Social Education January/February 2021
Social Education January/February 2021
Volume:85
Num:1
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Editor's Notebook
Editor's Notebook January/February 2021
The assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by rioters protesting the certification of the 2020 presidential election sent shock waves through the nation. Alysha Butler-Arnold suggests that teachers should take the opportunity to compare this event with occasions in U.S. history when white rioters used violence to contest elections in which the votes of African Americans were decisive. In her view, it is important to examine the bigotry underlying the riot of January 6 so that our country can “come closer to being a true democracy for all its citizens.”
A distinctive feature of the Trump presidency was its extensive use of executive authority. Steven Schwinn’s Lessons on the Law column describes the unitary executive theory that justifies actions of this kind, and analyzes the Supreme Court decisions that have either confirmed or limited specific presidential executive powers. He emphasizes the need to take a position on the use of executive authority that applies both to “presidents whose policies we like and presidents whose policies we don’t.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, it has become clear that scientific views on preventing the spread of the virus are rejected by part of the population. This problem is not new. In our Sources and Strategies column, Michael Apfeldorf examines three newspaper features written between 1913 and 1963 that dealt with the prevention of the spread of the deadly childhood disease of measles in this country, and suggests ways in which classes can study the challenge of disseminating scientific knowledge to promote public health.
At the start of 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa was a prosperous community known as Black Wall Street until it was destroyed in a race riot later that year. In our Teaching with Documents column, Netisha Currie examines the Tulsa massacre using a report and photographs by the Red Cross as primary sources. Her teaching suggestions highlight the racism that both caused the destruction of the Greenwood District and impeded its recovery.
Our Teaching the C3 Framework column introduces a new resource for social studies teachers who take the plunge into inquiry- based instruction—a set of films offered by the Making Inquiry Possible Project that are accessible free of charge to teachers and demonstrate recent efforts in Kentucky to implement inquiry-based approaches in the classroom. The authors (Kathy Swan, Ryan Crowley, S.G. Grant, John Lee, Gerry Swan, Callaway Stivers, and Gates Sweeney) point out that “a healthy inquiry culture can grow from the bottom up beginning in teachers’ classrooms and it can grow by district leadership building out an inquiry infrastructure for teachers to adopt.”
For many years, educational policymakers have assumed that increasing the amount of class time given to English Language Arts will increase students’ reading skills. One result has been a reduction in time allocated to social studies instruction. Adam Tyner and Sarah Kabourek show the fallacy of this approach as they present important results from a study they conducted, which was published by the Fordham Institute. The authors analyzed the reading scores of thousands of elementary school students recorded in the nationwide federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of the Kindergarten Class of 2010–11. Their study showed that “social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement. In contrast, extra time spent on English Language Arts (ELA) instruction has no significant relationship with reading improvement.”
Asking the right questions is a skill that students need to acquire, but Joan Brodsky Schur observes that “class discussion usually revolves around teacher-generated inquiries.” She recommends ways in which teachers can guide students through the process of learning to formulate their own investigative questions so that they can improve their ability to conduct research and communicate its results.
This year marks the Centennial of NCSS, which was founded in 1921. During the year, Social Education will offer a series of articles contributed by the Friends of NCSS Community in conjunction with the NCSS Archives Committee. In the first such article, Rozella G. Clyde and Jeremiah Clabough examine the historical context and educational developments that led to the founding of our association to promote an effective education for citizenship through the social studies.
Joel D. Cohen and Jessica S. Cohen point out that “quantitative literacy, the ability to interpret numerical information ... is a well-documented weakness for many students and adults.” In an article that identifies the specific skills needed for students to understand information presented in graphs, they show how an interpretation framework that they introduced in a unit on government in Joel’s eighth-grade U.S. History class resulted in an improvement in students’ skills.
Social studies education plays a vital role in educating students for active democratic citizenship. The opening feature of this issue is the address made by NCSS President Stefanie Wager at the NCSS Virtual Conference held in December 2020, in which she calls for more effective advocacy of the importance of social studies in our schools. She introduces the new Advocacy Toolkit that is available on the NCSS website at socialstudies.org/advocacy.
As always, the editors of Social Education welcome the comments of readers on any of the contributions to this issue at socialed@ncss.org.
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Letters
Letter to the Editor-Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?
Letter regarding Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? from the October 2020 issue and responses by the article's authors.
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NCSS Notebook
The Time is NOW!
The time is now to advocate for social studies because our democracy depends on it. The NCSS Advocacy Toolkit offers the guidance and tactics to do just that.
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Point of View
Why My Students Weren’t Surprised on January 6th
Students who studied events such as Louisiana’s 1873 Colfax Massacre, North Carolina’s 1898 Wilmington coup, and Florida’s 1920 Ocoee Massacre were well prepared for interpreting events like the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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Lessons on the Law
The Past, Present, and Future of the Unitary Executive Theory
A look back at former President Trump’s tremendous control over the work of experts and independent agencies can launch an engaging constitutional lesson about Article Two of the Constitution and executive power.
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Sources and Strategies
Science Literacy and Citizen Behavior: Helping Students See the Connections using Historical Newspaper Articles
Examining newspaper articles such as the featured one from 1913 about parents intentionally exposing children to measles can highlight for students the critical connection between science literacy and citizen behavior.
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Teaching with Documents
“The Responsibility is Placed in Your Hands Entirely:” Red Cross Relief after the Tulsa Massacre
The featured primary documents related to white violence against African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and Red Cross relief efforts, can springboard into an important classroom discussion about who gets to tell history.
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Teaching the C3 Framework
Making Inquiry Possible: A Film Project on Building a Culture of Inquiry
Educators can get an inside look at how some classrooms have shifted to inquiry-based social studies with four documentary films featured in the The Making Inquiry Possible project.
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How Social Studies Improves Elementary Literacy
Recent research shows that growing students’ knowledge of the world through social studies has a greater impact on literacy than increasing English language arts instruction time.
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What Makes a Question Valuable? Teaching Students to Pose Their Own Questions
Enabling students to pose and answer their own questions helps them evolve from passive learners to students who are actively engaged in their coursework.
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NCSS Centennial
NCSS: Building A Century-Old Bridge
This first article in a series on 100 years of NCSS leadership in social studies recounts the organization’s establishment and examines its initial mission.
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Graph Interpretation in a Government Unit
A social studies teacher and a mathematics educator created the featured U.S. history lesson on the three branches of government to help students better interpret evidence presented in graphs.
