Thesis: While this first week of June will go down in history for its record-breaking hot temperatures and as the week we first met each other and therefore changed each others lives for the better, something else of perhaps a bit more historical significance occurred this week. As I’m sure we all know by now, Barack Obama is now officially the “unofficial” democratic candidate for president. This headline along with the fact that we will be doing our research projects during an election year has me wondering how social studies teachers I will be observing will discuss and follow the election in their classrooms. Will and if so, how will teachers motivate their students who are of voting age to take advantage of their right to vote?
Antithesis: The more I toss around these thoughts however, the more I realize that these are pretty specific questions. And while I’m sure civics and US history teachers would love to spend class after class discussing the historical presidential election, the importance of voting, and turn their classroom into a CNN-type election center newsroom, the reality is they simply don’t have the time to do that when there are state objectives to cover. I really don’t think I could collect enough data or make any kind of generalizations with such a narrow scope. In my experience, it is always better to start broad and pare down.
Synthesis: Therefore, I think I would like to look at how social studies teachers incorporate current events, such as, but not limited to, presidential elections in their classrooms. A question we will all hear from our students no matter what our content area is, “Why do I have to learn this?” or “Why does this matter?”. For social studies teachers at least, I think a great way to answer this question and get our students to take an interest in the subject at hand can be showing our students how events of the past are shaping what is happening today. I’m looking forward to exploring how teachers are accomplishing this in classrooms today.
4 comments:
Jennie, this is excellent. I appreciate how you share your thinking process. And I completely agree with your synthesis. The study of how teachers incorporate current events is an excellent possibility. Keep thinking about how you might want to implement it....
I couldn't agree more...excellent idea and topic. I think you're right on looking at current events (rather than just the election). One option might be to survey say 8-10 teachers (ideally in the same content area...say US history) and ask them how often they use/discuss/integrate current events, and then interview/observe high frequency, low frequency, and middle frequency teachers, so perhaps we can see why teachers teach them at different rates and the factors that they consider.
Jennie,
I think this is a great topic! I think applying learning to the real world is a huge way to win over students. The focus is usually on Math for this topic but I feel like Social Studies should strive to do the same. Hopefully I can figure out how to do it in my English classes as well!
Your research, I think, should be mostly survey and interview based. Maybe you could even talk to the students and see how they feel about current events and how they relate them, or how often they hear about them in the classroom. Can't wait to see your presentation in December!
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