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Chris Browne
17 December 2015
Methods
Rational For Teaching
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Social Studies education is an often looked over aspect of the curriculum by both students

and administrators. With an increased STEM push, many social studies departments are seeing

cuts to budgets, lower enrollment, and questions of relevance. It is unfortunate that the discipline

is seen as such, as it is a key subject of study, with social studies covering numerous topics that

help make students a better-rounded citizen in their community and gains students skills to allow

them better interpretations of historical and cultural events. Social studies allows students a safe

place to discuss controversial issues and current events with their peers who may have different

views of the same subject and employs interdisciplinary skills that a student would find in

different subjects but has the students learn the skills through the context and the content. Social

studies, from any approach is a key part of the school experience.

For myself as a pre-social studies teacher, all the arguments I presented above represent

aspects of why I would want to become a teacher and what my goals are for being a teacher. One

of the biggest issues I have found with students and their thoughts towards the subject is that

history and the rest of the social studies disciplines are a textbooks narrative, with the past being

dead and not being applicable to their present lives. Against that argument, I harken to chapter

ten of Sam Wineburgs Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, in which Wineburg

describes an experiment conducted on students and their parents on how the Vietnam War is

remembered by those who grew up during the time period and how it is remembered by students

today. The study showed that one of the students in question saw that history is best seen

objectively with little place for emotion1. Wineburg disagrees with the student, saying that by

viewing the past for the emotional weight they carried and may still carry, allows the historian to

1 Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past (p.
237). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
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find empathy with those who lived and gains historical understanding through it. He claims that

the objective textbook style of teaching, which is used in American social studies classrooms,

ignores this, and I agree. Students should not see history as this objective straight forward

narrative, but one of a human experience that can empathized with.

This thought of turning history from a textbook narrative into a study of humans and human

reactions plays into another major component of why to teach social studies. Social Studies for

many students is the class to pass out during, while the teacher lectures on about people who

have been dead years before the students were born. During my own student observations in

Coventry High School, the students would sit in their seats and use the social studies class as a

time to catch up on homework for other classes, sleep, or browse Facebook. History, I find, is an

exciting and wonderful topic with stories and tales that Hollywood films can only mock. The

issue is trying to convey these stories and experiences in an engaging way. I want to become a

teacher to find this engaging way to teach history, by using popular culture to relate the present

to the past. During my two week unit I based ideas of using film and music off of lessons in

Methods (especially the viewing of the Best Years of Our Lives) and readings in various books to

help make the history relevant to the students. In practice it work, students got excited to discuss

films they were familiar with, in this case it was Toy Story 3 and The Great Gatsby, and how they

represented primary and secondary sources despite being recent popular culture. Getting students

to think outside the box, or textbook, allows them to view the world differently and history

differently.

On a similar vein of trying to improve the view of students of the content, I as a teacher

in general want to improve the students view of education in general. This semester in particular

I have had a lot of classes I thoroughly enjoyed and thoroughly hated because of the actions of
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the teacher. With talk of creating a positive classroom environment, especially in the most recent

Methods classes in regards to controversial issues, the political science class, American Political

Leadership, and the history class, Hip Hop and Youth Culture, were excellent examples of

semester long classes made topics that I was unfamiliar in interesting and engaging while

providing a safe place to discuss controversial topics including racism in the United States,

homosexuality in the United States, and, gun rights and violence in the United States to name a

few. To see this in practice, along with the lesson on structured academic controversy debates,

allows for me as a teacher to find new ways to be able to develop a classroom to be a place of

safety for students to voice their opinions and tackle issues of controversies that they would not

be able to learn academically elsewhere. Providing this safe space will allow students to feel

comfortable to speak their minds and will make normal classroom discuss easier for the students.

Another reason I want to be a social studies teacher is to be able to teach students writing

and reading skills through an historical context. In my own experiences, I learned best how to

write papers in my junior year history class. The teacher taught us the writing techniques that we

were being taught in English classes and put them to work in the historical narrative. That class

changed how I viewed writing and made my writing leagues better. After the methods class on

historical reading and writing, I want to be able to teach critical writing skills that students will

need if they want to pursue post-secondary education. History allows the skills of writing and

reading to be developed in a context. As me and my peers discussed following the methods class

on the historical reading and writing, we found that English classes present the skills in a

vacuum, with the literature we would have written about having no connection between each

piece of literature other than the skills that are being tethered together. Social studies also offers

the students the ability to practice numerous types of intelligences through writing. According to
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Frederick Drake and Lynn Nelson in their book, Engagement in Teaching History, the study of

history allows students to write through different lenses, whether it is through perspective based

writing, argumentative position based, or others, history allows different ways for students to

write and hon their language skills through the content2.

A final reason for my want for me to become a social studies teacher follows along a similar path

of some of the reasons listed above. Moving away from the textbook and including current

popular culture as an example of primary sources follows the trend of me wanting to have

students develop their skills of using and interpreting primary sources and having these sources

much more available to them. As a teacher I want to use primary sources a lot in the classroom

so students can get the perspectives of the people in the past and learn through their eyes. Even

in my two week lesson, I incorporated primary sources multiple times, ranging from the above

mentioned movie day, to music of the 1930s, to interviews of Harlem factory workers and other

documents. Having students learn from primary sources rather than a textbook or my lecturing

makes the history seem more tangible and real, rather than just facts and dates to know. Primary

sources and the methods I want to use them are all in the greater goal to develop historical

understanding in the students and have them understand that history is all a matter of perspective,

as we learned with the activity on Lexington and Concord in methods.

Becoming a social studies teacher has been an aspiration of mine for a long time. I have a

deep passion for the subject and I have always enjoyed working with and educating people on

my passion. By becoming a teacher I hope to usher into a class a feeling of safety in the

classroom so we can have debates and discussions over controversial issues, a lessening of

2 Drake, F., & Nelson, L. (2005). Engagement in teaching history: Theory and practices for
middle and secondary teachers (pp. 190-195). Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall.
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reliance on the textbook and more so onto primary source documents, in whatever forms they

may take, and the development of critical thinking, empathy, perspective understanding, and

writing skills that social studies classes have a chance to expand on with students.
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Bibliography

Barton, K., & Levstik, L. (2004). Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Classroom discussion, Lexington and Concord. 17 September 2015.

Classroom discussion, Music in history. 22 October 2015.

Classroom Discussion, Best Years of Our Lives. 29 October 2015.

Drake, F., & Nelson, L. (2005). Engagement in teaching history: Theory and practices for
middle and secondary teachers (pp. 190-195). Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall.

Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of
teaching the past (p. 237). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.