Ronald W. Evans

Taboo Topics: Cultural Restraint on Teaching Social Issues

ers. Over the history of social studies, many prominent thinkers have advocated curricular reform with greater emphasis on in-depth study of public or controversial issues (Engle and Ochoa 1988; Evans and Saxe 1996; Hunt and Metcalf 1955; Oliver and Shaver 1966; Rugg 1921). Despite the best intentions of social studies reformers over the years, a traditional, textbook-centered, fact-myth-legend approach to teaching history has continued to dominate the social studies curriculum (Goodlad 1984; Hertzberg 1981; Shaver, Davis, and Helburn 1979; Wilen and White 1991). Previous attempts to explain the failure of issues-centered social studies reform have focused on rational explanation: the realities of schools as tenacious bureaucracies resis-

Teacher Conceptions of History Revisited: Ideology, Curriculum, and Student Belief

Abstract The central purpose of this exploratory investigation is to describe and analyze the teaching of history in five classrooms, each representing one of five typologies developed earlier, the storyteller, scientific historian, relativist/reformer, cosmic philosopher, and eclectic (Evans, 1989b). The study focuses on the effects of each teachers conceptions of history on the transmitted curriculum and on student beliefs. Data collection included interviews with teachers, in-depth observation, and interviews with students. Results suggest that the impact of teacher conceptions vary considerably, that the teaching of history has little impact on student belief in four of the classrooms, and a profound impact in one, and that approaches to the teaching of history are linked, implicitly, to competing ideological orientations.

Dare We Make Peace: A Dialogue on the Social Studies Wars.

The authors present a conversation among several leading social studies theorists, researchers, and practitioners on the social studies wars, or conflicts in the debate over the purposes, content, and practice of social studies in schools. Questions focus on addressing the plurality of definitions for the field, creating more effective dialogue among interest groups both within the National Council for the Social Studies and with other professional associations, and improving classroom practice. Running through the discussion are concerns related to the possibility of progress, role of professional organizations, present and future impact of federal legislation, and potential for developing common ground. The authors conclude with reflections on areas of agreement and dissonance among the discussants and endorse the idea of a summit meeting of a broad group of stakeholders aimed at developing potential areas of consensus.

Rhetoric Versus Reality in Research on Social Studies

As a teacher and graduate student in the late 1970s and 1980s, I had my earliest encounters with research on social studies. It was an era when the new and newer social studies still had resonance in schools, and the status of the reforms was the focus of much of the research. An essay reviewing findings from the National Science Foundation funded “status” studies (Shaver, Davis, & Helburn, 1979) was frequently cited. The findings reported in that essay and related documents (Shaver, 1979) remain a daunting snapshot of the social studies field, one that has changed only slightly since that time. Among the “facts and impressions” contained in that report are some commonplace realities of the social studies field. With the caveat that many exceptions can be found, the authors wrote, in part:

The New Social Studies

The new social studies came to fruition during the 1960s, but was, in most ways, an artifact of the 1950s and the cold war struggle over communism. It was rooted in cold war manpower development anxieties and was an expansion of trends in science and mathematics education. Chiefly discipline-centered, the social studies projects of the period, supported by record federal and private financial backing, were a direct consequence of critiques of education and progressive social studies that had been brewing over many years. In a very real sense, this was an extension of the war on social studies and the climax of decades of disdain.

The Conservative Restoration

After the nationwide MACOS controversy had more or less subsided, another heated textbook controversy occurred in Warsaw, Indiana, a northern Indiana town of about 9, 600 people, a conservative community with “a strong religious feeling” and the home of 36 churches. Like the controversy in Kanawha County, this one involved questions over who would determine the curriculum, and whether the right to know and the right to read would be prized over the concerns of conservative and fundamentalist groups who felt their values and way of life were being threatened. As one observer noted, the controversy in Warsaw turned the back-to-basics movement into a crusade to purify the curriculum, ban books, and obstruct change.