I went to the same elementary school from kindergarten to 5th grade in Central Arkansas, and I am sad to say that I remember almost nothing about social studies during my time in elementary school. On one hand, my memory is pretty bad when it comes to my own personal memories from childhood, but on the other hand, I can distinctly remember a variety of lessons in science, math and English/language arts throughout my time in elementary school. I even called my mom (who was a borderline helicopter parent) to ask if she remembered any social studies lessons from my elementary school days and she could not remember any either. I was in elementary school from 1999 to 2005, which was around the advent of No Child Left Behind. Because of this, I think
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I have always excelled at reading with reading comprehension being potentially my strongest academic skill, and so I excelled in my social studies classes - many of my early social studies teacher taught strictly off of an educating workers framework (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). Since many of my teachers used the educating workers framework, doing well in class simply meant reading the required readings and memorizing the required information. However, in high school, many of my teachers began to use more of a liberal democratic approach to teaching social studies which involved quite a bit more interactive, creative and group oriented activities (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). My personal favorite assignment was in my European History course where we made a 20-minute-long docu-drama recreating highlights of the French Revolution. In high school, I am proud to say that I took every AP single social studies course that my school offered (such as Government, European History, Psychology), which cumulated in “Social Studies Student of the Year Award” my Senior year of high …show more content…
Unfortunately, the social science aspect of social studies mostly neglected before college, so it was not until college that I was really able to find the area of social studies that I was the most passionate about. In college, I took a wide variety of interesting honors colloquium classes that happened to each hit a different social studies framework (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). The Darwin Course used a liberal democratic approach to teaching about Charles Darwin’s and the Theory of Evolution’s effect on other disciplines. Primate Behavioral Ecology was taught through the humanist lens as we learned about the similarities between primates and ourselves as humans. Finally, Education Inequity in America focused on a social change framework as we learned about the gross inequalities that permeated America’s education system Though my social studies curriculum may have been lacking in elementary school, by the end of my undergraduate degree I had been exposed to a wide variety of disciplines and
I have always excelled at reading with reading comprehension being potentially my strongest academic skill, and so I excelled in my social studies classes - many of my early social studies teacher taught strictly off of an educating workers framework (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). Since many of my teachers used the educating workers framework, doing well in class simply meant reading the required readings and memorizing the required information. However, in high school, many of my teachers began to use more of a liberal democratic approach to teaching social studies which involved quite a bit more interactive, creative and group oriented activities (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). My personal favorite assignment was in my European History course where we made a 20-minute-long docu-drama recreating highlights of the French Revolution. In high school, I am proud to say that I took every AP single social studies course that my school offered (such as Government, European History, Psychology), which cumulated in “Social Studies Student of the Year Award” my Senior year of high …show more content…
Unfortunately, the social science aspect of social studies mostly neglected before college, so it was not until college that I was really able to find the area of social studies that I was the most passionate about. In college, I took a wide variety of interesting honors colloquium classes that happened to each hit a different social studies framework (Grant & Vansledright, 2014). The Darwin Course used a liberal democratic approach to teaching about Charles Darwin’s and the Theory of Evolution’s effect on other disciplines. Primate Behavioral Ecology was taught through the humanist lens as we learned about the similarities between primates and ourselves as humans. Finally, Education Inequity in America focused on a social change framework as we learned about the gross inequalities that permeated America’s education system Though my social studies curriculum may have been lacking in elementary school, by the end of my undergraduate degree I had been exposed to a wide variety of disciplines and