Anne Lise Halvorsen

Narrowing the Achievement Gap in Second-Grade Social Studies and Content Area Literacy: The Promise of a Project-Based Approach

Abstract This study addresses the question: Do second-grade students from low- socioeconomic-status (SES) schools taught with an iteratively designed project-based approach to social studies and content literacy instruction: (a) make statistically significant gains on standards-based social studies and content area literacy assessments, and (b) reach a benchmark on these assessments set by a group of students from high-SES schools? If so, what did the project-based approach entail? Students from 4 classrooms in low-SES schools were assessed before and after experiencing 2 project-based units focused on standards in economics; civics and government; public discourse, decision making, and citizen involvement; and content area literacy. Students from 2 high-SES schools were also assessed, following a year of business-as-usual social studies and content literacy instruction, to establish a benchmark we hoped low-SES students could attain. Results show that low-SES students made statistically significant gains in social studies and content literacy and, at post-test, showed no statistically significant differences from the students in the high-SES schools: Following instruction, there was no SES achievement gap on these assessments. The authors describe the project-based units and strategies that the teachers used to implement these plans, and discuss implications of the study for future research and practice.

Social Studies Teacher Education

Social studies teacher education is in a position of both challenge and promise. There is considerable discussion and often disagreement about the field, much of it stemming from the problems facing social studies education in general. For example, in the United States, one challenge has been the decreasing time devoted to social studies in the school day. Accountability pressures have largely targeted mathematics and reading, not social studies. Another challenge concerns rapidly changing student populations with the concomitant shifts in language, social background, and national/cultural/ethnic origins, all of which pose challenges to preparing future generations of citizens. Despite these contemporary challenges, social studies teacher education continues as an important element of teacher education programs, and research shows that good social studies teachers have a positive influence on childrens learning. This article describes the current challenges in social studies teacher education and offers suggestions for educators and researchers working in the field in order to reshape and strengthen it. It also highlights current trends in social studies education, which suggest ways the field may evolve in the future. Examples from an international perspective are provided throughout, although social studies teacher education has principally been a concern of greater interest to the US educators.

Teaching Asia in US secondary school classrooms: a curriculum of othering

This study examines six US social studies teachers’ beliefs and curricular decisions that impact their teaching about Asia. Using interview data, the study seeks to understand the forces that influence what, how, and when teachers teach about Asia in their secondary classes, if and how they position Asians as ‘others’, and what bearing that has on how these teachers represent Asia in the curriculum. As the study investigates these topics in light of the wider social perceptions of Asia in US society, it uses cultural studies as a major theoretical framework. Major findings show that there is a significant gap between teachers’ personal goals for instruction and students’ perceptions about Asia, the latter of which are often influenced by mass media and popular culture. The study provides a new perspective on understanding the nature and social function of the school curriculum as producer of the collective perception of other peoples and cultures.

Back to the Future: The Expanding Communities Curriculum in Geography Education.

This article traces the history of the expanding communities approach, the leading organizational structure for elementary social studies education since the 1930s. Since its introduction into the curriculum, educators have argued about the approachs effectiveness and suitability. Critics claim it lacks intellectual rigor and is redundant in that it repeats what children already know. Defenders argue that its relevancy to childrens lives helps them better understand their world. Yet typically neither critics nor defenders demonstrate an understanding of the approachs deep roots in U.S. education. Long before its adoption as the dominant approach in elementary social studies, educators used it in history, civics, literature, and geography lessons. This article focuses on the approachs successful implementation in nineteenth-century geography curricula and shows that it is possible to teach rigorous geographical content and processes while using this method. The author recommends recommends that contemporary educators consider examples of how the approach was successfully used in the past.

Lesson Study and History Education

This article examines the experiences of a group of fifth-grade teachers who used lesson study, a teacher-driven form of professional development, to teach history in a project supported by a Teaching American History Grant. The project addressed the following questions: What does a lesson study cycle for history education look like? What contributes to effective lesson study in history education? What are the unique challenges of lesson study in history education? Based on analyses of the teacher-designed study lessons, teachers’ online journal entries, a teacher survey, videos of lessons and debriefing sessions, and field notes from lesson study observations, the article concludes lesson study in history helps teachers feel they have improved their instruction and have advanced student learning if the unique features of history instruction are taken into consideration. This study contributes to the research on lesson study by examining a relatively unexplored content area, history, and makes suggestions on how to use lesson study in history education.

Does students’ heritage matter in their performance on and perceptions of historical reasoning tasks?

Abstract This mixed methods study explores how high school students (N = 35) enrolled in a US charter school with a high Latino/a population perform on and perceive (in terms of interest and relevance) document-based type historical reasoning tasks: one about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the other about the experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1920s. Students wrote essay responses and completed perception inventories about the tasks. We also interviewed 10 focal students to delve more deeply into students’ thinking regarding the tasks and their interest levels in the two topics. We scored students’ responses along the criteria of historical claims, substantiation of claims, use of evidence from documents, sourcing of documents and contextualization. Our hypotheses were that students would perform better on, and be more interested in, tasks that were culturally relevant to them. We found that although students did not perform differently on the two tasks overall, students’ perceptions of the tasks differed, with a significantly greater interest in the task about Mexicans and Mexican Americans. We address the complexity of these findings and discuss implications for curriculum and practise.

Intercultural Education in Detroit, 1943-1954.

In the World War II era, many United States educators recognised that the claims of racial superiority underlying German anti-Semitism and Japanese imperialism challenged the fundamental democratic idea of human equality that is the bedrock of US political ideals. At the same time, these educators realised the importance of national social cohesion for political unity and strength. Their response to this challenge was to develop school programmes that emphasised the principles of equality of opportunity and inalienable human rights, that promoted respect for diverse races and cultures, that warned against the dangers of race-based totalitarianism and that taught all students to fulfil their responsibilities as US citizens. These programmes, generally referred to as ‘intercultural education’, enjoyed their greatest success from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. In practice, most intercultural education programmes, as implemented in schools, did not live up to the ideals established by intercultural education’s founders. Instead, most programmes focused on the cultural contributions of diverse groups and on values such as tolerance and appreciation for differences. Yet one large and influential public school district, the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district, did fulfil many of the expectations for the programmes. DPS administrators and teachers pushed intercultural education in more daring directions, directly tackling deeper structural issues such as power, privilege, discrimination, equality and race to help students from different racial and cultural backgrounds respect one another and to help groups that were traditionally discriminated against achieve their full rights as citizens. Intercultural education in Detroit simultaneously taught students to value racial and cultural diversity and to cherish and follow civic values – not an easy task. Although intercultural education was a short-lived movement, ending in the 1950s in Detroit and around the country, we demonstrate that many initiatives of intercultural education formed the basis for accomplishments several decades later, during what is known as the multicultural education movement. Intercultural education also had a legacy through Norman Drachler, a leader of the intercultural programmes in the 1940s: years later, as General Superintendent of the DPS in the late 1960s, Drachler would lead the effort to dramatically change US history textbooks to be inclusive of diverse people and groups.

Teaching with Evidence.

In this age of real and fake news, students need to be able to assess the trustworthiness of evidence. The authors’ current research examines students’ use of evidence in secondary social studies classrooms as students deliberate contemporary public policy issues. The authors found that students shifted their evaluations of the trustworthiness of evidence depending on whether they were making these assessments in the abstract or in the context of a specific issue. In the abstract, evidence like statistical data ranked high, but when students considered a policy issue, they gave greater weight to anecdote and personal experience. The authors offer several recommendations for teaching good evidence use.

Teaching the USA in South Korean secondary classrooms: the curriculum of ‘the superior other’

By examining teacher interviews and student survey data through the lens of multiculturalism and post-colonialism, this study investigates how the USA is taught in secondary school social studies in South Korea. Specifically, the study examines the teachers’ goals, the representation of the USA in Korean textbooks and its influence on the instruction, the effect on the instruction by the dominant discourse on the USA in South Korea, and the conceptions of the USA held by Korean students in social studies classes. Our findings show that while the teachers strive to present diverse and complex aspects of the USA and its culture, for several reasons they rarely achieve these goals: the textbooks do not support these goals, the teachers lack relevant knowledge and experience, and administrators resist instruction that challenges the generally positive opinion of the USA among South Koreans. Consequently, the students often end up having complex, contradictory ideas about the USA. Based on these findings, this study argues that educators in Korea (and elsewhere) would benefit from curriculum re-evaluations aimed at helping their students acquire a more refined understanding of other cultures and other peoples, in particular the understanding of the values associated with human equality and diversity.

Less arguing, more listening: Improving civility in classrooms

Today’s youth increasingly are being expected to engage in civil deliberation in classrooms while simultaneously living in a society with a high level of political incivility. However, teaching students to argue — particularly in oral form — is enormously complex and challenging work. In this article, the authors report on a study of four high school social studies classrooms in which teachers facilitated argumentation via deliberations on immigration policy. Based on their research, they provide recommendations related to argumentation, deliberation, and the promotion of civility in classrooms.