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Page 1: Meaningful social studies for elementary students

This article was downloaded by: [Florida International University]On: 26 August 2014, At: 03:47Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Teachers and Teaching: theory andpracticePublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctat20

Meaningful social studies forelementary studentsJere Brophy a & Janet Alleman aa Department of Teacher Education , Michigan State University ,USAPublished online: 22 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Jere Brophy & Janet Alleman (2009) Meaningful social studies for elementarystudents, Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 15:3, 357-376

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540600903056700

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Page 2: Meaningful social studies for elementary students

Teachers and Teaching: theory and practiceVol. 15, No. 3, June 2009, 357–376

ISSN 1354-0602 print/ISSN 1470-1278 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13540600903056700http://www.informaworld.com

Meaningful social studies for elementary students

Jere Brophy* and Janet Alleman

Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, USATaylor and Francis LtdCTAT_A_405843.sgm(Received 7 October 2008; final version received 21 January 2009)10.1080/13540600903056700Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice1354-0602 (print)/1470-1278 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & [email protected]

This article begins with an overview of elementary social studies, considering itspurposes and goals, historical and contemporary controversies about learnerreadiness and curriculum content, and commonly reported problems withtextbooks and time pressures. It then considers proposed reforms, first consideringapproaches recommended by others and then focusing on the approachrecommended by the authors. This approach features units on cultural universals,organized around powerful ideas developed with emphasis on their connectionsand applications. Common features of the units are described and then illustratedas they play out in a unit on government. The final section describes how anexemplary elementary teacher implements these units in her classroom in waysthat personalize them to her students’ home backgrounds, uses a narrative style forestablishing a common content base, and in other ways addresses the challengesof teaching content-rich subjects to young learners with limited backgroundknowledge and literacy skills.

Keywords: social studies; elementary grades; cultural universals; curriculum;government

Curricula conventionally are divided into the arts and humanities (focusing on personalexpression and communication), the sciences (focusing on the physical world), and thesocial sciences (focusing on the social world). The school subjects are distinguishedfrom the disciplines that inform them. School curricula are organized to prepare studentsfor life in the present and future. The students learn something about how disciplinarygenres and tools are used to generate new knowledge, but most of their time in schoolis spent learning discipline-based knowledge and skills that they can draw upon toinform their personal, social, and civic decision-making in life outside of school.

In the USA, the elementary (and sometimes the secondary) social educationcurriculum is taught as integrated social studies, rather than as separate courses inhistory or the social science disciplines. That is, instead of being organized within asingle discipline and emphasizing discipline-specific content and issues, social studiescourses integrate content drawn from multiple disciplines and emphasize goals ofcitizen preparation.

The emergence of social studies as a coherent school subject organized to prepareyoung people for citizenship is credited to a committee report issued by the NationalEducation Association (1916), calling for incorporating content from history, geogra-phy, and civics within a social education strand to be called ‘social studies.’ Its content

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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would be selected based on its meaning and relevance to students and its value inpreparing them for citizenship. This vision is still emphasized by contemporary socialstudies educators. For example, the National Council for the Social Studies definessocial studies as ‘the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promotecivic competence,’ adding that its primary purpose is ‘to help young people developthe ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizensof a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world’ (NCSS,1994, p. 3).

Elementary social studies developed along the lines envisioned in the 1916 report.The curriculum drew from history, geography, civics, and economics, and later fromsociology, anthropology, and psychology. Content was taught as integrated socialstudies, rather than as separate courses in the academic disciplines. Gradually, theexpanding communities sequence became the dominant structure and framework.Also known as the expanding horizons or expanding environments sequence, it beginswith a focus on the self in kindergarten and then expands the purview to the familyand school in first grade, the neighborhood in second grade, the community in thirdgrade, the state and region in fourth grade, the nation in fifth grade, and thehemisphere or world in sixth grade.

Competing approaches to social studies

Within the commonalities established by this shared heritage, contemporary socialstudies educators hold contrasting definitions of citizen education and assumptionsabout how to accomplish it. Their contrasting views resemble the curricular debatesthat occur in all subjects and reflect continuing struggles among supporters of fourcompeting ideas about what should be the primary basis for elementary and secondaryeducation (Kliebard, 2004). The first group believes that schools should equipstudents with knowledge that is lasting and important. It looks to the academic disci-plines as storehouses of knowledge and sources of authority about how to organizeand teach it. The second group believes that the natural course of child/adolescentdevelopment should be the basis for curriculum planning. It would align content tothe interests and learning needs associated with each grade-level’s ages and stages.The third group works backward from society’s needs, designing schooling to preparechildren and adolescents to fulfill adult roles in the society. The fourth group seeks touse the schools to combat injustice and promote social change, by focusing curriculumaround social policy issues.

In practice, mainstream social studies has focused on transmission of the culturalheritage, emphasizing didactic teaching of content that features support for the statusquo, focus on Western civilization, and inculcation into American political values andtraditions. Periodically, it is challenged by historians and social scientists who wantpreservation of the integrity of their disciplines in the form of separate courses, or bysocial reformers who want more inquiry into and discussion of social issues withemphasis on critical thinking, values analysis, and decision-making.

Debates about the nature and content of social studies have focused primarily onthe secondary grades. Elementary teachers often do not know much about thesedebates, or even much about social studies as a coherent curricular strand. Their teach-ing preparation is heavily focused on literacy and mathematics. Most take only asingle course in social studies education as undergraduates and acquire little or noadditional social studies education thereafter. Limited exposure to social studies

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content in their preservice teacher education, combined with the low priority thatschool districts typically assign to inservice professional development in elementarysocial studies, leaves most elementary teachers poorly prepared to assess instructionalresources, identify the most worthwhile ones, and use them in ways that support theirstudents’ progress toward major social studies goals. Consequently, their view ofsocial studies often is limited to the contents of the social studies textbooks used attheir grade-level (typically purchased from one of four major publishers), andinformed by the instructional materials (maps, globes, videos, or fictional and nonfic-tional children’s literature selections) provided by their districts.

There are problems with this reliance on textbooks. First, the textbooks’ contentand activity suggestions often leave much to be desired. For example, whether mostlypicture books, as is the case for kindergarten through second grade materials, ormostly prose, as is the case for upper elementary materials, the content does notconsist of networks of connected information structured around big ideas (whichwould make it both worth learning and relatively easy to learn). Instead, it consists ofparades of disconnected facts that provide a ‘trivial pursuit’ or ‘mile-wide but inch-deep’ curriculum. Most of the suggested activities are similarly trivial – related to thetopic but not designed to develop big ideas with an eye toward application to lifeoutside of school (the same is true of most videos and instructional resources accessi-ble via the internet). The teachers’ manuals also do not provide much help. They mayhighlight new vocabulary words or suggest topic-related activities or children’s books,but they usually do not identify key ideas or guide teachers in systematically develop-ing these ideas for understanding, appreciation, and life application.

State and district standards do not provide much help to elementary teachers either.For the primary and upper elementary grades, state curriculum standards in socialstudies tend to be relatively limited and vague, and school districts’ standards usuallyreflect those of the states. Furthermore, because of accountability pressures and testingprograms that emphasize basic literacy and mathematics skills, primary teachers arehard pressed to find time to teach social studies. A few develop social studies contentduring only six or eight weeks of the school year. Most allocate substantially moretime to social studies by teaching about core democratic values and supplementingthe textbook content with the holiday curriculum – the civic socialization, historicalre-creations, and other school activities traditionally associated with Columbus Day,Thanksgiving, the birthdays of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and MartinLuther King, Jr., and other special days that provide occasions for developingstudents’ knowledge about American history and socializing their values as Americancitizens. Many teachers also supplement the text-based social studies curriculumthrough some of the literature selections and writing assignments that they include intheir literacy curriculum.

However, even a content base that includes the textbook, holiday activities, andsocial education-related children’s literature selections will not lead to a coherent andpowerful social studies curriculum, because these sources are long on trivia but shorton meaningful development of connected big ideas. Providing primary students witha more powerful introduction to social education requires both a content base that isstructured around big ideas and teaching that emphasizes the connections among theseideas and their applications to life outside of school.

As social studies educators and researchers, we have been working to developcurriculum and instruction that meet these criteria. In the remainder of this article, weexplain our rationale for adopting a new curricular approach to elementary social

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studies and provide an overview of the curriculum we have developed. Its contentfocuses on human activities related to cultural universals – basic human needs andsocial experiences found in all societies, past and present.

Concerns about elementary social studies education

To plan good social studies programs, teachers need to clarify their priorities concern-ing social education goals and their implications for the curriculum. Most programmodels share commitment to citizen education goals, so it is possible to constructricher yet still coherent curricula by incorporating multiple perspectives. A unit ongovernment, for example, might incorporate core democratic values (citizenshiptransmission), the three branches of government (political science), what it means tobe an informed voter (reflective inquiry), and the rights and responsibilities of citizensin a democracy (social criticism component focused on whether there is justice for allin America). Still, some critics of early social studies have questioned whether it ispossible to accomplish such a challenging agenda with young learners, and othershave questioned whether it is being accomplished effectively.

Learner readiness

In the past, the idea that social studies involves abstractions that are not well graspeduntil at least the fourth grade caused some to argue that social studies instructionshould not begin until that time, and others to argue that history should not be taughtuntil the secondary grades. However, subsequent research established that elementarystudents can understand general chronological sequences (e.g., that land transportationdeveloped from walking to horse-drawn carriages to engine-powered vehicles), eventhough they may still be hazy about particular dates. They also can follow age-appropriate representations of people and events from the past (especially narrativesbuilt around several characters with whom they can identify, depicted as pursuinggoals that they can understand), even though they might not be able to follow analytictreatments of abstract historical topics or themes (Booth, 1993; Brophy & Alleman,2006; Downey & Levstik, 1991; Thornton & Vukelich, 1988).

Piaget’s cautions against getting too far away from children’s experience base tothe point of trying to teach abstractions that will yield ‘merely verbal’ learning arewell taken. However, his ideas about what children are capable of learning at particu-lar ages were too pessimistic and too focused on the learning of logical-mathematicalstructures through self-initiated exploration of the physical environment (Downey &Levstik, 1991). More recent research indicates that, if guided by systematic instruc-tion, children can learn a great many things earlier and more thoroughly than theywould learn on their own, and can use situational schemas built up through prior expe-rience as templates for understanding information about how people in other times andplaces responded to parallel situations (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). In short,children’s ability to understand social content does not hinge on the content’s distancein time or space from the here and now, but instead on the degree to which it focuseson people operating from motives and engaging in goal-oriented actions that match (orat least are analogous to) motives and goals that are familiar to the children from theirown life experiences.

Thus, there is no need to confine the primary grades to the here and now beforemoving backward in time or outward in physical space and scope of the community

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in subsequent grades. Children can understand historical episodes described innarrative form with emphasis on the motives and actions of key individuals, and theycan understand aspects of customs, culture, economics, and politics that focus onuniversal human experiences or adaptation problems that are familiar to them and forwhich they have developed schemas or routines.

People skeptical about the value of social education might ask, ‘Even if primarygrade students are able to learn social studies with understanding, why not focus theearly grades on establishing basic skills and withhold initiation of social studies untilthe middle grades?’ This is a challenging question, but we see several compellingresponses to it. First, as recent research on literacy learning (Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2003) indicates, right from the beginning of schooling, opportunities toread and write about informational texts (including social studies materials) areneeded to support students’ progress toward important literacy goals such as readingcomprehension and strategy development.

Second, given that so much of what students read in the literacy curriculum isfictional and even fanciful, students need exposure to science and social studies todevelop realistic knowledge about the physical and social world. This would be trueat any time, but especially in the current climate of high-stakes testing of achievementin basic skills. One of the many forms of collateral damage that has resulted from thehigh-stakes testing frenzy has been a narrowing of the curriculum, with teachersreducing time devoted to social studies and other subjects not included in the testingprogram, in order to devote more time to test preparation (Houser, 1995; Howard,2003; Pascopella, 2005; Thomas, 2005; VanFossen, 2005). This is one probablereason for American students’ poor performance on national and international tests inhistory, geography, and civics.

Another important reason for early initiation of social education is to socializestudents to adopt values, attitudes, and dispositions desirable for young peoplegrowing up in a democratic society in an increasingly interdependent world. Youngchildren often display historical presentism (disparaging the thinking or technolo-gies of people of the past because they view them only with hindsight instead ofappreciating them within the context of their time and place), as well as national orcultural chauvinism (depicting unfamiliar customs as funny, weird, etc.) (Barrett &Buchanan-Barrow, 2005; Furnham & Stacey, 1991). They also show very limitedawareness of the role of climate and geography in creating affordances to andconstraints on people’s lives and therefore affecting economic activities and culturalpractices in different places in the world (Brophy & Alleman, 2006). Early socialeducation helps to insure that these childhood predispositions do not harden intomore firmly held prejudices, by providing information and socialization that supportdevelopment of historical empathy, identification with the human condition ingeneral (not just one’s own family, ethnic group, or nation), and recognition thatpeople are generally more alike than different, that many technologies that mightseem primitive (e.g., jungle huts) are actually sensible adaptations to the localclimate, given local resources, and that many customs that at first seem strange(e.g., rites of passage) have parallels in our own society and represent alternativeways of addressing culturally universal needs or wants. In short, social studiesshould be a part of the curriculum right from the beginning, not just becausestudents can learn aspects of it with understanding and interest, but because itprovides them with important fundamental understandings about the social worldand their place within it.

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Program quality

Critics of elementary social studies in the USA usually accept its feasibility but ques-tion its effectiveness. Although often presented as criticism of integrated social studiesor of the expanding communities’ sequence, their criticism is really directed at theelementary social studies textbook series offered by the major publishers. Critics havenoted that the content presented in the primary texts is thin, trite, and otherwise inad-equate as a foundation for developing basic social understandings. Even when thetopics are worth addressing, the presented content is too simplistic to have significantapplication value for students, and often is already familiar to them (Larkins,Hawkins, & Gilmore, 1987; Ravitch, 1987). Texts for the later grades present muchmore content, but suffer from the ‘mile-wide but inch-deep’ problem, offering paradesof disconnected information rather than networks of connected content structuredaround powerful ideas (Alter, 1995; Beck & McKeown, 1988; Beck, McKeown, &Gromoll, 1989; Brophy, 1992; Brophy & Alleman, 1992/93).

Alternative approaches to curriculum

Better instructional resources are needed to support elementary teachers’ efforts tohelp their students develop basic knowledge about society and the human condition.Controversy continues over what content is suitable for elementary students to learn,but the focus of controversy has shifted. Current arguments center less on what ispossible to teach children in the early grades than on what is worthwhile, why it ismore worthwhile than alternatives, and how it can be taught effectively. The approachthat we favor involves retaining traditional unit topics but developing these topicsmuch more thoroughly than they are developed in the textbook series, and with betterfocus on big ideas. Others have suggested different approaches, as follows.

Cultural literacy/core knowledge

E.D. Hirsch Jr. (1987) proposed cultural literacy as the basis for curriculum develop-ment. He produced a list of over 5000 items of knowledge that he believed should beacquired in elementary school as a way to equip students with a common base ofcultural knowledge. We agree with Hirsch that a shared common culture is needed,but we question the value of much of what he included on his list of ostensibly impor-tant knowledge (e.g., knowing that Alexander’s horse was named Bucephalus).Furthermore, because it is a long list of specifics, it leads to teaching that emphasizesbreadth of coverage of disconnected details over depth of development of connectedknowledge structured around powerful ideas.

Subsequently, educators inspired by Hirsch’s book have used it as a basis fordeveloping the CORE Curriculum, which encompasses science, social studies, and thearts (Core Knowledge Foundation, 1999). The social studies strands are built aroundchronologically organized historical studies, with accompanying geographical andcultural studies. First graders study ancient Egypt and the early American civilizations(Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs). Second graders study ancient India, China, and Greece,along with American history up to the Civil War. Third graders study ancient Romeand Byzantium, various Native American tribal groups, and the 13 English coloniesprior to the American Revolution. Because it is divided by grade-levels and organizedinto World Civilization, American Civilization, and Geography strands, the CORE

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curriculum is an improvement over Hirsch’s list of disconnected knowledge items asa basis for social studies curriculum in the primary grades. However, it focuses on thedistant past and content that few elementary teachers are well prepared to teach.

We think that cultural universals have more to offer than ancient history as a basisfor introducing students to the social world. An approach that begins with what isfamiliar to the students in their immediate environments and then moves to the past,to other cultures, and to consideration of the future constitutes a better rounded andmore powerful social education than an exclusive focus on the past that is inherentlylimited in its applicability to today’s students’ lives. It also is more sustainable as anintroduction to social education – more likely to be remembered and used in lifeoutside of school.

History/literature focus

Kieran Egan (1988), Diane Ravitch (1987), and others have advocated replacingtopical teaching about cultural universals with a heavy focus on history and relatedchildren’s literature (not only fiction but myths and folktales). We agree with themthat primary-grade students can and should learn certain aspects of history, but we alsobelieve that these students need a balanced and integrated social studies curriculumthat also includes sufficient attention to powerful ideas drawn from geography and thesocial sciences. Furthermore, we see little social education value in replacing reality-based social studies with myths and folklore likely to create misconceptions,especially during the primary years when children are struggling to determine what isreal (vs. false/fictional) and enduring (vs. transitory/accidental) in their physical andsocial worlds. Thus, although fanciful children’s literature may be studied profitablyas fiction within the literacy curriculum, it is no substitute for a reality-based socialstudies curriculum.

Similarly, we do not favor attempts to subsume the social studies curriculumwithin the literacy curriculum. It is advisable to include a lot of reading and writingabout social studies-related topics within the literacy curriculum, because (as we notedearlier) opportunities to read and write about informational texts (not just fiction) areneeded to support students’ progress toward important literacy goals such as readingcomprehension and strategy development (Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2003). If wellchosen, such texts can enrich the social studies curriculum. They cannot replace it,however. Realization of social studies’ purposes and goals as depicted in the NCSS(1994) standards’ statement requires offering students a coherent social studies curric-ulum structured around big ideas linked to those purposes and goals. Disconnectedreadings, even if topic-relevant, cannot supply the needed focus and coherence.

Issues analysis

Many social educators believe that debating social and civic issues is the most directway to develop dispositions toward critical thinking and reflective decision-making inour citizens (Evans & Saxe, 1996). Some of them have suggested that even primary-grade social studies should deemphasize providing students with information andinstead engage them in inquiry and debate about social policy issues. We agree thatreflective discussion of social issues and related decision-making opportunities shouldbe included in teaching social studies at all grade-levels. However, we also believethat a heavy concentration on inquiry and debate about social policy issues is

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premature for primary-grade students whose prior knowledge and experience relatingto the issues are quite limited.

Our recommendations for practice

We recommend an elementary social studies curriculum that is rich in content drawnfrom the foundational disciplines (history, geography, and the social sciences), butorganized and represented with primary emphasis on preparation for life in generaland citizenship in particular, not socialization into the separate disciplines. Further-more, rather than cramming as much content into this curriculum as possible, werecommend limiting breadth in order to focus on developing powerful ideas in depthand with emphasis on their connections and life applications. To better connect withstudents’ prior knowledge and experiences, it is usually most effective to draw contentfrom multiple disciplines and synthesize it with content drawn from the arts, thehumanities, the physical sciences, current events, and other sources, organized withintopical units.

Disciplinary specialists might label much of this content as pre-, pan-, or proto-disciplinary knowledge developed using relatively informal language rather thanprecise disciplinary terminology. However, such objections are beside the point if thecontent is valid and of enduring value, well suited to the needs and capacities ofelementary students, and supports goals of teaching social studies for life application(Gardner & Boix-Mansilla, 1994; Levstik, 1986). That said, it remains true that thedisciplines are key sources of enduring knowledge that is of value to the social studiescurriculum. Consequently, it is important for teachers (including elementary teachers)to acquire a basic knowledge of the social studies foundational disciplines and toensure that what they teach is consistent with these disciplines.

Our approach is not so much a new initiative as a return to the basic ideas aboutsocial studies synthesized in the NEA (1916) report. The report stressed that socialstudies should prepare students to know and act in the world outside of school, andthat its content should be well matched to students’ prior experience and currentreadiness levels (Jenness, 1990; Saxe, 1991). The content should be represented asconnected networks structured around big ideas, not mile-wide but inch-deep paradesof disconnected facts.

The importance of structuring content around powerful ideas has at least beenrecognized since Dewey (1902, 1938), who viewed them as the basis for connectingsubject matter to students’ prior knowledge in ways that make their learning experi-ences transformative. Transformative learning enables us to see some aspects of theworld in a new way, such that we find new meaning in it and value the experience.

Others who have addressed the classical curricular question of what is most worthteaching have reached similar conclusions. Whether they refer to powerful ideas, keyideas, generative ideas, or simply big ideas (Smith & Girod, 2003), they converge onthe conclusion that certain aspects of school subjects have unusually rich potential forapplication to life outside of school – most notably, powerful ideas developed withfocus on their connections and applications (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).

Powerful ideas have several distinctive characteristics

First, they are fundamental to the subject area in general and the major instructionalgoals in particular. They tend to cluster in the midrange between broad topics such as

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transportation and particular items of information such as the fact that the fuel used inairplanes is not the same as the fuel used in cars. Most are concepts, generalizations,principles, or causal explanations. Examples within transportation include the catego-ries of land, sea, and air transportation; the progression from human powered toanimal powered to engine powered transportation; the importance of transportinggoods and raw materials (not just people); the role of transportation in fosteringeconomic and cultural exchange; and the development of infrastructure to support agiven form of transportation once it gets established (e.g., roads, service stations,traffic control mechanisms).

Powerful ideas are embedded within networks of knowledge and connected toother powerful ideas. Teaching about an object, tool, or action principle, for example,ordinarily would include attention to propositional knowledge (what it is, why andhow it was developed, etc.), procedural knowledge (how to use it), and conditionalknowledge (when and why to use it). Big ideas are more generative or transformativethan other aspects of a topic and they provide the basis for worthwhile lessons andlearning activities. It is not possible to improve parade-of-facts curricula simply byreplacing their worksheets with better activities; one must first replace the knowledgecomponent by shifting from parades of miscellaneous facts to networks of connectedcontent structured around big ideas that can provide a content base capable of support-ing better activities. It is virtually impossible, for example, to design worthwhileactivities based on information about the states’ flags, songs, birds, etc. Big ideas lendthemselves to authentic applications, of which many will be generative and eventransformative; trivial facts do not.

Cultural universals as unit topics

We believe that primary social studies curricula should continue to focus on humanactivities involved in pursuing needs and wants related to cultural universals, but thatthese topics should be developed more effectively than they are developed in typicallessons in textbook series.

Teaching students about how their own and other societies have addressed cultur-ally universal human purposes provides a sound basis for developing fundamentalunderstandings about the human condition, for several reasons. First, activities relat-ing to cultural universals account for a considerable proportion of everyday living andare the focus of much of human social organization and communal activity. Untilchildren understand the motivations and causal explanations that underlie theseactivities, they do not understand much of what is happening around them all the time.

Second, children from all social backgrounds begin accumulating direct personalexperiences with most cultural universals right from birth, and they can draw on theseexperiences as they construct understandings of social education concepts and princi-ples. Compared to curricula organized around the academic disciplines or aroundforms of cultural capital linked closely to socioeconomic status, content structuredaround human activities relating to cultural universals is easier to connect to allchildren’s prior knowledge and develop in ways that stay close to their experience.

Third, because such content is about humans taking action to meet their basicneeds and wants, it lends itself to the presentation within narrative formats. Implicitunderstanding of the narrative structure is acquired early, and children commonly usethis structure to encode and retain information. Narrative formats are well suited toconveying information about human actions related to cultural universals.

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Fourth, in addition to providing frequent opportunities to introduce basic disciplin-ary concepts and principles, narratives focused on humans engaged in goal-orientedbehavior provide frequent opportunities to explore causal relationships and makeexplicit some of the human intentions and economic or political processes thatchildren usually do not recognize or appreciate. Stories about how key inventionsmade qualitative changes in people’s lives or about what is involved in producingbasic products can incorporate process explanations (of how things are done) andcause-effect linkages (explaining why things are done the way they are and why theychange in response to inventions).

In summary, structuring the curriculum around cultural universals helps keep itscontent close to the students’ life experiences and thus meaningful to them, andrepresenting the content within narrative structures makes it easier for them to followand remember. It also ‘unveils the mysteries’ that the social world presents (from thechildren’s perspective), helping them to view the cultural practices under study asrational means of meeting needs and pursuing wants.

This approach also offers important bonuses for teachers. First, precisely becausethe stories focus on people taking actions to meet basic needs and pursue commonwants, students are likely to view the content as interesting and relevant and toappreciate follow-up activities and assignments as authentic (because they will haveapplications to life outside of school). This facilitates teachers’ efforts to motivatetheir students to learn, which can be a significant challenge in social studies (Zhao &Hoge, 2005).

Second, when the stories deal with life in the past or in other cultures, their focuson commonalities (people pursuing culturally universal and thus familiar needs andwants) highlights similarities rather than differences. This helps students to see thetime, place, and situation through the eyes of the people under study, and thus to seetheir decisions and actions as understandable given the knowledge and resourcesavailable to them. Such promotion of empathy helps teachers to counteract thetendencies toward presentism and chauvinism which are common in young children’sthinking about the past and about other cultures (Brophy & Alleman, 2006; Davis Jr.,Yeager, & Foster, 2001).

Third, teachers can teach this content effectively without extensive preparation,because they already possess a great deal of relevant personal and professional knowl-edge. That is, their own schooling, and especially their personal experiences growingup within their culture, have equipped them with plenty of knowledge and experienceto bring to bear when teaching about cultural universals, and it is easier for them toidentify or construct instructional resources to use during lessons and learning activities.

If human activities relating to cultural universals are taught with appropriate focuson powerful ideas and their potential life applications, students should develop basicsets of connected understandings about how the social system works, how and why itgot to be that way over time, how and why it varies across locations and cultures, andwhat all of this might mean for personal, social, and civic decision-making. Such acontent base is not provided in the major publishers’ elementary social studiestextbook series.

Key characteristics of the units

We have developed units on nine cultural universals: food, clothing, shelter, commu-nication, transportation, money, government, childhood, and family living (Alleman

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& Brophy, 2001, 2002, 2003). The units provide a basis for three to four weeks ofinstruction, depending on the topic and the degree to which the teacher includesoptional extensions. All of the units feature six common components:

(1) They begin with focus on the cultural universal as experienced in contempo-rary US society, especially in the students’ homes and neighborhoods (thisincludes eliciting students’ prior knowledge and helping them to articulate thismostly tacit knowledge more clearly). Early lessons use familiar examples tohelp students develop understanding of how and why the contemporary socialsystem functions as it does with respect to the cultural universal being studied.

(2) The units consider how the technology associated with the cultural universalhas evolved over time. Lessons in this historical strand illustrate how humanresponses to the cultural universal have been influenced by inventions andother cultural advances.

(3) The units address variation in today’s world in the ways that the culturaluniversal is experienced in different places and societies. Along with thehistorical dimension, this geographical/cultural dimension of the unit extendsstudents’ concepts to include examples different from the familiar ones theyview as prototypical. This helps them to place themselves and their socialenvironments into perspective as parts of the larger human condition (as it hasevolved through time and as it varies across cultures). In the language ofanthropologists, these unit components ‘make the strange familiar’ and ‘makethe familiar strange’ as a way to broaden students’ perspectives.

(4) The units include artifacts, classroom visitors, field trips, and especially, chil-dren’s literature selections (both fiction and nonfiction) as input sources.

(5) The units include home assignments that call for students to interact withparents and other family members in ways that not only build curriculum-related insights but engage the participants in enjoyable and affectively bond-ing activities.

(6) The units engage students in thinking about the implications of all of this forpersonal, social, and civic decision-making in the present and future, in waysthat support their self-efficacy perceptions with respect to their handling of thecultural universal throughout their lives. Many lessons raise students’consciousness of the fact that they will be making choices (both as individualsand as citizens) relating to the cultural universal under study. Many of thehome assignments engage students in decision-making discussions with otherfamily members. These discussions (and later ones that they often spawn)enable the students to see that they can affect others’ thinking and have inputinto family decisions.

The repetition of these components across units builds students’ conceptions ofsocial studies as a coherent school subject with its own purposes, goals, and content.They learn that social studies is about how humans function in their environments andhow human societies work.

An example: teaching about government

To exemplify our approach and illustrate how substantive social education content canbe made coherent and interesting for young learners, we will describe some of the big

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ideas and learning activities featured in our unit on government (Alleman & Brophy,2003).

Some elementary teachers, especially primary teachers, shy away from teachingabout government because they believe that their students are not interested in orready for instruction in the topic. It is true that most elementary students will notrespond well to abstract theories about government or to some of the drier traditionalcontent such as a lesson on how a bill becomes a law. However, even young childrenare very interested in issues of fairness and justice (as can be seen when they learnabout slavery or past restrictions on women’s rights). We also have found them to beresponsive to lessons about the basic reasons for and functions of government.

To help students understand why governments are needed and what they do fortheir people, we recommend developing instruction around the basic idea that peopleneed governments to provide essentials that are too big, complicated, or expensive forthem to provide for themselves. These include national defense and the armed forces;roads, airports, and transportation infrastructure; education from kindergarten throughuniversity levels; the criminal justice system; police protection and emergencyservices; parks and recreation facilities; the postal service; standards and regulationsregarding product quality and safety; safety net services for people with special needs;and so on. The tax money that is collected to pay for these services supports thecommon good.

An effective way to develop such appreciation is to prepare a photo essay illus-trating events occurring in a typical day in the life of one of the students in the classand underscoring the role of government in facilitating these activities. For example,the photos might depict the child getting up in the morning wearing fire-resistantpajamas (as per government regulations); washing using purified running watersupplied by the local government; changing into clothes inspected for quality andsafety; eating a breakfast consisting of foods inspected for quality and safety; board-ing a safety-inspected, government-provided bus driven by a licensed driver; travel-ing to school on government-maintained roads patrolled by the local police force;attending school in a government-owned building; participating in learning activitiestaught by government-supplied teachers using government-supplied materials; andso on.

Initial ideas about alternative forms of government can be developed by contrast-ing our system of representative democracy (leaders are elected to limited terms andmust act within constitutional guidelines) with systems in which leaders ascend topower through other means (inheritance, military force), hold office indefinitely, andexercise totalitarian power. Contrasts can be brought home through discussion orsimulation of what it is like to live in countries where there are no elections or nosecret ballots, access to desired housing and jobs requires continued governmentapproval, and people who resist government policies are subject to arrest.

Some of the details of how our system works are best addressed around electiontimes via mock elections following study of some of the issues and the reasons whydifferent stakeholders would prefer one candidate or policy over another. Also, usingexamples easily understood by children, instruction can help students learn thatdebates about laws or policies often focus on means–ends relationships and tradeoffsrather than ultimate purposes (e.g., people who agree with the ultimate purpose of aproposed law or policy might nevertheless oppose it because they do not believe thatit will accomplish the purpose or that whatever good it accomplishes will not be worththe costs in higher taxes, new restrictions on individual freedoms, etc.).

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Teachers can convey basic information about taxes and address likely confusionof taxes and utility bills by sharing and leading discussions about their own personaldocuments. Most of the students will be familiar with sales taxes at some level, butshowing the amounts added to the purchase price as listed on store receipts will helpbring home the fact that sales taxes are attached to most purchases and provide a senseof the relative amounts involved. Similarly, sharing property assessments and local taxbills will help students understand how local governments raise money for schools andcommunity services. Support of the federal (and if relevant, the state) governmentthrough income taxes can be made concrete by showing paycheck statements indicat-ing that employers keep track of the taxes that their employees owe and deduct thismoney from gross pay to send to the government.

Once the students have developed some basic knowledge about the common formsof taxation, where tax money is sent, and what is done with it, teachers can shareutility bills and lead discussion of what is being purchased from utility companies,how it is used, and how the companies keep track of what customers owe them. Classdiscussion would be followed up with home assignments calling for students tointeract with their parents in locating and observing the meters that measure water,gas, and electricity usage, as well as inspecting and discussing tax bills, utility bills,store receipts, and related documents.

Instruction about the civic aspects of government might begin with the emphasisthat students are members of a classroom community as well as a larger communitythat incorporates their homes and businesses. As members of the classroom learningcommunity, they are expected to follow rules designed to help people get along, keepthings fair, protect individual and school property, and keep people safe. The largercommunity has laws for similar reasons. Political office holders make sure that life inthe community allows people to carry out their daily activities in a safe and orderlyenvironment. Students might be introduced to local leaders through guest speakerswho visit the classroom, field trips to government offices, or studying photos andlistening to taped interviews.

The students might learn that the community leaders have three basic jobs: makeplans and laws, solve problems, and make the community a pleasant place to live.Legislators make the laws that need to be followed by everyone. Some laws protectpeople’s rights, some protect property (e.g., zoning ordinances), some protect health(e.g., pollution ordinances), and some promote safety (e.g., speed limits).

Laws help guide our lives and remind us of our responsibilities toward otherpeople. They are enforced by police and judges who are a part of the local govern-ment, but they are intended to make the community a better place, not merely to limitindividuals’ behavior. To make this concrete, students might discuss why particularlaws exist (e.g., considering what would happen if people drove at any speed theywanted and ignored stop signs). Once students have developed a basic understandingof and appreciation for local government, they are ready for lessons on state andnational governments, on voting and other aspects of responsible citizenship, andcomparisons of different forms of government.

Finally, the learning might include encouragement of and opportunities for prac-ticing good citizenship. Some of these might involve the government (e.g., writing toappropriate government leaders to suggest new laws or express a position on a currentissue). Others might involve service learning (e.g., participation in anti-litter,recycling, or other volunteer activities), rationalized with the explanation that govern-ments cannot be expected to do everything and good citizens contribute to the

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common good as individuals. For a unit on government that incorporates these andother basic ideas, see Alleman and Brophy (2003).

The special challenges of teaching young children

Teaching content-rich subjects (primarily science and social studies) is especiallychallenging in the early grades. Young students almost always have at least someexperiential base to bring to bear, but their prior knowledge about topics addressed inthese subjects is usually very limited. Furthermore, this limited knowledge base ismostly tacit (not organized or even verbally articulated, and perhaps neverconsciously considered), and it often includes many misconceptions. Consequently,unlike teachers in later grades who usually can begin stimulating new knowledgeconstruction by making connections to an already established knowledge base,primary teachers often are faced with the task of helping their students to develop andbegin to integrate an initial knowledge base in the domain. This requires taking littleor nothing for granted, teaching (in some respects) as if the students know nothing atall about the topic.

In addition, primary teachers usually have to assume most of the burden ofconveying new information to their students. They cannot rely on texts for thispurpose, because kindergarten and first-grade students cannot yet read informationaltexts fluently, and even second- and third-grade students usually have not yet acquiredthe critical mass of reading fluency and study skills needed to enable them to learnefficiently from reading. Thus, most of the content that primary teachers believe isimportant for their students to learn will have to be conveyed by themselvespersonally during lessons. They may use books, photos, physical artifacts, or otherinstructional resources in the process, but their students’ initial exposures to newinformation mostly involve listening to what the teacher says during teacher-ledclassroom discourse.

Primary teachers need to work within certain constraints as they construct andmanage this discourse. Their students’ attention spans are limited, and they are not yetable to retain lengthy and complicated explanations, so extended lecturing is not afeasible teaching method. Also, their students do not yet possess the combination ofcognitive development and domain-specific knowledge needed to comprehend anduse the disciplinary content structures and associated discourse genres that are used inteaching subjects at more advanced levels. For example, children have experienceswith money and personal economic exchanges, but know nothing of macroeconomics;they can comprehend basic ideas about rules, laws, and authority, but not aboutcomparative governmental structures or other advanced aspects of political science;and they can understand stories about everyday life and key events in the past, but notabstract analyses of macro-level historical trends.

Consequently, although it is just as important for young students as for older onesthat teachers offer curricula featuring networks of knowledge structured around bigideas, teachers cannot do this through lengthy explication of concepts, principles, logi-cal arguments, or other advanced disciplinary structures that young students are notyet prepared to understand and use. Instead, they must stick to aspects of a domain thatcan be made meaningful to students because they can be connected to the students’existing knowledge, and especially to their personal experiences. In addition, it helpsto convey this content using text structures and discourse genres with which thestudents already have some familiarity (and preferably, some fluency).

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Narrative structures as teaching tools

One particularly useful tool that meets these criteria is the narrative structure, becauseeven the youngest students are already familiar with it through exposure to stories.Bruner (1990), Downey and Levstik (1991), Egan (1988, 1990), and others have notedthat even very young children are familiar with and adept at using narrative modes ofthinking for describing and remembering things that are important to them. That is,they formulate and remember in story form. Stories are built around one or a smallgroup of central figures and include attention to their goals, the strategies they use toaccomplish those goals (often involving solving problems or overcoming obstacles inthe process), and the outcomes of their actions for both the central figures and othersin the story. The narrative format provides a natural way to remember a great many ofthe details that fill out the story, organized within the goal-strategy-outcome ‘storygrammar.’

This makes the narrative format a powerful vehicle for teachers to use in helpingyoung students bridge from the familiar to the less familiar. Children can understandinformation about the long ago and far away when the information is represented asstories of people pursuing goals that the students can understand, using strategies thatinvolve doing things that the students have done themselves, can be shown, or can behelped to imagine. Just as children can understand fictional creatures (e.g., Hobbits)and worlds (e.g., Harry Potter’s) conveyed through narrative formats, they can under-stand stories about life in the past or in other cultures, so long as the depicted eventslie within their own experiences or can be understood and imagined based on thoseexperiences.

Many aspects of social studies are amenable to representation within narrativestructures, especially those that involve human actions that occur in steps, stages, orseries of events unfolding over time. History is the most obvious example. Althoughit has its abstract and analytic aspects, much of history involves reconstructing storiesof specific events (e.g., the American Revolution) or changes over time (e.g., in modesof transportation). Studies of children’s historical learning indicate that much of whatthey retain about history is organized within narrative structures, usually compres-sions of larger trends into stories that focus around goal-oriented activities or conflictsinvolving a few key figures (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Brophy & VanSledright, 1997).They tend to think of the American Revolution, for example, as a fight between KingGeorge of England and George Washington and other Americans who resented histaxes and unfair treatment, not as a protracted and multi-faceted conflict between asovereign nation and a federation of colonies about to become a nation.

Primary-grade children may be limited in their ability to understand the geopolit-ical aspects of the past, but they can understand stories about wars as attempts to gaincontrol over land or other resources, voyages of discovery as attempts to satisfy curi-osity and acquire riches, immigration as attempts to escape oppression or exploiteconomic opportunities, and so on. Most historical events and trends involved peopleengaged in goal-oriented behavior, and thus can be conveyed using narrative formats.

Although it is less commonly recognized, narrative formats also are well suited toconveying information about many of the geographical and social science aspects ofsocial studies, especially those involving human actions related to cultural universals.To teach about societies and cultures, whether past or present, teachers can constructnarratives explaining how people meet their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelterwithin the affordances and constraints of local climate and natural resources, how they

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communicate and travel locally and across longer distances, and how they act bothindividually (or as families) and collectively (through their governments) to meetneeds and pursue agendas.

These stories provide frequent opportunities to introduce basic concepts and prin-ciples of geography, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Also,because they focus on humans engaged in goal oriented behavior, they providefrequent opportunities to explore causal relationships and make explicit the humanintentions and economic or political processes that underlie and explain human behav-ior but often go unrecognized and thus unappreciated by children. Stories about howkey inventions made qualitative changes in people’s lives, about why Americans eatrelatively more wheat and beef but Chinese people eat relatively more rice andchicken, or about the land-to-hand processes and occupations involved in producingcommon foods and fabrics and bringing them to our stores all incorporate processexplanations (of how and why things are done as they are and how products aredeveloped) and cause-effect linkages (explaining why things are done the way theyare and why they change in response to inventions).

Adapting curriculum to the local context

All of the lessons in our instructional units are structured around at least one big idea.The units provide teachers with content bases to develop, as well as plans for follow-up activities and home assignments. The lesson plans begin with digests of basicinformation about a key aspect of the cultural universal under study. The digestsconsist of connected information developed around featured big ideas. The lessonsdevelop these big ideas in ways that allow students not only to understand them but touse them for making sense of the social world and in other ways apply them to theirlives outside of school.

Early lessons in each unit focus on concepts and principles needed to understandhow the cultural universal is addressed in the contemporary American society, espe-cially the students’ homes and neighborhoods. Subsequent lessons focus on inventionsand other significant developments through time, then on the nature of and reasons forthe current variations across locations and cultures. The lessons that come near theends of the units typically present less new information and instead focus on theimplications of what has been learned for personal, social, and civic decision-making.

Although they are rich resources, teachers need to adapt our units to their teachingcontext, drawing on their professional knowledge and experience and on their knowl-edge of students and their families. This can be seen in the adaptations made byBarbara Knighton, a teacher with whom we frequently collaborate. Barbara subsumesher social studies program within her overall approach to teaching. For example, as apart of her emphasis on helping students to see connections, she searches for ways toexploit connections between the lesson being planned and other lessons in socialstudies or other subjects, as well as connections between lesson content and theexperiences of her students and their families.

Barbara has found that her six- and seven-year-olds learn and retain big ideasbetter when she builds toward them by using examples drawn from her own life andtheir lives, instead of beginning by stating the big idea as an abstract generalizationand only then moving to examples. Consequently, as she thinks about teaching eachbig idea, she identifies anecdotes from her own life and examples from her students’lives that she can use to lay groundwork for building toward the big idea.

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Barbara shares our concern about limiting the breadth of content in order to focuson developing big ideas in depth, so her primary consideration in deciding whether touse anecdotes, examples, books, illustrations, activities, or other instructionalresources is her assessment of their potential value in helping her students understandand apply the lesson’s big ideas. Other criteria (e.g., the resources are easy to obtainand use, the students are likely to find them interesting) are relevant as secondaryconsiderations, but her primary focus is on adapting the lesson plans to ensure that thebig ideas are developed effectively.

Most of her adaptations focus on the big ideas themselves. If the terminology usedin defining concepts and explaining principles is not well suited to her students,Barbara will substitute for or elaborate on certain aspects of the provided content base.For example, she has found that her students easily understand the meaningsassociated with the term ‘weather’ but not those associated with the term ‘climate.’Consequently, she believes that it is not cost-effective to try to introduce and maintaindistinctions between the two terms at the earliest grade-levels, so she uses the termssynonymously (as in explaining that banana plants thrive in countries where the‘weather’ is warm and sunny).

Also, if the content includes reference to objects or processes likely to be unfamil-iar to her students, she will plan ways to supplement verbal descriptions or explana-tions with physical examples, photos, or other illustrations. She wants to make surethat her students can understand and visualize the processes they are learning about –not just memorize a definition or generalization that might not mean much to them.

However, to avoid making the lesson any more cluttered or complicated than itneeds to be, she typically omits adding such instructional resources for content that isalready familiar to her students. For example, she brought a woolen fleece and threepieces of wool clothing to a lesson on the land-to-hand story of wool, allowingstudents to feel them and gain visual and tactile sensations of wool to supplement theunderstandings developed through her verbal explanations. She also brought somefluffy cotton to the subsequent lesson on cotton, but she did not bring items of cottonclothing because she knew that most of her students would be wearing cotton clothingthat day.

When she sees the need for an instructional resource, Barbara prefers to make orassemble her own version so that she can tailor it to the lesson’s big ideas and herstudents’ experiences. She finds that illustrations in books and even maps, posters, orother materials specifically marketed to teachers as instructional resources oftencontain language that is confusing or unfamiliar to her students, details that distractattention from the big idea, or other features that detract from their usability.

Where unfamiliar or difficult language is a problem, Barbara may teach herstudents the language used in the resource and help them make it their own, adapt thelanguage on the spot to fit what is familiar to the students, or repeat key questions orphrases to simplify the learning task. In any case, she uses commercially manufac-tured instructional resources the same way as she uses the ones she co-constructs withher students: as bases for extended discourse, not just as series of questions to answeror outlines to fill in.

Most of the instructional resources Barbara uses are relatively simple and traditional,and many are made by Barbara herself. She uses props mostly when introducing newtopics, partly to engage students’ interest. Later she uses them sparingly, to support abig idea or perhaps a transition to a new topic or aspect. She is careful to ensure thatthe props do not ‘take over’ her lessons (i.e., distract attention from big ideas).

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Much more information about how Barbara teaches social studies to her younglearners can be found in Brophy, Alleman, and Knighton (2008). This book is one ofthe many resources that have become available in recent years for elementary teachersinterested in improving their social studies program. Besides its content and processstandards (NCSS, 1994), the National Council for the Social Studies now publishesSocial studies and the young learner and distributes books (Haas & Laughlin, 1997;Krey, 1998) aimed at elementary teachers and videos showing teaching in the earlygrades. Each year, the May/June issue of Social Education includes an annotatedreview of children’s trade books appearing that year that have special potential associal education resources.

Other significant resources include Storypath, a method of integrating literacy intosocial studies by engaging students in developing stories related to social studiestopics and themes (McGuire, 1997) and books on teaching elementary students abouthistory (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Hickey, 1999; Levstik & Barton, 2005), geography(Palmer, 1994; Wiegand, 1993), social studies curriculum (Thornton, 2005), andInternet resources (Berson, Cruz, Duplass, & Johnston, 2004).

Conclusion

It is important for many reasons to include social studies as a basic curriculum strandright from the beginning of schooling. To insure that its important aims and purposesare fulfilled, however, we need to restore appropriate time allocations and revitalizecurriculum content and learning activities to provide an introduction to the socialworld that is organized around powerful ideas developed with emphasis on theirconnections and applications to life outside of school. Human activities involved inaddressing culturally universal needs and wants are well suited as unit and lessontopics for such a curriculum. Whatever the topics emphasize, however, the key tomeaningful social studies is to focus on powerful ideas developed through authenticactivities.

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