social studies

Rethinking Developmental Frameworks for the Teaching of History as Social Studies

It’s Social Studies, so it Must be Global, Right?

Dr. Timothy R.W. Kubik, Kubik Perspectives, LLC

Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning, July 9, 2010

Senior History/Social Studies Consultant to AS/ISSNWith thanks to Jennifer Stephan Kapral (IHSS)

Steve Magadance (ISA) Gerardo Munoz (DCIS)

Don Profitt (ISSN Senior Arts Consultant)Dave Tabano (DCIS)

Edward Tierney (AGS)Katie Willett (AIS/IHS)

Don’t be so sure…

As we go through the next few slides…

…use your handout to jot down your initial response to the questions that follow.

Once we’ve discussed them a bit, flip the handout and jot down when your perspective changes.

How well do you know your state standards?

Use your handout to jot down your initial response.

How “global” are they?

• Do they help students find their way in today’s world?

• Do they help students find their way to today’s world?

Use your handout to jot down your initial response.

How are they “global”?

• Do they stress diversity and multiculturalism?

• Do they stress employable skills for a single global market?

Use your handout to jot down your initial response.

Do they connect the world to America?

Do they connect America to the world?

and then, how are WE “global”?

Use your handout to jot down your initial response.

We asked a lot of the these questions as we sat around thinking about teaching a “global” history…

…but we didn’t like the image we were getting, here…

Our students should be the agents of their history, not subjects to our history.

• the educational leaders of the 18th and 19th century sought to “educate the human race” by building it’s knowledge base (encyclopedias and disciplines)

• the educational leaders of the 20th century sought to improve the human condition by building institutional capacity  (school and university systems, standardized curricula with measurable outcomes)

We’ve been there, before…

The frameworks we propose seek to build human capacity  in the students themselves.  

We didn’t want to end up where we started…

We wanted to start and end with our students.

“…[wa]s not merely to revitalize education in a way that will empower our students to improve upon the human condition once they leave our classrooms, but also to empower our students to perpetually revitalize education  before they leave our classrooms. To do this, they must engage the process of history where they are, rather than wait until they have learned the process of history.”

Our Challenge…

Use your handout to jot down your initial response.

So, we began, like most, with the assumption that you teach the world this way….

…and that our scope and sequence might look something like this, when we were done:

But it doesn’t and, likely, it can’t. The “world” doesn’t fit into neat analytical patterns like that.

It looks more like, well, this…

Or this…

Or even, like…

And as a scope and sequence, it feels a lot more like this…

With only a selectfew evermaking it to“going Global”

LocalLocal

Regional

Regional

GlobalGlobal

ISSN schools face a unique challenge, if not a unique choice:

“Too standard, or not too standard? That is the question.”

It’s not a choice of one or the other, but rather, a choice of where your classroom, and your school, lie on a continuum…

Use your handout to note whether your perspective is changing….

Our “Essential Question” became:

Is “local, regional, global” a human developmental category, basically the way we grow up, or just a “traditional” way of “going global?”

Use your handout to note whether your perspective is changing….

To us, “local, regional, global” was more “governmental studies” than “social studies.”

Many of the standards we worked with assumed two things, and a third corollary:

1.That (thanks to Hegel) global governance is a (thankfully?) unattainable possibility;

1.That (thanks to Kant) ‘cosmopolitanism’ is ONLY a moral/affective possibility.

The corollary?Political allegiance and the morality of humanity are in essential and irresolvable conflict.

EITHER you are a patriotic nationalist and teach national values as values to which the world should aspire;

OR you are a good human being who adheres to universal values to which nations should aspire.

This has some deep implications…

…for writing curriculum that our teachers can use…

…and for the historical agency of our students.

Use your handout to note whether your perspective is changing…

We wanted students to be able to know and do these things…

Question: The student is able to formulate purposeful hypotheses and/or questions 

Evidence: The student is able to locate and to situate relevant evidence and/or source materials

Argument: The student is able to construct an argument based on evidence

Perspective: The student is able to explore evidence and/or arguments from a perspective other than his or her own

Implications: The student is able propose ethical actions and to see and consider the consequences of answering his or her question one way or the other.

But the local/regional/global framework kept getting in the way as we moved forward, especially when it came to perspective…

GlobalGlobal

Our students are experiencing the world much more “immediately”….

The old political boundaries no longer separate, but collapse or flatten out into new social spaces.

RegionalRegionalLocalLocal

So, we decided to CHANGE THE CONTEXT:Emerging: engaged in questions relating to understanding not yet

consciously framed by social categories such as nationality, historical context, race, gender or religion (i.e., fact collection).

Comparing: engaged in questions comparing emergent facts from the perspective of several social categories (i.e., we see “it” this way, they see “it” that way).

Relating: engaged in questions that seek relationships emergent facts share across social categories (i.e., though different, these contrasting views have this in common).

Integrating: engaged in questions regarding how comparisons and relationships of emergent facts across social categories might be connected to develop new understandings (i.e., a richer, more nuanced factual definition is now possible).

Transcending: engaged in questions that involve moving beyond previous understandings in order to address a range of social issues. (i.e., now that we know this, it changes the way we’d tackle the problem of malnutrition.)

Some tell us this feels like Bloom’s Taxonomy…

…but there are important differences.

Transcending?

Integrating?

Relating?

Comparing?

Emerging?

• the question the becomes NOT how well the model proposed reflects the world we know as adults (i.e, local, regional, global),

• but rather how well the proposed model allows students to engage the world as they find it (i.e., are they comparing cultures, seeing relationships, integrating new ideas into their understanding?).

Putting it All Together: The Conceptual Framework

Use your handout to note whether your perspective is changing….

We ended, after all, with the end in mind: a student who can think about the world, socially, in very distinct, disciplined ways.

Use your handout to note whether your perspective is changing….

Developmental Contexts as a Framework:

Whether you start local or national,

or start global,

the ultimate question becomes, “How do I find MY place in the world?”

Do students compare, relate, integrate…?

The Conceptual Framework as Course Framework

Remember this?

ISSN HSS Course FrameworksVillage Voices 9th Grade Literacy Course Framework

(Judy Conk with the AS/ISSN Literacy Team)

Experiences in American History Course Framework (with the full ISSN HSS Development Team)

Experiences in World History Course Framework (with the full ISSN HSS Development Team)

Civic Engagements Course Framework (Tim Kubik, AS/ISSN)

Global Engagements Course Framework (with Jennifer Stephan Kapral, IHSS and Katie Willett, AIS/HIS)

ISSN HSS Units

EAH Unit III, Nations within America/”Troubling News Civil Disobedience Task (with Katie Willett, AIS/IHS)

EWH Unit I, Emerging Histories/Historic Families Task (with Evan Meyers, HS4LD)

EWH Unit III, Cultural Exchanges/Columbus Debate Task

EWH Unit IV, A World Culture?/Colonize(r/d) Task

Is your head spinning yet?

Your world turned, upside down?

At your tables, compare your new perspectives among yourselves for five minutes…

…and now we’ll share those perspectives you found in common.

W: www.kubikperspectives.com

E: Tim@kubikperspectives.com

C: 720.219.0268

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www.AsiaSociety.org/Education