learning for social studies educators should not only encapsulate how we desire students to learn in and to engage with others in digital settings, but should also illustrate ways to anticipate, prepare, and act on digital innovations.

Recommendations

1. Convene a group of preK-16 social studies educators to deliberate what was learned during the pandemic-induced shift from in-person to remote learning and offer recommendations on ways to better integrate in-person and remote learning.
2. Given how “technologies are not neutral,” explore ways to better enable preK-16 social studies educators to assess the potential benefits and harms of using technologies with youth. This necessitates thinking of technologies more broadly than as tools, but as constructs grounded in commercial and social systems that are not always in the best interest of peoples and democratic systems. While we are attuned to examining curricular materials for racist and sexist content, for example, how sensitive are we to how bias is infused into technologies? How is online content narrowed or influenced by filter bubbles and motivated reasoning? What constitutes the ethical collection and use of students’ personal data?
3. Rethink the curricular role of science, technology, and society, and related themes in the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies and the College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework. Historical and contemporary technologies are often intertwined with socio-political and economic issues. Problems to be considered could include how the advent of industrialization both negatively and positively affected women, how bias and targeted marketing are built into search engine algorithms, how governments moderate and respond to the toxic effects of propaganda and/or disinformation, or how communications technologies from the printing press to online authoring apps have both democratized information and spawned voluminous amounts of dis/misinformation. Recommendations have been set forth in the report by an NCSS Task Force on fostering digital civic participation through critical inquiry (NCSS, 2022).
4. Adapt the civic and socialization role of social studies to blended and online places. Identify the cultural, economic, and social benefits and concerns resulting from students’ immersion in the emerging digital world and address related policy and curricular issues. This recommendation ranges from addressing concerns such as cyberbullying and cybersecurity and issues like the commercial value of one’s personal information to recognition of how cultural norms are operationalized online and of ways to become civically engaged in a global setting.
5. Determine ways to best enable children and youth to translate their informal, socially oriented democratic experiences into a more academic, civically oriented setting . Powerful social studies learning places learners at the center, intellectually inspires learners to see the relevance of social studies in their daily lives, and fosters civic engagement in a pluralistic, democratic society and global community. What better way to illustrate the power of social studies than by showing children how “liking” a person is akin to voting, or by showing youth how creating a social networking site for a group is like campaigning for a political candidate or social cause. Youthful advocates for Black Lives Matter and efforts to combat climate change abound, offering diverse, rich role models for social studies educators on how to better equip children and youth with the civic understandings, digital tools, and offline and online participatory skills necessary to address matters of public importance.
6. Promote the experience of preK-16 educators in the use of technology and its integration into student learning . Looping back to the first recommendation, it is important to discern ways to operationalize what the preK-16 social studies educators recommend in light of the other recommendations in this position statement. NCSS should foster an online professional learning community dedicated to furthering this statement’s recommendations. The community ought to operate from an online platform suitable for acting on and engaging with peers about the recommendations. Its activities might range from the development and/or endorsement of acceptable use policies related to the use of smartphones or online social networking sites in social studies to the identification of ways to ensure student security and privacy in limited and open online public networks and the provision of examples of exemplary uses of technology in social studies. In doing so, social studies educators must recognize how the use of technology will always raise questions about the equitable distribution of and access to emerging technologies. In turn, the promotion of technology integration into student learning requires remaining sensitive not only to existing but also to emerging technologies so as to ensure that a learning environment is in place which best enables students to make rich use of those technologies as they become reasoned, deliberative, and action-oriented digital citizens.

References

Anderson, J., Rainie, L., & Vogels, E. (2021). Experts say the “new normal” in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more big challenges. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/02/18/experts-say-the-new-normal-in-2025-will-be-far-more-tech-driven-presenting-more-big-challenges

Donovan, J., & Boyd, D. (2021). Stop the presses? Moving from strategic silence to strategic amplification in a networked media ecosystem. American Behavioral Scientist , 65 (2), 333-350.

Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Mason, L. E. (2020). Editorial: Technology won’t save us—A call for technoskepticism in social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 108-120.

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Task Force on College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Inquiry and Engagement (2022). College, career, and civic life (C3) inquiry and engagement online: Fostering digital civic participation through critical inquiry. https://www.socialstudies.org/reports-and-papers/c3-inquiry-and-engagement-online

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.

[1] Although in 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the school district in the case, the Court acknowledged that “public schools may have a special interest in regulating some [online] off-campus student speech” (p. 1). U.S. Supreme Court held in Mahanoy Area School Dist. v. B. L., 594 U.S. ____ (2021 )

This position statement was drafted by NCSS Technology Community Co-Chairs Kimberly Gilman and Kori Green. Kimberly Gilman teaches at Hocker Grove Middle School, Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and Kori Green teaches at Wichita East High School, Wichita, Kansas. Joseph O'Brien of the University of Kansas and Tina Heafner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who was NCSS President in 2019-2020, contributed to the drafting of this statement.