Michigan State University outlines five enduring understandings of social studies, those being:
- 1.Teachers Create Curriculum that is Purposeful, Thoughtful, Engaging, and Student Centered.
- 2. Teachers Value the Cultural, Social & Intellectual Funds Students Bring to School
- 3. Social Studies is Interdisciplinary and Connects Students to the World Around Them
- 4. Teachers and Students are Citizens
- 5. Teaching is a Learning Profession
1.Teachers Create Curriculum that is Purposeful, Thoughtful, Engaging, and Student Centered.
The curriculum teachers create for their students needs to be reasoned and have a pedagogically-sound direction that supports students in building appropriate learning of content and skills. The curriculum ought to be thoughtful and meaningful, critically engaging students with important—and often difficult--ideas and concepts pertaining to the issues at hand. For a curriculum to serve the above purposes, it needs to be student-centered—that is, focused on where students are intellectually and socially and what may be necessary to get them to higher and deeper levels of understanding about themselves as learners and as citizens, as well as about the curricular topics being discussed.
2. Teachers Value the Cultural, Social & Intellectual Funds Students Bring to School
Teachers recognize, value, and build upon what students bring to school. Teachers enhance teaching and learning opportunities by meaningfully incorporating students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge, prior knowledge, life experiences, personal life goals, values, and talents into one’s planning and teaching. Student diversity is a strength in the classroom, not something to overcome or remediate. These considerations ought to be front and center when planning for instruction, during instruction, in the organization of the classroom, in classroom requirements and rules, and in the day-to-day classroom interactions surrounding the above.
3. Social Studies is Interdisciplinary and Connects Students to the World Around Them
While school knowledge is divided into subject areas and a further division is often created within social studies (separate classes for history, geography, economics, etc.), the world—the substance of social studies content—is never divided along those lines. So if our subject is the world, we might more purposefully think of ways to integrate our teaching of it in ways that are more conducive to students’ understandings, not to mention to the way the issues discussed in social studies are integrated in the world we are asking students to study. We call this an interdisciplinary (or cross-disciplinary) approach, one that explores the multiple facets of a phenomenon being studied by integrating knowledge from a variety of disciplines, both within and outside social studies “proper” (e.g., English/literature, science, etc.).
Social studies teachers also connect the classroom to the world and the world to the classroom through active inquiry and the use of meaningful, dynamic teaching. Social studies teachers help students identify and explore the “big ideas” as they investigate essential questions both in and outside of classrooms. Social studies teachers help students more meaningfully explore the world around them (and that which is far but nevertheless is sure to impact them) through the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments they have created. To do so, social studies teachers draw from all areas of knowledge (both academic and artistic fields, including popular culture) in their lessons and units.
4. Teachers and Students are Citizens
Teaching, regardless of subject area, is always about engendering particular forms of citizenship. The kinds of questions teachers ask, what they deem as “appropriate questions, who is invited to speak (when, how, for how long) all send messages about one’s worth in the world. That said, and while all teaching is a form of citizenship, and all teachers and students are citizens, social studies has more focused purposes regarding citizenship--it is an important part of our academic subject area. Engaging citizenship in social studies classrooms is not about promoting particular political ideologies but, rather, about providing students the tools to become informed, caring, compassionate critical citizens of a democracy, ones that promote equity, pluralism, and justice both locally and globally.
5. Teaching is a Learning Profession
Learning to teach is a life-long process. Good teachers continue to learn and grow as they provide access to learning for self and others. Teachers learn as they use past and current life experiences to address professional problems in the present and to imagine a better future. Teachers learn in collaboration with others. Outside of the classroom, teachers engage in their professional organizations, read widely, keep up to date on world events (reading a newspaper on a daily basis is a good start) and use the knowledge gained form the above to improve instruction.