After a series of postings, this blog has
attempted to report a discouraging picture of the current US political
landscape. Those postings reviewed the
historical effects of several movements, particularly transcendentalism,
pragmatism, and perceptual psychology, that have led to the current situation. Their sum effect was to help normalize and
legitimize high levels of individualism and self-centeredness.
In the process, communal qualities have suffered,
and a basic constitutional underlying element has all but been discarded. “We the People” has, at best, become we, a
collective of individuals. That is, the
nation’s assumed sense of a grand partnership – a federated people – has
suffered greatly and the consequences of that development are being experienced
today.
What should the role of social studies be in
this current state of affairs? The
belief here is that there is a role but not one that can singularly save the
day. Social studies curriculums can help
alleviate the condition by making their study a great deal more communal. For only through a communal structure and
processes can students begin to define a sense of citizenship other than what
prevails today.
One simple change would be to focus a social
studies courses’ content, especially in civics courses, on local, communal
issues that students should address. By placing
these issues in a more central position – in terms of positioning within the
timeframe of a course of study and in the number of references a course utilizes
– students are more apt to become aware of the human challenges – economic,
social, political – that manifest in their communities. But more important, the curriculum can
emphasize communal action skills.
That is, the curriculum can have students work
with members of their community. They
can also analyze how relevant societal forces operate in contemporary life. Care should be exercised to make sure such
contact does not pose any dangers to students or other negative effects on their
welfare.
For example, one can arrange interactions
beyond person-to-person sessions. Even
if such efforts are limited to reading about local conditions, this would be
more revealing of those conditions than what usually happens today. A review of a typical civics textbook reveals
a heavy emphasis on national governmental arrangements and national issues with
little concern for the local political landscape.
Neil
Postman[1]
(1931-2003) sees, for example, the only way to neutralize the effects of
television – effects an earlier posting described[2]
– is to have students analyze them.
Extending this idea, social action skills can be intentionally utilized
in the classroom to analyze all aspects of a studied problem or situation. This blogger proposes a list of such skills:
1.
Devising a social plan
2.
Negotiating
3.
Advocating / counter advocating
4.
Being a change agent or status quo defender
5.
Being a concerned citizen
6.
Being a constructive follower
7.
Being an effective leader
The first three skills are seen as fundamental
social action skills and the last four are operational social action skills.
This blogger would like to note that these skills are not
seen as linked to a particular ideology or educational philosophic construct,
such as reconstructionism,[3]
because every effort should be extended to have students decide which way these
skills will be utilized. More
specifically, schools should not impose a particular form of communalism.
What schools should do is have students begin
participating in defining communalism as they deem appropriate. A qualifier to this claim is that whatever
form students adopt needs to be conducive with federalist principles –
principles that undergird the US Constitution and promote a sense of
partnership among the nation’s citizens.
Therefore, the skills are seen as getting
students involved with community institutions and with other citizens. The communal aspect does not have to be
explicitly central to the issue addressed but will be implicitly a concern as
students engage in the appropriate activities they are to perform, i.e., all social/political
issues have their communal aspect to them.
A problem with other reform efforts of social
studies is the application of social science disciplinary processes to define
or strongly suggest classroom activities.
The assumption was that students would be equally intrigued with the
mysteries that the social sciences address if they were creatively presented to
students.
This blogger feels that the interests of
scientists are often too abstract and foreign to secondary students. Even early advocates of these methods, such
as Jerome Bruner (1915-2016),[4]
eventually admitted that other methods can be utilized to engage student
interests. Bruner identified several
learning paradigms that are successful in the appropriate context. Among them, appropriate for what is being
advocated here, is the nativist school of thought.
By
way of illustrating the array of ideas one can employ in pursuing this communal
option, the next posting will describe this nativist school of thought and
other approaches educators have introduced.
This blogger has often refuted the notion of an ideal teaching style or methodological
approach can be applied to the teaching strategies of all teachers.
That is, he has argued that teaching is too
much a form of personal expression and needs to respect what sort of person
that teacher is. But that does not
preclude describing and reviewing the positive elements of various approaches. In that vein, this series of postings
proceeds and hopefully shares with readers forms of instruction with which they
are not as familiar and might prove to be effective in promoting communal requisites.
[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1986).
[2] Robert Gutierrez, “The TV Effect,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, February 20, 2024,
accessed March 6, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2024_02_18_archive.html.
[3] “The philosophy of Social
Reconstructionism is a student-centered philosophy. This philosophy is rooted
in the belief that
[4] Jerome Bruner, “Models of the Learner,” Educational
Researcher, June/July 1985, 5-8.
