Literacy In History

As a future educator I do not what this to happen to my students. Many people think history is just reading about the past and memorizing facts. History is totally contrary to this belief, it is about critical thinking, problem solving, and trying to relate to other people, both in the past and people of different cultures. In essence, it is about connectedness, how everything connects together and how one thing is effected by another. However, many students don’t feel this way. All they know is that history is reading a text book, reading primary sources, writing papers, and memorizing facts. Three of those four things involve literacy. A student who struggles in English probably wouldn’t fair to well in a history course where those four activities …show more content…
Writing is a form of communication and an essential part of literacy. In Social Studies it is almost impossible to not have some form of writing assignment within the class. While it should not be a key feature, it should play a role in the learning process. When students begin writing it is crucial for them to understand two different types of writing, transactional and expressive. Transactional is written for a specific audience, and is usually written in a formal format. Two examples of this form of writing are an essay or a letter. The second tope of writing is expressive. This form of writing is used to crystalize thoughts, therefor it usually has a free form to it. It is written for the author, usually thoughts for self. Examples of this form of writing would be notes and lists. Students would need to understand the difference between the two forms of writing. One can argue that Social Studies wouldn’t need to worry about literacy in the classroom, but they would be poorly mistaken. The different forms of writing illustrates how important literacy is within the classroom. Even more important is the teachers understanding of …show more content…
There are three steps for students to gain knowledge, they are: assess, activate, and add. I mentioned in the previous paragraph that the students learn through using prior knowledge. In the illustration of the bird, the student already knew what a bird was, then used the knowledge of what a bird looks like to distinguish what a wing was, and how it was used for flying. This is the same for gaining knowledge. Students review past material as a building block for learning new information. The second step is activate. Just like in the example above the teacher had to tell the student of why not all birds can fly. This closely aligns with activate. This is because the teacher takes the prior knowledge and corrects anything that was wrong, or fill in any gaps that they were missing. Finally, the teacher can add new information. Adding is what students take away from the previous two steps. This is the way students gain knowledge, and is crucial for teachers to understand in order to properly teach their students. It does not work if teachers skip one of the three