Successful Social Studies

Disruptive Teaching: Elementary School Teachers as Intellectual Risk-Takers

“…Educational design and methods that recognize the cultural diversity of today's students are just as important as raising student academic achievement. Infusing the arts into the everyday curriculum has the propensity to not only enhance the teaching of other subjects, such as ELA and social studies, but to also promote understanding and appreciation of different cultures ( Burstein & Knotts, 2021;Le, 2019). Arts education, specifically relating to content that connects humans to culture, is essential because it can be the one and only link students have with the world outside of their individual community (Meyer, 2005).…”

“…Art preserves what fact-based historical records cannot: how it felt to exist in a particular place at a particular time. In this sense, art is communication; it allows people from different cultures and different times to communicate with each other via different forms (Burstein-Knotts, 2021;Freedman, 2013). Hence, multicultural art education can bring about success in supporting the many aspects of the whole child: academics, linguistics, socialemotional, and behavioral.…”

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

“…For example, each syllabus had one or more scheduled classes that centered methods on the incorporation of drama, music, and/or dance into social studies instruction. The syllabi in this category used texts such as Reclaiming Social Studies for the Elementary Classroom: Integrating Culture Through the Arts (Burstein & Knotts, 2018) or The Creative Arts: A Process Approach for Teachers and Children (Edwards, 2009). Both syllabi included an assignment that asked students to design a multimodal center or station activity that incorporated the interdisciplinary arts.…”