Social Studies Education: A Re-conceptualized Framework
Avner Segall
Michigan State University*

Despite a number of reform efforts throughout the second half of the 20th century, social studies classrooms at the beginning of the new millennium look very much like those of 50 years ago. Social studies education is still, by and large, governed by teacher-dominated lecture, textbook assignments and recitation lessons; practices which all too often require little intellectual effort on the part of students. In too many social studies classrooms students are still kept busy filling in worksheets, memorizing facts, doing time lines and writing definitions into notebooks straight from the textbook glossary. They read and believe the textbook and listen to (and believe) the teacher. Seldom are they invited to challenge the knowledge/ideas presented to them or to formulate their own. Consequently, what many students currently learn most of all in social education is not how to become the active, thoughtful, critical citizen social studies reforms have long desired. Instead, they learn how to "do school": how to please the teacher, sit quietly, accept, comply and conform; how to (pretend to) listen without thinking or learning; how to answer (someone else's) questions and unquestionably recite (someone else's) answers, how to pass the test, rarely using what was learned beyond that test, outside the social studies classroom or the school. Not surprisingly, then, we find that many students believe social studies is irrelevant, boring, and disconnected from their own learning, interests and lives.

The aim of Project TIME’s model units is to generate a culture of teaching and learning in social education that challenges those existing regularities; a culture that works against those regularities by moving beyond. This means moving social studies education in a direction in which students are invited to think (rather than be told what to think) and to think for themselves, to question and challenge the given, the taken-for-granted. It means creating and maintaining a learning environment where students are made to realize not only that they have opinions but that their opinions matter and their actions (and inaction) count. It is an environment in which students are invited to listen to and speak with each other in a community that embraces multiple discourses, interpretations and ways of knowing, all of which are used in the study and practice of interpretation, and where the investigation of interpretation becomes part of knowledge production. In such classrooms, learning is not simply about constructing a sanitized, linear narrative about the world but about critically examining the stories we are (and have been) told and those we ourselves tell about the world (i.e., What counts as history? Who does history count and account for? Who is it accountable to?). Such a focus shifts attention from traditional questions in social studies classrooms about "What is true?" to ones about "What is truth, for whom, and why?" That is, questions about why and how do different people, communities of inquiry, disciplines, media, texts and genres produce different truths about a common (or is it common?) world. Why do different audiences believe different truths? What makes some communities, media, narratives and conventions more convincing than others?

This, of course, does not mean that learning the (events of the) past is insignificant, that students cease to "do" history or geography and restrict themselves to thinking about the constructed nature of texts used to engage knowledge in the disciplines. What it does mean, however, is that for social education to be meaningful, critical and generative, both teachers and students need to think about that "doing" while they are doing it. How can teachers create and sustain such a learning environment in their social studies classroom? Both entail recognizing and implementing a variety of understandings about social studies education. While some of these are not new, it is useful to re-iterate them and expand upon newer ones as you and your students begin your journey with the Project TIME units. The 10 inter-related, overlapping ideas presented below are not intended as a comprehensive guideline for social studies education. Nor are they reflective of the numerous issues inherent in social education. Instead, their purpose is to provide a framework, tentative and incomplete as it may be, for the kind of thinking that ought to go into teaching and learning in social studies if we wish to make both more of what we hope and believe they can and ought to be.

1) Social studies education as the study of big ideas.

The Project TIME units you will encounter use big ideas to give purpose, direction, and meaning to the educational process. They serve as an organizing structure and are the focal point of instruction. Big ideas are more than what is often referred to in social studies as concepts. Contrary to concepts, which are embedded in the content under study, big ideas are conceptual frameworks, pedagogical invitations, and lenses of inquiry for learning (concepts or any other organizing structure in) social studies. Big ideas are not immediately self-evident; they need to be identified, determined by the teacher and/or the curriculum designer. When they have been determined, big ideas focus and provide direction for one’s pedagogy, for what and how one wants students to know. Arriving at the big ideas (whether it is one or several) for one’s unit begins by thinking about and thinking through what one is teaching (What makes this topic worth teaching? Why? Why to these students? Why this way? Why at this time?)

But determining that teaching, for example, the Roman Empire, is important at this time and to these students is not enough to make learning meaningful, powerful, or generative. Identifying a (or several) big idea(s) helps combine your responses to the above questions in a way that moves beyond the mere integration of content and pedagogy. It is in this "more" or "beyond" that big ideas play their role. Big ideas not only allow teachers to connect content and pedagogy but to do so in a fashion whereby one generates and becomes the substance and essence of the other. In other words, what one learns becomes inseparable from how one learns it and from the knowledge and knowing generated in that process.




2) Social studies: An inter-, cross-disciplinary project.

Social studies comprises various academic disciplines —— history, geography, economics, law, sociology, anthropology, etc. Social studies, however, is much more than the sum of those disciplines. Rather than a multi-disciplinary project combining each of those disciplines, social studies is an inter-disciplinary endeavor. As such, it crosses and combines those disciplines into a learning environment which requires those disciplines to speak to, interrogate, and build-upon each other, making connections that reflect the workings of a world that is not divided into, nor determined by, academic disciplines. The workings of the world occur in time and space simultaneously. History, geography, economics, etc. are always interconnected; neither takes place in abstraction from, or independently of, the other

A multi-disciplinary project, social studies becomes more than teaching history in one class, geography or economics in another. While still maintaining those disciplinary structures (an outcome of school’s division of knowledge rather than a desired perspective on the world), history classes cannot afford to ignore the role of geography or economics, or political science in studying the past (or vice versa). Issues of time, space, and economic, political, and social structures must be integrated to provide a more complex, interrelated understandings of the interconnections between humans and the various environments and ecosystems with and within which they interact.




3) Language in/and social studies education.

While school knowledge has traditionally separated the study of language (English) from social studies, the two are inherently connected. In fact, they are inseparable. What students learn about the world in social studies classroom comes to them in the form of language. Whether knowledge is found in textbooks, newspaper articles, a classroom discussion, a film, or a computer program, all these texts are provided through, and require students to produce language. Ultimately, what students do in social studies classrooms is read texts about the world and construct —— write, speak, draw —— their own. Nothing, then, escapes language. Language is what makes the world possible and meaningful. It is what allows (and restricts) students' ability to know, think, and imagine. Language, therefore, is not an afterthought to social studies education; it is its heart and essence.

What does such a recognition mean for (and in) social studies education? A serious consideration of language entails more than correcting students' spelling or sentence structure. This might be a good place to begin but understanding the importance of language in the social studies classroom means much more. First, it requires that we understand (and make sure students understand) that language —— that used in textbooks and other subject-area texts brought into the classroom as well as the language students themselves produce —— does not naturally and neutrally present the world. Instead, the language we and others use re-presents the world; it produces, packages, and circulates particular knowledge about the world that engenders some ways of thinking, being, and acting rather than others. In that sense, language is action; it creates rather than describes what already pre-exists. By exploring language as action, as a way of constructing the world, students are better able to understand (a) how those who have the power and ability to name —— define, explain —— the world, come to dominate its meaning, and (b) how to effectively use language themselves in order to actively participate in the different domains in which the world is being defined.




4) Social studies education is not only complex, it is about complexity.

Social studies education is inherently about studying the world. Since the world is complex, so should be the kind of knowledge and knowing generated in social studies classrooms. Granted, some of what social studies teachers need to do is help make the complex in the world simple so students can better understand what underlies complex phenomena. Most social studies teachers are able to do that and do it well. Good social studies education, however, is often not about making the complex simple but about making what is perceived as simple, complex. In other words, ensuring that what textbooks or students often take for granted, assume is natural, straightforward, and self-evident must be questioned, problematized —— shown for what it is: multi-layered, nuanced, contradictory, and open to multiple, valid interpretations. Rather than cohering the world and reifying its essence, social studies education ought to be about fracturing the "real" and working its multiples. As such, the purpose of social studies is not simply to reduce learning to finding a correct answer, arriving at the truth. It is about examining how truths about the world —— past, present, and future —— are constructed, circulated, and accepted as such. That is, how a particular truth becomes the truth —— a natural depiction of the world —— even though different truths about the world can (and do) exist beyond the "official" version we have come to take for granted as a true depiction of the way things are.




5) The relationship between history and the past.

While the terms history and the past are conflated in everyday use, history and the past are not one and the same. While the past includes everything and anything that happened prior to a present, history is only a discourse about the past, stories constructed to make meaning for us in the present. Writing the past is a process in which historians and others select, order, and evaluate past events, experiences, and processes. Always positioned to tell a particular story from a particular time, place, and perspective, historians story the past in ways that promote certain understandings and interpretations over others. The past does not have meaning in and of itself; meaning is given to the past by those who tell us about it. As such, history is a re-presentation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes as an explanation. Facts do not exist in and of themselves; they are used to construct an interpretation and convince readers of the plausibility of that interpretation.

History encountered in schools, however, is still, more often than not, engaged as objective, authorless, and true. By presenting history in that fashion, teachers advance students’ estrangement from it. For by not questioning the obvious, by not challenging the taken-for-granted, students are left with the notion that the historical narrative is true, real, and nonnegotiable. And when something is accepted as true and an end in itself, conversation is over. But history education can be quite different if one starts from the conviction that its aim is to give meaning to history rather than find meaning and direction in it. Teaching history in a manner that is aware of its construction, where students do not see history as "a fixed story, entails examining texts as subjective constructions needing to be actively read; where students are made to consider that between the "facts" and the text (books) lie analysis, interpretation, and narration shaped by the particular values, skills, questions and understandings of a particular teller.

Acknowledging that history is written not by (or for) itself but by some one for some (other) body opens it up to questions of its production: how is the past produced? How is it maintained? Such questions allow those involved in the educative process to examine under what conditions and through what means we come to know; how history is storied and how some stories become "legitimate" history(ies) while others are relegated to the periphery of history. How one stories the past, as much as who stories it and for what (and whose) purpose, therefore, become inseparable from the knowledge being produced. Exploring these issues allow us to examine not only how language creates the world but the degree to which those who have power to produce and circulate stories about the world come to dominate its meaning. From such a vantage point, new questions emerge about what history is and is not as well as what it can and cannot be; about why we learn about the past; about how we use that knowledge and how we have been used by it. As these questions get asked and answered, it becomes evident that there is a choice in history. Learning that people have a hand in making history informs students not only and that history (and its education) could have been different but that it can still be other than what it currently is.




6) The pedagogy of the question and the pedagogy of the answer.

For too long, social studies education has been about students finding answers to questions posed by others —— teachers, textbook authors, etc. End-of-chapter questions, worksheets, quizzes, and exams, by and large, require students to provide answers to someone else's questions. Such an approach, while appropriate sometimes, can be defined as the "pedagogy of the answer" —— a pedagogy whose ultimate goal is to teach students how to find the "right" answer and respond appropriately. While, as stated, this is an important component of learning, what most often motivates meaningful, generative learning (and even good answers) is a sense of puzzlement that leads to the construction of one's own questions, not the pursuit of pre-existing answers.

To think about social studies education differently, the pedagogy of the answer must be accompanied by a "pedagogy of the question" which emphasizes the need for, and creates opportunities for students to, ask questions, indeed, to question, to seek alternatives. A critical citizenry in a democracy should be able to pose questions to those who have the power to determine their world: politicians, media organizations, corporations, etc. Learning how to question does not occur, miraculously, after students graduate. If we want our students to ask the hard questions that need to be asked in a democracy as adults, we need to provide them an abundance of real, meaningful opportunities to do so as students.




7) The negative lessons of social studies: How can we turn those around?

Social studies education that is about big ideas, concepts, and public issues and that requires students to make connections in and about the world is an educative process that utilizes and requires higher order thinking, that engages in meaningful and generative knowledge. Knowledge becomes meaningful and generative as a result of activities that invite students to develop and express complex, integrated, and holistic understandings of the issues, ideas, and concepts being studied. Few teachers would disagree that this is the direction in which social studies should desire. Indeed, many social educators attempt to create learning environments that foster that kind of learning. Standing in the way, however, are two interrelated issues. First is the idea that one needs to "cover" everything. Second, that good classrooms are those where students are kept busy and quiet.

While we know it is impossible to teach all that happened in two hundred years of American History in a semester and do so meaningfully, we nevertheless march on, unable (or unwilling) to make the tough decisions (and teaching is ultimately about making decisions) as to what knowledge, issues, ideas and concepts are most important in and about that period. Which of those should we teach our students at this point in time (and why)? Similarly, we know that the kind of learning discussed above is generated by students who are involved in active, passionate learning; learning that is very different from the one in which they are kept busy and quiet. Being busy and quiet is, of course, not a problem in and of itself (some students and some meaningful tasks require that kind of learning) as long as students are not kept that way for the sake of keeping an appearance of learning, when learning in fact is not taking place. That is, meaningful learning is not taking place because some form of learning always takes place, even if it is of a negative kind.

In many social studies classrooms instructional time and effort are often spent having students color maps, write time lines, and copy definitions from the textbook. None of those do much to enhance good social studies education. But while these activities don't encourage students to learn, develop, and express complex, integrated, and holistic understandings of the issues, ideas, and concepts being studied, these activities do teach them something. They teach them that social studies is about disembodied facts, trivia that can be summarized (though not always understood) in one or two words, at best, sentences; that it is divorced from the big ideas of the disciplines, abstracted from the learner and from his or her thinking. It also teaches students that learning comprises short-term memorization rather than conceptual, higher-order understanding and that such knowledge, rather than being generative, can be memorized and forgotten immediately after the purpose of such memorization —— the test —— is over.




8) Social studies: Civics or citizenship education?

While most national and state standards and curricula guidelines in the area of social studies highlight the need for citizenship education, social studies education has focused, at least explicitly, mostly on civics education. Although the terms civics and citizenship are often used interchangeably, they mean different things. Civics teaches students about the workings of government and its structures: how one gets elected for office, how the three branches of government operate (and operate separately), how legislation gets enacted, etc. These are, no doubt, important issues every citizen should know. But citizenship education entails much more than civic education. Learning about the operation of one’s government does not necessarily mean that students either know how to or use that knowledge to become the active citizen we need in a democracy. Becoming an involved citizen —— one who uses one’s knowledge critically —— entails questioning structures of power in order to make society more of what we believe it should be rather than simply knowing how those structures of power operate. The latter require passive knowledge, the former call for active knowing.


Teaching students how to become an active and critical knower in (rather than simply of) the world, is not a natural consequence of a unit, even a full course, on government. Students learn what it means to be a citizen, a member of society, through the various daily activities they are asked to engage, as learners, with other members of society and with the world at large. Questions teachers ask, the way they ask them, and the kinds of responses they deem appropriate (and from whom) inform students about what it means to be a citizen, whether in school or in society at large. Similarly, the topics and processes of investigation (and those excluded from classroom investigation) all send students powerful messages as to what and whose knowledge and knowing are of most worth, how one should construct understandings of oneself in the world, and how and where (if at all) one should act upon those understandings. In that sense, all of social studies education (all schooling, for that matter) is primarily, and regardless of topic, about citizenship education. Hence, while teaching civics might be an important component of students’ ability to act as citizens, it is how we teach civics (and everything else) and the explicit, implicit, and null messages embedded in our teaching that determine whether or not students will become the active, critical citizens we hope for in our democracy.




9) The media and social studies education.

In a society that is inundated with media texts, many interactions with, and experiences of, the world are acquired indirectly through the media. Consequently, today's students are as much educated through their casual media experiences outside of school as they are through the more formal structures and practices of school. Media —— texts and technologies —— serve a variety of purposes in education. Common to most, however, is their current, unproblematized role as transparent, unproblematic mediators conveying information and/or providing stimuli for engaging the content of an already existing curriculum; they are not considered a curriculum worthy of study in and of themselves. Frequently, media texts and technologies are used to provide a mode of entertainment, to enliven lessons, entice students, and stimulate their interest as they learn. They give teachers a notion of modernizing instruction and relating the curriculum to students' lives and interests. But as long as these sources of information are not subjected to critical scrutiny, the prevailing view of media as natural and neutral providers or information permeates the classroom under the guise of educational innovation and relevance.

Why the need to study the media in the social studies classroom? Among socializing institutions, the media are prominent environments where public issues are discussed and debated. The media, however, do more than provide environments for discourse; they often determine which issues are debatable and how debates unfold. As they lay the parameters for debate, they regulate what may be debated, how, where, when, for how long, and by whom. They also decide what constitutes news and how newsworthy an issue becomes by ascribing it a particular space in the newspaper or on the nightly news. Similarly, they allocate different groups in society particular (but not always equal) spaces from which to share their voices with others. Consequently, media education becomes important for examining the role mass media play in determining, establishing, and regulating public discourse and affecting (both enhancing and restricting) students' particular understandings of, and participation within, society. In a society where the media increasingly determine political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural issues, students need to be critically familiar with media texts if they are to become active citizens who can fully participate in the democratic process. They must understand the processes in which they are asked to participate and the information upon which to base that participation.

Newspapers, television and magazines (as do social studies textbooks) commonly distinguish between fact and opinion, news and editorial. This separation, however, ignores the fact that editorial decisions are inherent in every aspect of presenting '"facts" or "news" thereby turning them into "opinion" just as much as the specifically labeled sections they call "editorials." Any decision that results in the selection of a certain shot over another, one interviewee over another, one lead story over another, is an editorial decision, one that affects the product with which audiences are presented. From the journalist "on location," to the production team at their computers, to the editors at their desks, each have a part in deciding what audiences see, hear, or read and how they are positioned to make meaning of that experience.

As they mediate reality, the media inform readers about life in context. They illustrate how knowledge is produced, what knowledge is of most worth, and how knowledge is legitimated. Moreover, they inform readers of social reality: how society is structured and how each group is situated within it. To consider those issues, reading the media needs to go beyond the printed, aural or pictorial symbol; it needs to explore the media as social phenomena that image, reflect, and often help determine social reality. As such, they are worthy critical scrutiny in our social studies classrooms.



10) Social studies education as conversations about (and in) the world.

Social studies education is not about memorizing facts about the world but about helping students gain a voice with which to critically read and write —— learn about and act in —— the world. Engaging in substantive conversations in classrooms is part of coming to know the world and one self in that world, of having opportunities to talk through ideas as one talks to and with others. Substantive conversations are more than just talk. They require students to demonstrate higher-order thinking, to question, apply, build-upon, and connect ideas. They also demand that students don't only build-upon and connect ideas underlying the curriculum but also do so as they speak about their own experiences in the world and listen to those of others. Conversation, then, is more than reporting facts, definitions, and experiences. Conversation is intended to allow students to listen, to themselves as well as to others, to learn from, challenge and question ideas in ways that promote a deeper collective understanding for the group as a whole. Also, and contrary to lecture and many other exchanges in classrooms, conversations are not interactions only between a teacher and students (whereby knowledge goes from one to the other) but among students, where teachers are facilitators, moderators rather masters of ceremony.

Substantive conversations in social studies classrooms do not happen overnight. Accustomed to an environment which requires students to reiterate what textbooks and teachers have already defined as fact, students may find it difficult to express opinion, to engage in a meaningful discourse about ideas in and about the (and, as importantly, their) world. This is often compounded by the fact that students have been conditioned to listening to the teacher rather to each other. Creating a conversational space will not only take time but deliberate action (which sometimes means less action) on the part of teachers. Inviting students to express opinions requires more than verbal invitations to do so. To allow students to feel comfortable expressing their views, they need to be respected as speakers. This, by no means, mean that all views are equally legitimate or that views are left un-interrogated once they have been aired. Substantive discussions are not about feeling good; they are about deepening one’s understandings of one’s own views (Where do they come from? What do they represent? Who do they privilege?) and about re-thinking those views in light of what is shared by others, questioning rather than merely affirming one’s initial, often simplistic, understandings of the world.




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* This paper was prepared for Project TIME. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Education under CDFA #84.303A. Any opinion, finding, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Education or the Battle Creek area school districts.