Jaselle B.

Torres BEED 3B

Philosophy of Teaching the Social Studies

Teaching the social studies is a great and important responsibility. In an important sense teaching students to know and understand the world around them historically is a great trust. I believe social studies teachers have four major responsibilities to their students and must employ effective techniques for living up to those responsibilities. The first responsibility social studies teachers have been charged with is to form citizens of localities, countries and the world. In my view, these three types of citizenship need to be held in tension. Many teachers yield to the temptations of patriotism and overemphasize citizenship and loyalty to the nation. However, my study of the history of this country has taught me that many people of good will have found their commitments to their local communities and their identity groups (based on, for example: race, class, gender, and religious community) to be in tension with their commitment to the nation and its government. In addition, many people have found that they must balance their patriotism with their desire to identify with all the peoples of the world. The proper role of the social studies is to teach these tensions and describe ways in which people in the past have dealt with them. The methods associated with fulfilling this role are many. The social studies teacher should tell the stories of many different peoples. Students need to understand the world as a place full of people with different stories than their own. They need to be able to place themselves and other people in these stories. In addition, the teacher should clearly describe the laws and traditions that shape nations and communities. Students need to understand the conventions which bind them to others in order to participate fully politically and socially. Knowing these stories and these conventions shapes students into citizens. A second responsibility of the social studies teacher is to pass on the consensus view of historians regarding what has happened in our world. Good teachers do not simply pass along facts, they help students understand where those facts come from and how historians constantly reevaluate which are the important facts and events. The reason for this responsibility is closely related to the first responsibility, but the two are not identical. Students will come to high school without a clear sense of where they have come from and what has happened before them. Passing this knowledge on does help make students into citizens and it also provides them with the basic tools for reevaluating the world and their place in it.