Components of My Ideal Social Studies Classroom by Jacob Polley
Components of My Ideal Social Studies Classroom
I often daydream about being a school teacher. I envision myself in the front of the classroom with a kick-ass outfit on, coffee in hand, spewing out directions for an assignment while the students are perfectly behaved, laughing at all of my jokes and completely prepared and motivated to take on a lengthy activity that I have designed from scratch. That’s exactly how it is going to play-out right? Well, after speaking to numerous teachers, volunteering in the classroom, conducting student interviews and reading a plethora of educational texts over the course of my collegiate career, I understand my daydream may fall short of reality. However, I believe it is necessary to dream and work to have those dreams manifest into goals. That is exactly what I will be doing with this article. I want to take my dreams of becoming a school teacher and combine them with my education, along with my student and teacher interviews, to create what I believe to be a functional and effective fifth-grade social studies classroom.
Disclaimer: I will not be addressing every single attribute I would like to adopt into my future classroom. It is the goal of this article to highlight a couple key components I believe promote better learning for all in a social studies classroom.
Inclusivity
One of the top priorities of my future classroom will be inclusivity. I believe it is necessary and key to have students feel welcomed and represented within the classroom. Fortunately, I know first-hand what it feels like to be underrepresented in a classroom setting and feeling like an outsider. For the majority of my K-8 career I was the only person of color in a majority Caucasian setting and I remember learning about people who looked like me very little (I often had to wait until the month of February to learn about prolific African-Americans throughout history). I’ve seen how non-inclusion can hinder a student’s motivation tremendously. This is why I believe Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies are necessary for our classrooms as they become more diverse. “CSP seeks to foster – to sustain-linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (Alim, Paris; 2017). With minorities becoming the majority in public schools in 2014 (Strauss in Alim & Paris; 2017) it is imperative that teachers stress to students that all cultures are equally important components to today’s society as well as the future.
While interviewing teachers this past semester I heard this very same sentiment about culture in the classroom heavily stressed. To address this notion, Jessica Hernandez, a fifth-grade school teacher in the Bay Area begins her schoolyear annually by having her students participate in the construction of a cultural museum in their classroom. Each of her students are asked to interview their parents / guardians about their family’s culture. Next, they are asked to bring in an artifact from home or their community that represents their culture. With their findings from their interviews, along with their artifacts, the students start to build a cultural museum within their classroom. Jessica told me that this activity is beneficial on numerous levels, because, not only do her students learn about their own family background and culture, but, they also learn about other students’ cultures. Also, the cultural museum gives Jessica an excellent opportunity to see what cultures are represented in her classroom, which can act as an excellent start to incorporating some CSP in the classroom. I will definitely be adapting Jessica’s cultural museum into my future classroom.
Inquiry Based Learning
Often times in Social Studies classes we ask students to memorize the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of important dates and times throughout history. This certainly was true when I was student and probably the reason why I can tell you that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. While I can rattle off important dates and times, I couldn’t begin to tell you how the Battle of Hastings came to be and why it is significant today. This is where Inquiry-Based-Learning can play an important role in education. It focuses more on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ which promotes critical thinking and problem-solving skills within the classroom. Inquiry-Based-Learning is a method of teaching that puts the student, the subject, and their experiences at the center of the learning interaction. It also turns the teacher into a conversation facilitator rather than just the spiller of knowledge. The notion of IBL being an important aspect of education brings me to Jean Anyons’ essay on ‘Hidden Curriculum’. In her article Anyon discussed her research findings where she examined educational differences between affluent schools and working-class schools. Students from the working-class schools were asked to simply regurgitate facts that the teacher wrote on the chalkboard, whereas the students from the more affluent schools were asked to read and discuss concepts while conducting independent research. Anyons’ research concluded that the students who were from the more affluent schools were receiving an education that would better prepare them for the world as opposed to the students from the working-class schools.
I mention Anyons’ research because IBL reflects the type of learning that was being administered to the more affluent schools in her research. IBL requires students to rely less on memorizing facts and more on discussing concepts that require students to reason through difficult notions. While I would like to incorporate IBL into my social studies classroom, it is important to note that it is a proven effective tool for all subject matter.
Anyon, Jean. “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” Journal of Education, vol. 162, no. 1, 1980, pp. 67–92
