Abstract
In 2006, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) sponsored a grant program to retain young audiences by stimulating the development of youth-focused cross-media and technology applications. As part of the Young American Heroes project, a focus group of 14 middle school teachers met with a video production company, curriculum design team, and a project evaluator to discuss some of the ways in which teachers use digital technology to meet the challenges of engaging students in the social studies classroom. In order to promote critical thinking and encourage students to view history as relevant and meaningful, the teachers employed Internet resources as well as digital video and digital storytelling projects. Standards addressed by the project include those derived from the National Center for History in the Schools (2005), as well as those from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2007).
Introduction
In October 2007, a focus group of teachers was convened to discuss the use of digital media to meet the challenge of reaching students in the middle school social studies classroom. This group was brought together as part of a CPB American History and Civics Initiative grant to inform the development of a multi-platform project on the lives of young American heroes throughout U.S. history. A goal of the CPB was to fund educational projects to “reach the iPod-equipped, PlayStation-addicted inheritors of American democracy” (Egner, 2007). Since youths tend to stop watching public television once they outgrow children’s shows, the CPB hoped to reach them through multi-platform projects, such as Young American Heroes. This project was designed to teach American History to middle school students through stories of youths doing extraordinary things at seminal historical moments, with a pilot based on the life of Frederick Douglass. Collecting data on the types of resources and materials that engage students with human story would inform the developers of the Young American Heroes television program in creating components of the project: DVD, graphic novel, interactive Web component, and accompanying curriculum.
Participants
The participants in the focus group were selected using purposeful sampling. Thirteen middle school social studies teachers and one school media specialist participated in the focus group. In general, most teachers were mid-career and their number of years of teaching experience ranged from one to more than thirty years (see Table 1). Most of the participants taught in affluent suburban schools in southern Connecticut.
Table 1 Teachers’ Years of Experience
Number of years teaching |
Number of teachers |
1 - 3 |
5 |
4 - 10 |
5 |
11 - 20 |
2 |
30+ |
2 |
The participants were chosen based on the recommendations of the local historical society and a school district coordinator of information and technology literacy. Had this been a random sampling of social studies teachers, their use of technology would likely have been more representative of what is happening nationally with the use of technology. In fact, the uses described herein are anomalous to previously reported social studies teachers’ technology use, which has been described as in its “adolescence” since social studies classrooms tend to lag behind other disciplines’ integration of technology (Bennett & Pye, 2003; Berson & Balyta, 2004).
Questions Posed, Issues Raised: Challenges and Rewards
The facilitator began with probing the focus group to uncover what each individual found most rewarding about teaching, as well as what each found most challenging. During the conversation it became clear that there was a direct correlation between the two; it is precisely what is most challenging in the classroom that provides teachers with the greatest reward. These teachers thrive upon the moments when they work with their students on what is hardest to address. Two themes of challenges and rewards emerged from the conversation: getting students to think critically and getting students to see history as relevant and meaningful.
Critical Thinking
Five participants expressed their most rewarding moments in the classroom as watching the students have their “aha” moments, or “see[ing] the light bulb go on, when somebody has that look they got it.” The process of discovery, exploring ideas, and using higher-order thinking skills is an important part of these teachers’ classrooms. At the same time, achieving this state was inversely related to the state of un-engagement or disengagement, which is precisely the source of the teacher’s greatest challenge. This in itself has usefulness in understanding the tensions inherent in teaching, and, if thinking about teaching and learning as energy, it is the transformation of students’ energy from the state of potential to kinetic. Therefore, seeing and using the energy and tension in the transformation as the “creative tension” generates the most rewarding states (Alibrandi, 2003).
Several participants expressed their biggest challenges as not only getting students to engage in critical thinking, but also to express their thoughts both orally and, as one teacher put it, “motivating students to independently elaborate on their ideas in writing … emphasis on elaboration.” Another teacher was challenged by getting students to respond to one another. For one of the two urban teachers in the group, the biggest challenge was dealing with the students’ lack of prior knowledge; however, her greatest reward was cited as, “Watching my class becomes enthralled with a subject they’ve never even heard of or thought about.”
Seeing History as Relevant and Meaningful
Nine of the 14 participants in the focus group cited making connections to history as both challenging and rewarding. It is not surprising that social studies teachers are passionate about their subject and that they want to pass that love of history on to their students. “With all due modestly, it’s the best subject, honestly. You know, it involves every aspect of their lives,” one teacher said. Another teacher enjoyed “watching them learn and understand how they connect to the world as a whole and the past, where they fit.” Teachers identified “making history relevant” as a central focus, and “making the connection between past and present and … applying it to current [conditions].” “Active participation” and civics were among the goals these teachers had for their students: “Helping to create responsible and contributing members of society–emphasis on contributing.”
When asked to articulate challenges, several participants noted that social studies had a special challenge to get students to relate to the historical figures of another time. One teacher described the challenge of getting “the kids to relate to the fact that these were people. And it’s not just dead folks we’re reading about because you have to–but the chances, the risks they took, the challenges they had.”
Another teacher commented, “These historical figures aren’t people that just live in a textbook. They were heroic, why are they important?” A participant discussed her efforts to have her students accept and grasp cultural differences. One teacher found it difficult to convince students that social studies is relevant in their lives, now more difficult since it is not a part of the Connecticut state’s high-stakes test in middle school: “… it’s being squeezed out of the curriculum … Science, math [is] what everyone values now.” Teachers are challenged to balance the desire to have those rich moments in the classroom that promote critical thinking and a love for the subject with the pressure to cover the amount of material dictated by the curriculum. A first year teacher found “the whole time element to be the most crushing challenge … like how do you set enough time to what’s appropriate to study, Colonial America versus the U.S. Constitution?” Another teacher, struggling with “knowing what things to actually teach and what to leave out”, echoed this. One teacher who wanted to incorporate current events into the curriculum found it difficult to fit it in. Choosing the right materials and making lessons appropriate for different types of learners also presented challenges.
