CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, V
This blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation,[1] argues for an instructional approach he calls historical dialogue to action (HD-to-A). Basically, that approach calls upon students to investigate historical documents and other historical sources (including the work of historians) to gather information relevant to some contemporary problem area. While grounded in historical material, it is not exclusively so.
These problem areas are so designated because they, to some degree, offend federalist values. And the aim is for students to develop their individual positions regarding these issues and be prepared to defend their positions in discussions, arguments, and debates. Teachers are to employ a process that has students develop the knowledge and skills by which they can perform these various steps including taking some action at a local site in which the problem is being manifested.
While this whole process is very much dependent on historical material, this blogger finds the application of the parochial/traditional construct as an approach too reliant on historical materials to the exclusion of other sources. This bias goes contrary to a great deal of both psychological and pedagogic theory that advocates diversity of instructional methods for different types of learners and for different types of substantive materials.
Here is what a current academic group has to contribute:
Teaching methods are the broader techniques used to help students achieve learning outcomes, while activities are the different ways of implementing these methods. Teaching methods help students:
· master the content of the course [and]
· learn how to apply the content in particular contexts
Instructors should identify which teaching methods will properly support a particular learning outcome. Its effectiveness depends on this alignment. To make the most appropriate choice, an instructor should consider learning outcomes, student needs and the learning environment.
Consider the following example:
· Learning outcome: Solve a complex math equation.
· Learning environment: An in person, upper-level math course with 20 students.
· Teaching method: Guided instruction. First, the instructor facilitates learning by modeling and scaffolding.[2] Students take time to ask questions and receive clarifications. Next, students practice applying these skills together and then independently. The instructor uses formative assessment to check for understanding.
This example demonstrates alignment of what the instructor wants students to do, and how they are supported in these tasks. If the instructor chooses a different teaching method, such as a traditional lecture, students would need to process the lecture’s content and apply principles simultaneously. This is very difficult to do and would lead to less successful outcomes.
Choosing the appropriate teaching method brings instruction to life while encouraging students to actively engage with content and develop their knowledge and skills.[3]
HD-to-A was thought of with these sorts of concerns in mind. It calls for, where appropriate, employing social scientific processes and findings, natural science processes and findings, journalistic sources, literature and other artistic sources, and any other reputable source that is relevant to the issue under study.
This approach – a diverse and interactive one – to educational challenges has a rich history and includes the work of such scholars as Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy,[4] Robert Slavin,[5] and Robert Solso.[6] And when one considers what the above cite advocates, it verges on the obvious in that it respects the notion, “different strokes for different folks.”
In addition, when social studies curriculum employs a more current, problem-solving, and relevant approach, it would be useful in encouraging lower achievers to interrelate with the substance of the material and bring it more to life. In addition, relying on both experimental designs and then narrative based material can avoid falling into a routinized experience for students.
Parochial federalism is too committed to analyzing those historical materials, i.e., historical documents. Yes, they contain, for example, the values and beliefs of the founding generation – useful information – but in adopting a strategy that reflects the above citation, analysis of these documents to the exclusion of other sources and modes of investigation is short-sighted. Instead, and this would be promoted by some other construct, there should be a give-and-take between and among various sources and/or activities.
And with that call for diverse methods, this critique is set to address its final point of contention. That would be how parochial federalism defines community. That view, being a product of the nation’s early history with its limited technology, thought of community only in geographic terms. Today, given online technologies (hence this blog) and transportation advancements, community can transcend physical localities.
These broader capacities call for a broader view and that view should be incorporated into a definition of community. Parochial/traditional federalism – as its name suggests – has an excessively local view of social/political concerns. Yet to meet what ails the nation, any view of governance and politics needs to be proactively ensconced in what is currently the relevant setting, that being a global reality.
And with that, this blog comes to its end of how it substantively presents and critiques the parochial/traditional construct – a construct by which Americans mostly saw governance and politics from colonial days to the end of World War II. In those years, it took on various versions of itself – the first being a covenantal view, one believed to be witnessed by God.
Through such developments as the Enlightenment, Western expansion, industrialization, the Hollywood effect, and the New Deal, that construct was not a stagnant view but evolved with the major events of the nation and with the various forms of its main challenge, the natural rights view. But with the experiences of World War II and how profound they were, that form of federalism gave way. This blog, with the next posting, will begin reviewing its replacement, the natural rights view.
The next posting will be short and will summarize what this blog has offered in terms of the parochial federalism construct. It will offer some introductory commentary on what constitutes the natural rights construct and that will be in the form of an overview in the context of how it was historically situated in the late 1940s.
[1] Available through Amazon. The book dedicates three chapters to the development of three units of study a teacher can employ in a civics or American government, secondary course.
[2] Scaffolding is merely an instructional strategy of breaking up what is to be learned into manageable segments and either giving students the tools by which to handle the segments or giving them various structures of the materials that possibly render them in a more manageable and/or understandable form.
[3] “Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation/Teaching Methods,” University of Buffalo (n.d.), accessed July 20, 2022, https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/develop/design/teaching-methods.html .
[4] Thomas L. Good and Jere Brophy, Educational Psychology: A Realistic Approach (New York, NY: Longman, 1990).
[5] Robert Slavin, Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1994).
[6] Robert Solso, Cognitive Psychology (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1995).