Blog Post #5

What are some of the benefits of infusing equity & inclusive education into the Social Studies curriculum?

Frieze of the Rotunda of The United States Capitol, Death of Tecumeh. 1824.

       There are many benefits gained by infusing equality and inclusive education into the social studies curriculum.  The document Capacity Building Series, chapter entitled: "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Towards Equity and Inclusivity in Ontario Schools" demarcates and explains many such benefits.  Some benefits include: using culture as resource for learning, developing a personal understanding and relationship with students, creating social-cultural awareness, and developing culturally diverse curriculum that has a wide variety of inclusiveness.  Another ministry document entitled Equality and Inclusive Education in Ontario Schools, supports these view about the benefits of inclusive education.  It identifies inclusive education as means of promoting enduring equality, well being, and public confidence.  Significantly it is important that cultural diversity is taught in schools so students can be educated and exposed to complex cultures at an early age.  Teaching students about cultural diversity at early age in a safe and nurturing environment is important because it instills a level of comfort with diversity.  Developing the capacity of all students to appreciate and understand various cultures that are estranged to their own is a great method for establishing empathy and dispelling ignorance or bigotry before it is able to take root in impressionable youths.

Blog Post #4

Incorporating the information reviewed this week, identify some of the benefits of integrating primary documents into the curriculum.

 Caravaggio. St Jerome Writing. 1606.

       According to Ruth W. Sandwell in her Using Primary Documents in Social Studies and History, primary documents can be used in a variety of ways to benefit student learning while still being applicable to the necessary curriculum expectations.  Some of the activities that Sandwell proposes are: "Seeing Myself in the Future's Past", "Personalizing the Past", and "Using Multiple Sources", among other suggestions.  I will discuss all three briefly, identifying their specific benefits.
       Seeing Myself in the Future's Past is, in my opinion, a good way to teach students about how to understand historical perspective and its value.  The activity asks students to review how they might seen by historians hundreds of years in the future.  They are asked to list the documents that would be left behind to provide evidence of who they were and what they believed, and how they acted.  The activity requires students to view how this evidence might be interpreted or possibly misinterpreted.  I think this is a good exercise to demonstrate to students the value of primary resources and the benefits and problems they provide for historians that are far removed from the events which they detail.
       Personalizing the Past is an activity that I think is provides students with a means to building empathy with historical figures.  Artifacts such as diaries, personal letters, interviews, even ancient graffiti can all provide insights into the personal thoughts and activities of people from the past.  By allowing students to study these primary resources we open up a door to the past that reveals human emotions and passions that are often easy to overlook when studying history.  By understanding the personal details of historical figures students are better able to appreciate the human involvement  with historical events so they can develop a better grasp for what it was like to live in a particular time period.
       Finally, I think the Using Multiple Sources activity is an excellent way to demonstrate to students the variety of contrasting opinions that have existed throughout history.  Sometimes history can be viewed as a linear set of events without any significant derivation throughout its gradual development.  However, finding multiple primary sources with conflicting points of view can easily dispel this latter belief.  Demonstrating to students that the people of the past often disagreed about social and political issues that we might take for granted today is a good way of showing them that history involves conflicting points of view which has taken many forms both in their developments and resolutions to their conflicts.  For instance, multiple sources depicting the views on First Nation's peoples by European settlers would be a good way of demonstrating to the class the inherent racist views of most colonists towards the indigenous people's of Canada.  Connections could then be made to the Indian Act and who these views helped to shape that legislation.

Blog Post #3

Incorporating the information from the financial literacy, document and EduGains videos, identify some of the benefits of integrating financial literacy into the curriculum.

 David, Jacques-Louis. The Death of Socrates. 1787.

       There would seem to be many benefits of incorporating financial literacy into the Ontario curriculum.  To my mind, there are three benefits in particular that stand out.  They are: developing a practical skill set, developing a deeper understanding of social complexity, and developing a critical understanding of social responsibility and social justice.  I will address all three educational benefits respectively.
       According to the "Sound Investment" Ministry document it is important that students are educated in "the concepts of income, money, earning, saving, spending, investing, budgeting, credit and borrowing, risks and rewards, compound interest, pensions, insurance, taxes, and planning ahead" (Sound Investment, 13).  Undoubtedly, all of these concepts will have a real impact on the lives of students.  In particular, learning how to save and borrow responsibly will have an immediate impact on students that are planning on attending increasingly expensive post secondary institutions.  Along with that, understanding taxes is also significant at an early age.  Personally, I received almost no education about taxes as a student.  Naturally, this lack of education had negative consequences.  The most practical one being I did not know how to file my taxes, a legal obligation.  Therefore understanding how to file taxes properly provides student with a very useful and practical skill set they will need once they join the work force.
       In my view, financial literacy is essential to having a more complete understanding of the world.  Issues such as the global economy, trade agreements, and government taxing and spending will have an important impact on all students throughout their lives. "The recent global recession underscored the importance of financial literacy. To put it simply, people need to broaden their knowledge of how to make informed financial decisions with the resources they have. They need to understand basic concepts such as saving, spending, and investing. It is also important that they have a basic understanding of economics and the flow of money in the global economy" (Sound Investment, 7). Understanding how the global economy functions can assist students with personal decision making for their futures, such as, electoral voting, career paths and opportunities, investment strategies, among many other possibilities.
       Finally, I believe that financial literacy offers students the capacity to develop a critical understanding of social responsibility and social justice.  Financial literacy should teach students about practical financial skills and the economic functions of a global economy.  But it must also educate students about economic inequality and issues of fairness and justice.  These latter issues require value judgments and I believe they are a significant component necessary for a well rounded education on financial literacy.  These issues have important ethical questions that should not be overlooked, such as: Why do many people struggle in poverty while there are some that are super affluent? What are our taxes spent on and do we agree with how that money is spent?  What accountability do businesses and corporations have to stakeholders in their communities?  What investments are ethically sound and what investments are ethically dubious?  What responsibility do we have to the poor, elderly, and disabled financially?  To my mind all of these question are important for developing the moral framework of students and how they will eventually be forced to address these and similar questions once they have reached maturity.  Some familiarity with these ethical problems at an early age will provide the foundations for a more comprehensive and informed approach in the future.

Blog Post #2

Incorporating the information from the curriculum document and EduGains video, identify some of the challenges of implementing an inquiry approach.

  Magritte, René. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. 1929. 

 

There are various difficulties confronting teachers that desire to implement inquiry study in their classroom.  Some of these challenges are summarized neatly in the Ministry document: The Ontario Curriculum: Social Studies Grades: 1 to 6; History and Geography Grades: 7 and 8.  On page 34 this document states that, “[t]o provide effective instruction, teachers need to consider what they want students to learn, how they will know whether students have learned it, how they will design instruction to promote the learning, and how they will respond to students who are not making progress.” Some suggestions are made in this document as to how to approach these issues.  One method advocated for effective instruction is incorporating differentiated instruction.  Differentiated instruction can help with classroom diagnostics that gauge the readiness and academic capacity of students.  It can also assist in demarcating student interests and learning preferences.

            Coinciding with differentiated instruction is the scaffolding approach to instruction and student learning.  Scaffolding is particularly useful strategy for guided learning.  In particular, it can be used to guide students in the direction of valuable approaches to learning.  Scaffolding can be used to develop a basic understanding of a subject, research skills, and final product development.  Depending on academic ability the independence of student learning can be altered based on both readiness and personal responsibility.
            While instructional approaches are important for inquiry success, learning goals also play an important part for identifying student expectations and organizing project objectives.  If relevant, considerations for interdisciplinary approaches should take precedent.  If such considerations exist, the framework for student approaches and expectations might be narrowed in order to satisfy prearrange unit goals and collaborations.  Meeting the needs of curriculum expectations in this latter capacity may take some careful planning so as to facilitate the may requirements across various disciplines while still maintaining student interest.
            Finally, responding to students that are struggling with the inquiry process can also be tackled with various approaches.  Perhaps the most significant method for doing so is to fully understand student IEPs.  This should reveal both the strengths and weakness of a particular student’s learning preferences and cognitive capacities.  It will also inform instructors as to instructional accommodations, environmental accommodations, and assessment accommodations to implement, if necessary, for each particular student.  Fully understanding these particularities should help instructors to better understand the needs and expectations of their students when they approach their inquiry projects.
 

Blog Post #1

Incorporating the information from articles and videos reviewed this week, identify some of the benefits to an integrated or interdisciplinary approach to teaching.

GÉRICAULT, JEAN LOUIS THÉODORE. The Raft of the Medusa. 1818. 

       Integrating learning through cross curricular education has several benefits to both students and teachers.  For students, the experience of integrating learning is more holistic than traditional methods of compartmentalization of academic subjects.  Compartmentalization of subject disciplines usually leads to fractured learning, especially in schools that are on a rotary schedule.  That is, the content of what one instructor is teaching in, for example, Social Studies, will likely have little if anything to do with what another instructor is teaching in, for example, Science.  The negative consequences of this for student learning are significant.  One such consequence is that students will receive information about a subject from a perspective that is limited by the functions and practices of that discipline. So, for example, instead of learning about the early European settlers in Canada in one class and studying about plants in another class an integrated education might teach about the crops the early European settlers in Canada planted.  This latter topic could be studied in Science by studying the plants themselves, it could also be taught in Language by having students write an essay on early farming.  Naturally, Social Studies could teach about the history and geography of early European Settlers, while Math could possibly do data management work on crop yields and trading of early European Settlers.  

       The main point about all of this is that integrating learning helps students understand a particular topic from various angles.  It allows students to become fully immersed in their subject matter by diversifying information and developing a more complete understanding of a particular topic.  While all of these points have important value for students, integrated learning is also beneficial to teachers too, especially those that teach multiple subjects to a single class.  The major advantage that integrated learning has for teachers is it helps them with time management and class focus.  Covering all the curriculum expectations can be very difficult as there is only so much time to teach in one day.  Also, preparing for many disciplines with diverse and divergent subject matter can also be daunting at times.  Hence, the integrated learning approach allows for teachers to cover a variety of subjects in one project and, metaphorically speaking, 'kill several birds with one stone'.

Welcome Post

Welcome to my Social Studies, History, and Geography Blog!

Rombouts, Theodoor. A Lute Player. 1620

       Hello and welcome to http://whenhistoryandgeographycollide.blogspot.ca/ !!! My name is Corey Padgett.  I am currently a teacher candidate at Brock University, in Ontario, Canada.  This blog is dedicated to the work I have undertaken, and which I am still undertaking, on the subjects of social science, history, and geography.  I have long had a personal interest in all of these subjects, especially history.  In my opinion, not only does understanding history provide us with a better grasp of ourselves, our cultures, and our current political/economic/social climates, there is perhaps no greater and more interesting stories about human triumph and tragedy then what lies in the history of humanity.

       The following series of blog posts are selected articles I have written for my Social Studies, History, and Geography class at Brock University.  For this reason they mainly focus on these latter subjects from a pedagogical perspective.  Furthermore, the articles may seem slightly obscure at times because they were originally intended to be a written response to course content and readings.  Therefore my apologies if at times some of the references that are made within my posts are not immediately apparent to the reader.  To help with this issue I have included the question or questions that each blog is intending to respond to as the header or title of each post.  Thanks for reading and enjoy!

- Corey Padgett