Social Studies and the Young Learner November/December 2020
Social Studies and the Young Learner November/December 2020
Volume:33
Num:2
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Editor's Notes November/December 2020
In the first article of this issue, “News-Group Fridays: Engaging Students in Current Events,” Natasha C. Murray-Everett and Erin Coffield describe how a teacher educator engaged pre-service teachers in a current event project. The authors describe how news groups were effectively used in a social studies methods course, as well as how a local teacher integrated and adapted news groups to help sixth grade students develop critical literacy skills and become more informed and engaged citizens.
Erin M. Casey’s article, “What’s My Favorite Landmark? Investigating Pre-Kindergartener’s Interests and Abilities during a C3 Framework Inquiry,” outlines an approach to using landmarks in instruction with younger students. The author notes that although the C3 Framework is not labeled for use with student younger than kindergarten, it can be effective employed by pre-kindergarten teachers. This five-week study, following a class of twelve three-and four-year-old children, shows how familiar landmarks can be used to create engaging social studies inquiry in early childhood with a few modifications for desired results.
Natalie Keefer, Julia Lopez, Jyhane Young, and Michelle Haj-Broussard view families as resources in their article, “Gathering Funds of Knowledge: An Elementary Social Studies Unit Plan for Bilingual Settings.” They argue that, at the intersection of social studies and world language curricula, are opportunities to explore “funds of knowledge” with vocabulary-rich content to support second-language acquisition. Strategies in this unit plan were sequenced to provide space for families to contribute toward activities in early childhood and elementary classrooms. An associated pullout, “Handouts for Gathering Funds of Knowledge,” by the same authors, features questions for family members and directions on how to make a “faux mola ”!
In “Walking the City: Developing Place-Consciousness through Inquiry,” Annie McMahon Whitlock describes how a class of preschoolers engaged in an authentic inquiry opportunity to inform students’ families of the special places within their local neighborhood and the wider city of Flint, Michigan. By exploring these special places as "sources" for inquiry, students were able to begin to develop place consciousness, a pre-cursor to broader civic awareness and action.
The final article of this issue is “Women’s Suffrage: Teaching Voting Rights using Multiple Perspectives and Timelines” by Jessica Ferreras-Stone. In this piece, the author outlines how social studies has historically marginalized many voices. In this article, she provides a detailed example of how voting rights can be taught in an inclusive manner that attends to the intersectionality of oppression. Women of African, Hispanic, and Asian descent played key roles in the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States, even as they struggled for other basic civil rights.
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News-Group Fridays: Engaging Students in Current Events
Many elementary and middle school students are confronted by media messages constantly. They receive messages not only from family and friends, but from television and social media outlets.1 The media messages about current events are often politically biased, polarized in nature, and potentially inaccurate, especially on social media platforms.
Teachers can model how to evaluate media for potential biases, showing students that just because something is political does not mean it should be off limits for discussion.
This article draws upon experiences from both a sixth grade social studies classroom and an undergraduate methods course.
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Women’s Suffrage: Teaching Voting Rights using Multiple Perspectives and Timelines
In order to promote inclusive social studies, this article describes how upper-level elementary students can learn about the Women’s Suffrage Movement and how it intersects with the experiences of other marginalized Americans persevering to obtain the right to vote.
