Old Things and New Perspectives: Learning How to Teach Social Studies

  My Initial Experiences With Projects As a student I was never too happy whenever I heard the teacher bring up the word project in the classroom. I always associated it with the same tired trifolds and presentation boards that I would do over and over with sometimes less than enthusiastic partners. That's why I was perhaps initially skeptical about the teaching strategy of Project-Based learning but after learning more about it I quickly discovered that it wasn't your usual one or two day presentation board projects but instead an interesting way to engage students and motivate their learning in a self-guided way. What is Project-Based Learning? Project-Based Learning is an approach in the classroom where students engage with content through a long process of research, producing their own project, and presenting it to an audience. It all begins with a question or dilemma that intrigues the students and starts as a focus point for their research. This way the process is student

  What is Citizen Journalism? Citizen Journalism is the idea that people should play an active role in reporting and analyzing the news in their community and nationally. It encourages independent thinking and the collection of evidence as well as an unbiased analysis of evidence. The popular fictional character of Nancy Drew would be a good example of a citizen journalist as someone who frequently is active in her community by collecting and distributing news stories as well as deciphering key information.  What Does it Mean for Students? Using citizen journalism in the classroom involves teaching students media literacy and the ability to understand the role of perspective or bias in influencing the content they read. A student should be able to read a modern news article or even one from the 1940's and read between the lines to understand what would motivate the author to make whatever argument they are making.  Once students have grasped this they can then create their own cont

                                 V  Yeah Okay There's Some Weird Stuff To many historians and social studies teachers the genre of alternate history has often been thought of at best as an amusing distraction or at worst a futile effort in science fiction and fantastical theories about alternate worlds.  I do respect this viewpoint and don't deny that much of alternate history is often drowning in unknowable butterfly effects and prone to absurdist elements. While a series from Harry Turtledove where aliens invade during World War Two and become addicted to ginger might be an entertaining read on the weekend, I wouldn't advocate for it to be used in the classroom. I would argue though that thinking about alternate paths and what ifs in history could be useful when used in a constrained way that encourages students to examine the causes of historical events or inspires them to look at history in a new way.  A Positive Example   What if Napoleon Never Came to Power? https://w

From early on I always had a fascination with history that developed from watching historical movies, playing historical games, and diving into history books all of which occupied a large amount of my free time outside of school. However in school I often times found myself disinterested and disengaged in my social studies lessons as I was confronted with lecture after lecture where I had to sit for an hour and listen about material that I had already learned myself at that point.  That was until my European History class in my first year of high school. I was blown away by the comprehensiveness of the content and also the engaging ways in which we were presented the knowledge from being able to do our own research into historical documents or having class discussions on why historical events played out the way they did. But my favorite lesson in that class and probably the most engaging social studies lesson I had in my K-12 experience was when our class conducted our own mock version