Preparing Elementary Pre-service Teachers to Promote Big Ideas Within Social Studies

Informing, transforming, inquiring: Approaches to elementary social studies in methods course syllabi

“…Although the focus on justice is decidedly more apparent in elementary social studies teacher education scholarship, other teacher educators have focused on practice-based approaches to elementary social studies, including developing pedagogical content knowledge (Silva & Mason, 2003), ways to navigate the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework with elementary PSTs (Neel & Palmeri, 2017), teaching PSTs to teach with “big ideas” (Brooks & Jares, 2016), and moving beyond “cute” or “fun” social studies (DiCamillo, 2010) towards more meaningful (Bauml, 2016) and powerful social studies (Ritter, 2012). Others have written in response to teacher education reforms, including a survey of how Georgia social studies methods instructions responded to the implementation of edTPA (An, 2017a), the opportunities for literacy integration as a result of the Common Core State Standards (Gleeson & D'Souza, 2016), and the push towards online teacher education (Tschida & Sevier, 2013).…”

“…An Inquiry Based System of education engages students in “big ideas” (Brooks & Jares, 2016) usually through the use of compelling or essential questions that make required content relevant to students’ lives. Compelling or essential questions in social studies seek to understand “why people do the things they do” ((Grant et al., 2017), p. 200).…”

“…At the same time, the framework can be used to engage in transformation depending on how a teacher educator positions the inquiry framework in their classroom (Gallagher et al., 2018). However it is used, inquiry helps move teachers away from “trite, redundant factual content” (Brooks & Jares, 2016, p. 83) and towards a method that is rigorous and relevant (Swan et al., 2018).…”