I am designing a pedagogy class through the College of Charleston called “Teaching and Learning History in the K-5 Classroom.” It should be an awesome mix of guest presenters on topics from using historical thinking, historical literature, making sense of history using the five senses (art, music, movement, digital literacy), reading and writing in social studies, field studies to historical places in the rich historical area of Charleston county and much more. Plus teachers will tone up on their content knowledge through a fun survey course in US History. Yes, it has been busy around here.
Teaching social studies and US History is in the process of making an historical shift as teaching and learning takes place in the 21st century. This is happening in all curriculum areas and now the shift must happen here. I have been thinking and studying lot about the shifts that need to be made and exploring what it should look like in the classroom. I have always love teaching fifth and sixth grade social studies. I have loved using historical fiction with all the facts from the text book. In my learning over the last five month, I see a clear cognitive shift in thinking about the instruction of social studies in all K-12 classrooms.
The cognitive shift includes the move to inquiry. Now I keep asking the question “how do you get kids think like Historian? How do I show students what historians do on a daily basis? How do I understand this myself?” My own inquiry has taken me to how affect can primary source documents, artifacts, recording, art, etc be use with elementary kids in order form them to make sense of the past, present, and the future. The shift is no longer about learning and memorizing facts but how those facts, historical events, people, etc affects our understanding of the world. Hence, our classrooms- all content- must be environments where inquiry is being conducted- even in kindergarten. It is about the learning and it not about the schooling. Our kids need skills to help them make sense of our rapidly changing world.
The is what I am trying to mesh out in my mind as I think about 21st century learning in a social studies classroom. There has to be some common vocabulary! I remember the looks from the cohort of teachers I spend my days with when I used the word primary source and historical thinking. I learned that many primary and elementary educators think of school as teaching and not learning. We have to make strides to change that thinking. We teach learners not content. As a writing teacher I know how to help the writer but I don’t know how to teach the writing! We have to make the shift!