Application: Synthesizing Social Studies Content and Integrating Technology

I have been utilizing Social Studies, Literacy, and Social Justice in the Common Core Classroom: A Guide for Teachers by Ruchi Agarwal-Ragnath as a course text for social studies methods for the past few semesters. This text provides a social justice-oriented social studies framework, where students are to process and synthesize content in what is known as Application. During this step students process and apply the information they have learned. Writer's workshop, dialogue poems, first person narratives, dramatization, visual arts, and rewriting narratives are specific methods students can utilized to demonstrate their understanding of social justice-oriented social studies content.

This semester, my undergraduate students have been reading A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki along with the Agarwal-Ragnath text. Below are some of their "Application" examples highlighting their synthesizing and processing of history of a multicultural nation. The students included the utilization of a geographic tool to support our conversations on the five themes of geography, specifically movement.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ck-kxs2xfho-W47jcvrUToyhrcNQTAhcofhKuQSoixQ/edit?usp=sharing

http://www.animaps.com/pb/294420002/6796/Japanese_Immigration

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wDzRKVOtdHOvOm0wyFhp09ZAfDHVdppyw1mg4oABlNc/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12Ge00DDC4OQOhN33OhqmlQGkaI_UyZgSgH3EZWlKcRk/edit?usp=sharing

Teacher Scholarly Knowledge 2016

For the fall 2016 semester of "Teaching Elementary School Social Studies" we have revisited the idea of teacher scholarly knowledge in preparation for unit planning.  Teacher scholarly knowledge includes listings of necessary teacher information for teaching social studies units on historical events/people/places, geography, economics, or civics education. Here are a few examples of student work.

Rewriting History for the Better by Dave Constantin

http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-51-fall-2015/feature/rewriting-history-better

Studies in Multicultural Education Spring 2016

Students in my "Studies in Multicultural Education" course have been reading Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice. This text provides a robust and powerful presentation of multicultural education that is anti-racist and social justice-oriented. Recognizing that race is not the only social category which presents itself in classrooms, the students were charged with reflecting, researching, and then writing about other aspects or combinations of social identities they experience in their classrooms or have in interest in learning more about. The following comments to this post include some of the highlights they have discovered.