My recent participation in a journal article roundtable focusing on literacy in the social studies classroom has provided me with many great ideas, and has raised several good questions in my mind. I will give a brief account of these thoughts and questions, focusing mainly on Christine Pescatore’s article Current events as empowering literacy: For English and social studies teachers (2007). My general feeling is that Pescatore’s article is filled with many great ideas, but lacks a clear vision of how these ideas could be implemented in a social studies classroom. After discussing both the positive and negative aspects of this article, I will discuss ways in which Pescatore’s ideas could be adapted to the context of social studies.
Pescatore’s article describes a large, research-based unit that she conducted with an 11th grade English class on the subject of global warming. As the title suggests, Pescatore’s main claim is that the use of current events as reading material is a particularly effective means of developing critical thinking skills in students. Pescatore describes additional benefits of current events material; namely, that students are likely to be more engaged in the work because it feels relevant, and that there is a huge variety of readily-available reading material.
Many of Pescatore’s ideas resonated with me immediately. The concept of doing an in-depth, thematically based unit is appealing to me. Tovani remarks that content teachers inadvertently “Water down our content because we try to cover too much” (2004, p.54). Tovani’s assertions are reinforced by Pescatore’s claims that students began to actively seek out reading material when they had a question they wanted to answer (Pescatore, 2007, p.333). In this way, Pescatore’s global warming unit resembles the interdisciplinary theme-based units conducted at Best Practice High School(BPHS), as reported in Subjects Matter (2004, Daniels and Zemelman). In both cases, the use of a wide range of reading material from diverse sources seemed to contribute to students understanding and enjoyment of their topic. Daniels and Zemelman’s discussion of textbooks has convinced me that their use needs to be seriously limited, and that textbooks by definition do not constitute a healthy reading diet for students (2004, p.38-45). Pescatore’s use of newspaper, magazine, and internet sources demonstrates that she likely shares this same conviction. Additionally, the topics of both BPHS and Pescatore’s English class were topics of immediate interest and were relevant to students’ everyday lives (i.e. current events), which produced great enthusiasm and student initiative in both cases. In designing my own units and projects, I will certainly incorporate the above-mentioned practices and would also strive to include current events in the curriculum.
Despite my overwhelming approval for the project Pescatore describes, her model would have to be modified to succeed in the social studies setting. I am becoming a firm believer in the fact that content area teachers need to incorporate literacy development and critical thinking into the curriculum; however, with such a large amount of content to cover, literacy and critical thinking need to be taught through the content. In a social studies setting, it would not be possible to do a large, extended unit on current events, such as she was able to do in her English class. Rather, literacy activities and current events would both need to be applied to the specific content of a particular history course.
I have two ideas for remedying this problem which would allow me to design large, interactive units which develop literacy skills, such as Pescatore and Daniels describe, while making progress towards the content objectives. The first idea involves incorporating specific literacy techniques mentioned in articles that my colleagues read. Boyer (2006) describes numerous writing activities that help students master the key concepts of social studies. One brilliant idea she had was having students adopt a historical persona and write several journal entries as this person. This project would require students to research a historical period, include specific historical details, and also practice writing skills. This process would likely make their learning very meaningful and would help them to “hold” the information they leaned, to use Tovani’s phrase (2004, p.68). I would definitely incorporate this type of activity, as well as others mentioned in the article.
The second way to transplant Pescatore’s English-class based ideas into the social studies classroom would involve a revolutionary reframing of the curriculum. It seems to me that it would be much easier to construct interactive student-based units that incorporated diverse reading and writing activities if the history curriculum was organized thematically rather than chronologically. Obviously, a three page paper is not the place to lay out the complete plans for such an undertaking; however, I will mention a few of the units that I envision. Comprehensive and in-depth units could be constructed on the following topics, as well as many others, in a U.S. History course,: Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., the Immigrant Experience, Religion in the U.S., the Creation and Development of Constitutional Law, Urban/Rural Interdependency, etc. Thus, each unit would focus on a particular concept or theme, which could be studied through many specific cases in history and in the world today (which allows for the incorporation of current events). I believe this thematic arrangement of the curriculum would allow more possibilities for the teacher to build in literacy techniques, and would come closer to the type of learning advocated both by Pescatore and by Daniels and Zemelman.
References
Daniels, H., and Zemelman, S. (2004). Subjects matter: Every teacher’s guide to content
area reading. Portsmouth. Heinemann.
Pescatore, C. (2007). Current events as empowering literacy: For English and social studies
teachers. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 51(4). 326-339.
Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to teach reading?: Content Comprehension Grades 6-
12. Portland. Stenhouse Publishers.
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