Children's Thinking About Cultural Universals

Jere Brophy, Janet Alleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135614683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on interview data, the authors describe K-3 students' knowledge and thinking about basic aspects of the social world that are addressed in the elementary social studies curriculum. The interviews focused on human activities relating to nine cultural universals that are commonly addressed in the elementary social studies curriculum: food, clothing, shelter, communication, transportation, family living, childhood, money, and government. This volume synthesizes findings from the research and discusses their implications for curriculum and instruction in early social studies. Children's Thinking About Cultural Universals significantly expands the knowledge base on developments in children's social knowledge and thinking and, in addition, provides a wealth of information to inform social studies educators' and curriculum developers' efforts to match instruction to students' prior knowledge, both by building on already developed valid knowledge and by addressing common misconceptions. It represents a quantum leap in the availability of information on the trajectories of children's knowledge about common topics in primary elementary social studies education.

1
Introduction

Interviewer: Why did some Indians live in tipis?

Kindergartener: Maybe they just had a small family and only needed a little house.

First grader: You could build a fire in a tipi and the smoke would go out the hole in the top, so it was cozy warm in there and they could cook.

Second grader: They liked them because they could paint designs on them to decorate them.

Second grader: Maybe they were poor people and didn’t have enough money to get a better house.

Third grader: The Indians never wasted anything, and building tipis gave them a way to use all of their leftover animal skins.

This question about tipis was included in an interview about shelter as a cultural universal that was administered to students in Grades K–3. A previous question established that the vast majority of the students could supply the name “tipi” when shown a drawing of a tipi and asked what it was. Most of them also were able to generate one or more reasons why some Indians lived in tipis, as the examples indicate. Despite this familiarity with tipis and ability to reason about them, however, very few students understood that the main reason that the tribes who constructed tipis used this form of housing was its portability. These were plains tribes who followed the buffalo on which they were dependent for meeting most of their basic needs, so they had to pack up and move periodically, taking everything that they owned with them, including their shelter. The students’ interview responses imply a need for instruction about tipis to include emphasis on the tipis’ portability, as well as a need for teaching about the nature of and reasons for nomadic societies (a concept unfamiliar to most K–3 students).

Another one of our interviews dealt with clothing. Responses to initial questions indicated that most K–3 students could describe business, work, and play clothes accurately and talk knowledgeably about why these different types of clothing are worn in their respective contexts. When asked about cloth itself, however, many were unable to describe how it is made and most of the rest talked about “smishing” fluffy cotton in order to flatten it into cloth, putting wool into a machine that makes it into cloth (or even, makes it into shirts or other specific clothing items), or cutting material into the appropriate shapes for parts of a shirt (trunk, sleeves, collar, etc.) and then sewing them together to make the shirt (without explaining where the material came from in the first place). Probing often indicated that the students thought of cloth as a solid akin to leather or plastic, not realizing that it is a fabric woven from threads, which in turn are spun from raw material. These findings imply that K–3 students do not need much instruction about different kinds of clothes and when they are worn, but they do need instruction in the basic processes involved in creating cloth (spinning threads or yarn from raw material and then weaving or knitting these into fabric).

Tipis and cloth are just two of over 100 topics addressed in interviews that we conducted with students in Grades K–3. These interviews were designed to identify aspects of students’ prior knowledge and thinking about these topics that might be taken into account in planning social studies curriculum and instruction in the primary grades. Ideally, such instruction will connect with students’ prior knowledge, both by building on their valid knowledge and by addressing their misconceptions.

K–3 students’ thinking about food, clothing, shelter, communication, transportation, family living, and government was explored in seven large interview studies. In addition, first and second graders’ thinking about two additional topics— childhood and money—was explored in smaller studies. Along with a great many specific ideas unique to just one of these nine topics, our interviews elicited several general response tendencies that cut across topics but also had implications for teaching. For example:

1. When talking about the past, students often displayed historical present-ism (disparaging the thinking or technologies of people of the past because they viewed them only with hindsight instead of appreciating them within the context of the time and place studied).
2. When talking about other cultures, they frequently displayed chauvinism (depicting unfamiliar customs as “funny,” “weird,” etc.).
3. When seeking to explain why particular people use certain food or forms of shelter or emphasize certain economic activities, they seldom showed much awareness of the role of climate and geography in creating afford-ances and constraints that affect the lives of people living in the area.

The presentism and chauvinism tendencies highlight the need for instruction that will help students to empathize with people from the past or from other cultures, so as to be able to view them within the context of their time and place and to appreciate their activities as sensible adaptations to that context. The paucity of geographical components in the students’ explanations indicates the need for a general consciousness-raising concerning the role of geography in creating af-fordances and constraints for human activities in particular places, as well as for more specific highlighting of climate and location influences on the diets, clothing styles, shelter forms, and economic activities developed in particular societies. The social studies curriculum in the primary grades is the logical “home” for these and other basic social understandings. However, primary students in most American elementary schools are not systematically introduced to such content, nor to much, if any, significant social education content at all.

DEARTH OF CONTENT IN EARLY SOCIAL STUDIES

The social studies curriculum in the primary grades tends to be a loose amalgam of three main sources of content: (a) socialization of students concerning the prosocial attitudes and behavior expected of them as members of the classroom community; (b) introduction to map concepts and skills; and (c) introduction to basic social knowledge drawn mostly from history and the social sciences. Good materials are available for teaching about maps (in several textbook series) and about becoming a prosocial member of the learning community (in widely distributed ancillary materials). However, there is much dissatisfaction with the social knowledge component of early social studies, especially as it is represented in the leading textbook series (Alter, 1995; Beck & McKeown, 1988; Beck, Mc-Keown, & Gromoll, 1989; Brophy, 1992; Brophy & Alleman, 1992–1993; Egan, 1988; Woodward, 1987).

The content of primary-grade social studies texts is often criticized as overly limited in scope, trivial in import, and lacking connection to major social education goals or structuring around key ideas. Much of it focuses on (ostensibly) human activities related to basic needs or other universal domains of human experience, and some critics believe that the problems with the textbook series are rooted in their focus on this content base. In contrast, we believe that cultural universals are viable topics around which to organize the primary-grade social studies curriculum, and that the problems with textbooks are rooted in inadequate development of this content base, not in the choice of the content base itself.

For example, treatments of shelter in these textbooks typically feature several pages of colorful photographs of a wide variety of shelter forms: tipis, igloos, stilt houses, tropical huts, modern homes, apartment buildings, and so forth. However, the text accompanying these photographs typically says little or nothing more than “People around the world live in many different kinds of homes.” Furthermore, little or nothing is said in the teacher’s manual about big ideas to develop in helping students understand the reasons for this variety in housing forms. Students will not gain much understanding from looking at or even discussing photographs unless they are taught something about the reasons why different forms of shelter have been constructed in past and present societies.

Some basic ideas that we would emphasize in units on shelter in the primary grades include:

1. People’s shelter needs are determined in large part by local climate and geographical features.
2. Most housing is constructed using materials made from natural resources that are plentiful in the area.
3. Certain forms of housing reflect local cultural, economic, or geographic conditions (e.g., tipis and tents as easily movable shelters used by nomadic societies, stilt houses as adaptation to periodic flooding used by rice farmers who live in marshes or flood plains, high-rise apartment buildings as adaptation to land scarcity in urban areas).
4. Inventions, discoveries, and improvements in construction knowledge and materials have enabled many modern people to live in housing that offers better durability, weatherproofing, insulation, and temperature control, with fewer requirements for maintenance and labor, than anything that was available to even the richest of their ancestors.
5. In the process, people’s orientations have shifted from merely meeting basic shelter needs to acquiring comfortable internal living environments that offer a great many labor-saving devices and other conveniences.
6. Modern industries and transportation make it possible to construct almost any kind of shelter almost anywhere on earth, so it is now possible for those who can afford it to live comfortably in very hot or very cold climates.
7. Forms of shelter that existed in the past and that still exist in some societies today are much simpler than the modern homes that most American students live in, but they typically represent intelligent use of locally available materials to fashion homes that not only meet basic shelter needs but are well adapted to the local climate and reflective of the culture of the inhabitants.

CULTURAL UNIVERSALS

Anthropologists and other social scientists often refer to cultural universals (sometimes called social universals or basic categories of human social experience) as useful dimensions for understanding a given society or making comparisons across societies (Banks, 1990; Brown, 1991; Cooper, 1995; Payne & Gay, 1997). Cultural universals are domains of human experience that have existed in all cultures, past and present. They include activities related to meeting the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, as well as family structures, government, communication, transportation, money or other forms of economic exchange, religion, occupations, recreation, and perhaps others as well. The term implies that activities relating to each cultural universal can be identified in all societies, but not that these activities necessarily have the same form or meaning in each society. On the contrary, it recognizes variations among societies (as well as among individuals within societies) in orientation toward or handling of common life events associated with each cultural universal (e.g., family structures are universal, but different cultures and individuals within cultures have different notions of what constitutes a family).

Cultural universals have special importance for the early elementary social studies curriculum because although it is usually described as an “expanding horizons” or “expanding communities” curriculum, much of its basic content actually focuses on the universals. The traditional reasoning has been that teaching students about how their own and other societies have addressed the human purposes associated with cultural universals is an effective way to establish an initial, predisciplinary knowledge base in social studies, preparing the way for the more discipline-based courses of the middle and upper grades. Organizing early social studies around cultural universals provides a sound basis for developing fundamental understandings about the human condition for two main reasons: First, human activities relating to cultural universals account for a considerable proportion of everyday living and are the focus of much of human social organization and communal activity, so a curriculum organized around cultural universals provides many natural starting points for developing initial social understandings. Until children understand the motivations and cause-and-effect explanations that underlie these activities, they do not understand much of what is happening around them all the time. As they develop such understandings, the previously mysterious behavior of their parents and other people significant in their lives becomes comprehensible to them, and they acquire intellectual tools for developing efficacy in these domains themselves.

Second, children begin accumulating direct personal experiences with most cultural universals right from birth, and they can draw on these experiences as they construct understandings of social education concepts and principles in the early grades. This is true for all children, regardless of their family’s ethnicity or socioeconomic status. If cultural universals are taught with appropriate focus on powerful ideas and their potential life applications, students should develop basic sets of connected understandings about (a) how our social system works (with respect to each cultural universal); (b) how and why it got to be that way over time; (c) how and why related practices vary across locations and cultures; and (d) what all of this might mean for personal, social, and civic decision making.

Not everyone agrees with this rationale, or even with the notion of social studies as a pre-or pandisciplinary school subject organized primarily as preparation for citizenship. Advocates of basing school curricula directly on the academic disciplines would offer separate courses in history, geography, and the social sciences, simplified as needed but designed primarily to pursue disciplinary goals rather than citizenship education goals. With particular reference to the primary grades, Egan (1988), Ravitch (1987), and others advocated replacing topical teaching about cultural universals with a heavy focus on chronological history and related children’s literature (not only historical fiction but myths and folktales).

We agree that K–3 students can and should learn certain aspects of history, but we also believe that these students need a balanced and integrated social education curriculum that includes sufficient attention to powerful ideas drawn from geography and the various social sciences, subsumed within citizenship education purposes and goals. Furthermore, we see little social education value in replacing reality-based social studies with myths and folklore likely to create misconceptions, especially during the primary years when children are struggling to determine what is real (vs. false/fictional) and enduring (vs. transitory/accidental) in their physical and social worlds.

Recent trends in U.S. education have increased the applicability of this argument. So-called reform movements built around high-stakes testing programs have increased the curricular “air time” allocated to language arts (and to a lesser extent, mathematics) at the expense of science and social studies (Haas & Laughlin, 2001). As a result, contemporary American children are getting even more exposure to the fictional (and often fanciful) content emphasized in primary language arts, and even less exposure to information about physical and social realities. This imbalance might be justified if research supported the argument that it would establish a solid literacy foundation that ultimately would enhance achievement in all subjects. Ironically, however, relevant research indicates that children show more progress in literacy (as well as in other subjects) when their reading and writing opportunities emphasize content-area texts and reality-based tradebooks, not fanciful fiction (Duke, 2000; Pappas, 1993).

NEED FOR INFORMATION ABOUT CHILDREN’S KNOWLEDGE AND THINKING

Some of those who are opposed to a focus on cultural universals in early social studies have asserted, without presenting evidence, that there is no need to teach this content because students already know it from everyday experience (Larkins, Hawkins, & Gilmore, 1987; Ravitch, 1987). We have disputed this assertion, suggesting that the knowledge about cultural universals that children develop through everyday experience tends to be tacit rather than well articulated. Furthermore, much of it is confined to knowledge about how things are without accompanying understandings about why they got to be that way, how and why they vary across cultures, or the mechanisms through which they accomplish human purposes (Brophy & Alleman, 1996).

Recent developments in research on teaching suggest the need for data that speak to this issue. Increasingly, educational theory and research have been emphasizing the importance of teaching school subjects for understanding, appreciation, and life application, using methods that connect with students’ prior experience and engage them in actively constructing new knowledge and correcting existing misconceptions. In mathematics and science, rich literatures have developed describing what children typically know (or think they know) about the content taught at their grade levels. These literatures allow curriculum developers and teachers to draw on what is known about common trajectories in children’s developing understanding of a content domain (including knowledge about false starts or distorted paths associated with common misconceptions), so as to scaffold students’ learning optimally. Drawing on information about students’ prior knowledge and thinking about a topic, a teacher can “work in the zone of proximal development” by asking questions, suggesting problems, or providing feedback that will be most helpful in enabling students to construct accurate understandings, make connections, and see the need to question invalid assumptions or other misconceptions.

PRIOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Unfortunately, very little information of this kind exists about topics addressed in K–3 social studies (Brophy, Alleman, & O’Mahony, 2000; Marker & Mehlinger, 1992; Schug & Hartoonian, 1996). There have been some studies of stages in the development of economic, political, and social knowledge (Barrett & Buchanan-Barrow, 2002, 2005; Berti & Bombi, 1988; Furnham & Stacey, 1991; Furth, 1980; Moore, Lare, & Wagner, 1985), but most child development research has concentrated on cognitive structures and strategies that children acquire through general life experiences rather than on their developing understanding of knowledge domains learned primarily at school. Furthermore, when child development researchers have addressed topics taught at school, they have focused on mathematical and scientific knowledge rather than on social knowledge.

Furthermore, they have focused on attempts to support or dispute the claim that preschool and early-primary-grade children have intuitive theories of biology, physics, psychology, and possibly other disciplines, even before they acquire connected knowledge in these domains. Carey (1999), for example, argued that even by 12 months of age, infants show abilities to represent concepts in at least three core domains: intuitive mechanics, ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: FOOD
• 3: CLOTHING
• 4: SHELTER
• 5: COMMUNICATION
• 6: TRANSPORTATION
• 7: FAMILY LIVING
• 8: GOVERNMENT
• 9: MONEY AND CHILDHOOD
• 10: VARIATION ACROSS SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS, ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL, AND GENDER
• 11: OVERALL TRENDS IN THE FINDINGS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY SOCIAL STUDIES