A VARIETY OF APPROACHES

 

[Note:  This posting is a continuation of a series of postings that addresses what a civics teacher preparation program should include.  The last posting finished describing and explaining the first of five elements.  This posting will begin by describing what the second element is.  If not read, the reader is encouraged to check out the previous postings in this series that began with the posting on September 28, 2021, entitled “Prime Reason.”]

So, here is the next element,

 

Element Three:  A program that imparts the teaching skills that allow those perspective teachers to conduct curriculum strategies instructing children and adolescents in the civic knowledge and skills suitable to their developmental level and to the civic challenges of their community, state, and nation.

 

Here one gets to the practical.  What technique or methodology is most apt to engage students to be willing, able, and intelligently review the issues addressed in civics education?  Intuitively, one would guess that it would be one that has students perform, in real or simulated form, those activities that make up active civic roles in those secondary students’ communities.

          That is a format that calls on students to deal with issues that are pertinent to the civic realities of the day.  Students under such an approach could be asked to identify, define, and relate their values to those issues by investigating and forming and applying conclusions regarding them.  There happen to be many imaginative ways to go about doing these things.  Summarily, these strategies tend to follow an inquiry approach to social studies.[1]

          A review of instructional strategies tends to identify different approaches, each based on different philosophic positions and, by implication, favor varying methodological techniques.  While the literature offers listings of these approaches, this blogger bases his argument on a listing provided by Allen C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.[2] 

Their listing includes the behavioral approach, the managerial approach, the systems approach, the academic approach, the humanistic approach, and the reconceptualist approach.  This array, as presented by this listed order, suggests a rough continuum.      That continuum runs from a scientific/technical view to a non-scientific/non-technical, holistic view and, in between, various versions by degree of these more extreme views. 

If one were to draw this continuum, it might look like a list of approaches in the following ordered way:

Scientific/technical end of continuum

Behavioral – Essentialist approaches incorporating mostly didactic methods and emphasizing basic knowledge;

Managerial – Offshoot to behavioral approaches, emphasizing planning, rational principles, and logical steps (as in linear programming) but not necessarily stated in behavioral terms;

Systems – Incorporates a sensitivity to coordinating varying elements of social efforts, as in during the last century (mostly in the sixties), social studies promoted disciplinary (scientific based) methods of discovery;

Academic – Usually associated with historical or philosophical, deals with perennial questions and promotes the Socratic method of logical analysis;

Reconceptualist – Inheritors of the reconstructionist movement of the 1930s, with the aim of promoting justice and transforming society.  Methods used in this approach were geared toward critically challenging established socialization aims of existing curriculum;

Humanistic – Emphasizes artistic, physical, and cultural aspects of subject matter with an aim at the self-actualization of students.  Methods include a high degree of social interactions such as in small groups usually associated with student-centered curriculum.

Non-Scientific/Non-Technical, Holistic end of continuum

What has been the thrust of the literature in the field of social studies – perhaps of all education – has been to convince teachers that they need to develop lessons that call for students to participate in interactive, classroom activities.  This reflects adopting approaches associated with those listed from the systems to the humanistic end of the continuum.

          That is, it is generally ascribed that those approaches explicitly call on interactive methods and hands-on activities.  In general, there is among these approaches more of a reflective expectation on the part of the students (a necessary element of effective teaching no matter what approach is adopted).  Teachers, by and large, have been resistant to these approaches and favor the more didactic methods and essentialist content or methods that appear toward the scientific/technical end of continuum.

          They apparently have been more comfortable with what one can call traditional approaches in which teachers simply present the information that the students “need” to know.  The common teacher, in order to impart the information, gives lectures and has students fill in worksheets – or, being more innovative, might show a film.  This has been satirized in featured films depicting teachers who have yellowed, stained lecture notes or teachers who fall asleep in class while students fill in the answers to an endless stream of worksheets.

          This blogger’s take is as follows:  teaching is a very personal activity, and teachers will do what they feel most comfortable doing, but that does not relieve them from being as good as they can be in whatever approach they utilize.  But, as mentioned above, regardless of what method a teacher decides upon, if the student is going to learn, he/she needs to engage cognitively and emotionally with the content, what some might call being reflective of the material.

          Part of this engagement calls for the students to question and manipulate the information they are either given or that they discover.  Mere memorization might make the information available to the student in an end-of-the-lesson or unit test, but it will be soon forgotten if that information does not interact with information already known.  It will be temporarily stored and then dismissed – several learning theories support this depiction of long-term learning.[3]

          The point is that higher-level interactions with information do not necessarily come from inquiry, Socratic dialogues, or scientific discovery; they can come from engaging lectures and challenging worksheets.  If appropriate effort is given to preparing such activities, they can be effective. 

This blogger, though, does prefer inquiry, though an eclectic disposition – one that has teachers varying the approaches they use – is seen as necessary and advisable.  This is so because a variety of factors, including resources, time, and the need to evaluate various sorts of content are just some of the factors facing a teacher on a given day.  While to this blogger it seems to be commonsensical, given the national establishment’s commitment to the inquiry style of teaching (one not imposed at the school site), this message might be considered controversial among that professional audience.

This blog will start with this notion of variety in the next posting.  Just to remind the reader, this posting reports on the third element.  Upon completing its presentation of this element – of which there is still a good deal to go – the overall presentation has two more elements to address.  This overall topic, what should constitute a teacher preparation program, is more complex than what one would think when first presented with it.

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[1] For various classroom strategies, the reader can look at this blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation (available through Amazon).

[2] Allen C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins, Curriculum:  Foundations, Principles, and Issues (Boston, MA:  Pearson, 2004).

[3] For example, see Morris L. Bigge and Samuel S. Shermis, Learning Theories for Teachers (New York, NY:  Longman, 1999).

LACKING WHAT’S NEEDED

 

[Note:  This posting is a continuation of a series of postings that addresses what a civics teacher preparation program should include.  The last posting finished describing and explaining the first of five elements.  This posting will begin by describing what the second element is.  If not read, the reader is encouraged to check out the previous postings in this series that began with the posting on September 28, 2021, entitled “Prime Reason.”]

As this note points out, this blog continues with reviewing the second of five elements that a teacher preparation program should include.  That second element is,

 

Element Two:  A preparation program identifies both the challenge presented by the commodification of education and the popular culture that supports such commodification by describing it, explaining it, and evaluating it.

 

And as cultures tend to do, they promote some values and degrade others.  Understanding that dynamic in terms of what schools should be striving to accomplish needs to be part of what teacher preparation programs should address.

            There are those in education who fear recent developments – those pointed out by Daniel Bell and addressed in the last posting.  While this blogger has some reservations concerning Bell’s points, his overall message rings true.  With a popular culture that adopts an alluring commercial view, one hears, as legitimate prescriptions, commercial answers for the problems of education. 

In heeding such answers, is the nation bartering away its obligation to teach the young what should be taught?  When such policies as vouchers, other market mechanisms, and policies that heighten parental influence – as consumers – and limit the ability of school officials to run schools, do the more civic aims of education become compromised?

First, there is no doubt that parents need to have access to school officials to voice their concerns about the quality of the service that schools provide for their children.  They enjoy perspectives that are beneficial for school officials to hear and consider.  But the voice of a consumer is not what is needed.  What is needed is the voice of a partner in the endeavor to educate his/her son or daughter.  And that more communal role occurs, by definition, in truly federated arrangements.

Second, and here is the point at which this blogger’s experience kicks in, he believes, on a daily basis, that most parents do not respect good education per se.  What they want are credentials for their children.  They want the acquisition of those credentials to be as smooth, with the least number of hassles, as possible.

Yes, overall, they might buy more expensive housing to be able to send their children to what are perceived as better schools, but how do they measure better schools?  As the grind of daily living takes its toll, many parents simply do not want to be bothered with the on-going challenges associated with assuring that the education their children are getting is good. 

There is nothing in the popular culture that this blogger can detect that promises, encourages, or ensures that anything else is the case.  Oh, the economy may hold out rewards for those who have attained a superior education, but not as that education is taking place.  Instead, the popular culture seems to promote values, attitudes, and biases that are at best indifferent to the challenges of doing well in school if not “pushing” for a more immediate gratification frame of mind.

The popular culture also works in another counterproductive way.  Of course, students of college age are also products of that same culture.  In order to create a teacher education program that adopts this second element, college level programs need the assistance of appropriate messaging that would emanate from state government officials who support college professors as they conduct teacher preparation courses.  Such messaging should counter those counterproductive elements of the popular culture.

At the pre-college level, policies should be in place constraining schools from having to depend on the commercial interests that exploit the popular culture and its messages.  For example, this blogger taught at a high school some years ago that signed a contract with a soft drink giant to promote its drinks on campus.  The beverage they promoted was one high in caffeine.  Of course, the vending machines on campus made the drink readily available.  One can safely conclude that schools hinder the learning environment of their campuses by selling such a product.  While this practice may have become less likely of late, here it is cited as illustrating how a commercial entity might exert questionable influence.

When questioned, the principal justified the contract by pointing out that school supplies were going to be bought with the funds accrued from the deal.  In addition, the newspapers are full of stories about obesity of children a condition enabled by the lack of healthy food choices in the nation’s schools’ cafeterias.

Should schools have to depend on such deals to buy educational equipment and supplies or should the state provide these supplies without having to promote harmful products to the nation’s youth?  Is the nation bartering away its responsibilities as far as education and schooling are concerned?

And shouldn’t new teachers understand how pervasive the legitimacy of the popular culture is that supports this commercial view?  Of course, the answer given here is yes, but this blogger cannot express how difficult it is to even mention that message in public forums.  Yet, to be a viable civics education program, it must promote this messaging if it is to meet this particular challenge. 

In short, the public spirit that this blog promotes and that it wants civics education to support in the nation’s public schools sounds to a degree hollow and out of place in school settings that not only function in a popular culture of commercialism, but also have, to varying degrees, sold out to it.  In addition, even in education circles, this seems to be an incubating problem.  It’s under the surface and not being given the attention it deserves.

The popular culture which this posting addresses treats the dysfunctional aspects of the nation’s current society not as ones subject to reform, but as parts of a political and social backdrop untouchable by those who are involved.  Yes, they may lament this general condition, but little else.  One can look at current discussions and debates over civics education.  This blogger remembers before he retired, attending a Congressional Conference on civics education that was completely mute on these points.

He remembers that the assumptions of the discussions did not allow for the inclusion of these concerns and feels a bit awkward addressing them here.  Is it a state of affairs about which one cannot do anything to ameliorate the underlying factors causing these conditions?  Yes, critical theorists might speak to them, but does one have to adopt what this blogger considers such an extreme position to question this commercialization?

Without some meaningful recognition and commitment to change these conditions, the educational establishment and its classroom teachers have no hope of developing the type of civics education to which a partnered view would aspire.  Without a profound, transforming change, an educational system or even a local community might spend some money, make some noise and, as a fad, such effort will pass with little change. 

As things stand, any concerned teachers dubious of this undergirding condition are justified in being suspicious of any likelihood that things will change.  Addressing the obstacles to instituting changes in the nation’s polity, Matt Grossmann looks at how difficult it is to institute them into the American political system.  He writes,

 

Policymakers can and do collectively ignore public opinion and the direction of election results, sometimes by enacting contrary policy but most often by making no change at all.  The results of the policy process are determined by the interactions among policymakers themselves, and the public appears to have quite limited impact.[1]

 

Yet, Leslie R. Crutchfield writes of the potentials of “grass roots” politics and provides evidence of movements – such as the antismoking effort – being able to change policy.[2]  And these aspects of American politics should be addressed by teacher preparation programs.  Bottom line:  this should be addressed and those addressing the issue should be realistic, but believe that change can happen, if only through incremental advances at a time.  So, with that this blog is now ready to, and in the next posting will, share the third element.

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[1] Matt Grossmann, Artist of the Possible (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 9.

[2] Leslie R. Crutchfield, How Change Happens:  Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t (Hoboken, NJ:  John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018).