Social Studies
by Amanda Moerbe
1. Transmission, social science, and critical thinking approaches:
1.1. Social studies taught as citizenship transmission, taught as social science, and taught as critical (or reflective) thinking
1.2. Multicultural Education:
1.2.1. Focuses on how people and how they interact with each other and nature, lessens ethnocentricity
1.2.2. Monocultural perspective has damaged generations of minority americans
1.2.3. Multiple acculturation: Process through which the common us culture and society emerged from a complex synthesis and interaction of the diverse cultural elements that originated from various cultural, racial, and ethnic groups
2. Global Education:
2.1. teachers in the global education program use substantive knowledge about world geography, history, and current events to help students build their own awareness and develop their own conclusions
2.2. promotes open mindedness, anticipation of complexity, resistance to stereotyping, inclination to empathize and naunchauvinism
3. Classroom Settings For Bilingual and ESL SS:
3.1. Elementary SS Classroom Settings
3.1.1. -ideal situation to meet language needs in the context of social studies instruction is usually a bilingual classroom environment -late exit is best
3.2. Middle School and High School social studies classroom settings
3.2.1. depend on factors like the number and size of language groups represented in the school, the mix of immigrant versus indigenous language minorities, the educational background of the students, the availability of trained bilingual and ESL teachers and instructional assistants, community attitudes toward the use of L1 in the schools and the history or past bilingual and esl programs
4. Challenges of Social Studies Instruction
4.1. 1. Limited background knowledge 2. Limited points of view in many social studies materials 3. Unfamiliarity with the formats and the instructional styles used in the US SS classes 4. High vocab density in the SS materials 5. A complex variety of genre and sentence structures in social studies materials 6. Heavy reliance on advanced literacy skills with limited opportunities for hands on activities
5. Use of L1 and L2
5.1. Concurrent approach: allows for the use of both languages during SS instructional time
5.2. nontranslation approach is better to help a more language rich environment with complex, thought provoking utterances.
6. Instructional Strategies
6.1. Making connections with students’ lives, using student knowledge about home countries, activating background knowledge, providing hands on and performance based activities, promoting critical thinking, paying attention to ss language issues and using graphic organizers
7. Connections with students lives, home countries, and background knowledge:
7.1. -students are highly important resources for their own learning -identify learner’s current schemata and build off of it -schemata’s represent networks of connected ideas
8. Hands on and Performance Based Activities:
8.1. Time line murals, design dioramas and models and create objects to place in a time capsule depicting a particular historical period
9. Critical Thinking and Study Skills Development: ARE KEY
9.1. Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA): is an example of a classroom strategy that teachers can use in a wide range of contexts to help language minority students develop critical thinking skills and deal with abstract content in social studies courses
10. Doing SS: 3 Examples
10.1. the process in which students do the types of activities that social scientists might engage in: writing histories, conducting interviews, analyzing data or recommending and planning courses of action
11. Social studies belongs in the elementary, middle and high school level curricula as a potentially exciting, inviting, and engaging intellectual environment where English Language Learners examine bedrock democratic principles and ideals of our society
12. Provides a variety of challenges for language minority children
12.1. involves abstract vocabulary
13. Multiple perspectives: A framework for social studies
13.1. It is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence
13.2. Anthropology, archeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology
14. Paying Attention To Social Studies Language Issues
15. Bringing the Strategies Together: CALLA as an Example (cognitive academic language approach)
16. Theme Based, Integrates Social Studies Units: Middle School Units on Protest and Conflict , Protest and the american revolution, Conflicts in world cultures
17. Social Studies and NCLB: A Conflicted Coexistence
17.1. NCLB has driven SS, especially in elementary school, to the sidelines
