The Importance of Teaching Social Issues

Our Pedagogical Creeds

Samuel Totten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317657668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

John Dewey's My Pedagogical Creed outlined his beliefs in regard to teaching and learning. In this volume, prominent contemporary teacher educators such as Diana Hess, Geneva Gay and O.L. Davis follow in Dewey's footsteps, articulating their own pedagogical creeds as they relate to educating about social issues. Through personal stories, each contributor reveals the major concerns, tenets, and interests behind their own teaching and research, including the experiences underlying their motivation to explore social issues via the school curriculum. Rich with biographical detail, The Importance of Teaching Social Issues combines diverse voices from curriculum theory, social studies education, science education, and critical theory, providing a unique volume relevant for today's teachers and education scholars.

PART I

The Imperative

1

THE IMPERATIVE TO INCORPORATE A STUDY OF SOCIAL ISSUES INTO THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Samuel Totten

PROFESSOR EMERITUS, CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION,
UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, FAYETTEVILLE

My interest in social issues was sparked while in high school (Laguna Beach High School, class of 1967). Many of the teachers at LBHS were outstanding, and not a few engaged us, their students, in discussions/projects dealing with various social issues. My biology teacher, Mr. Art Robertson, who walked a good distance to work everyday, not only for the exercise but also for the sake of the environment, constantly spoke to us about the beauty and value of the environment and what individuals could do to preserve it. He was not didactic or preachy but rather approached us in a way that was more contemplative (in a quiet voice), almost as if he was simply sharing his deepest thoughts with us.

One of the most profound lessons I experienced in relation to the environment was when Mr. Robinson (who ultimately left Laguna High to earn his doctorate in biology in order to teach at the university level) took a small group of students to a local tide pool, paired us up with a partner, and asked us to collect as many different specimens as we could within a two-hour period. Even though I had romped around tide pools during my many days at the beach while surfing, body surfing, skin diving, and fishing, I had little to no idea just how rich and alive tide pools were. In the end, our group of thirteen students or so located 56 different items from the tide pools, including such fascinating specimens as the following: a sea anemone, striped shore crab, hermit crab, kelp, starfish, California mussel, acorn barnacle, surf grass, chiton, sandcastle worm, owl limpet, periwinkle snail, sea lettuce, gooseneck barnacle, feather boa (brown algae), coralline algae, black turban snail, purple sea urchin, and owl limpet. Ultimately, from this single lesson, I learned to truly appreciate the richness in nature, the symbiotic nature of flora, fauna, and the settings in which they live—and that, in turn, led to my becoming more appreciative of the critical need regarding the conservation and protection of nature.

Another incredibly powerful lesson I gleaned in high school vis-à-vis social issues took place in my U.S. History course during my junior year. Our teacher, Mr. Walter Lawson, a recently retired officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, required each of us to read and review a book from a list he provided. The latter assignment served as a supplement to the regular coursework. I chose Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Not only was I deeply moved by the conditions that the workers in the stockyards faced and the horrific treatment of the animals, but I was also deeply impacted by a particular message in the Preface to the book. Therein, I discovered that Sinclair’s book had been read by President Theodore Roosevelt and, as a result of having read the book, he pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act. (Many years later I read that this was an apocryphal assertion.) What really hit me at the time, though, was the ostensible power of “the word,” the power that a writer could have, and that one’s words could truly change the world. It was at that point that I began to yearn to become a writer whose words would impact the world in a powerful and positive way.

Upon graduating from college (California State University, Long Beach) with a degree in English, I intended to write a novel. To that end, I moved to San Francisco where, for thirteen dollars per week (yes, per week), I took up residence in a single residency occupancy hotel that bordered Chinatown and North Beach. Each morning I would catch a trolley car out to San Francisco State University, where I would write for five or six hours. Then, each evening, after a cheap but substantial dinner in a tiny Chinese joint, the Ding Ho Cafe, I would head to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop, where I would pull the same four or five books off the shelf and read the night away. One evening, as I sat down at my usual table in the basement, I noticed a journal, amongst several books and otherjournals sprawled across the tabletop, with the words “Torture in Chile” scrawled across the front cover. My interest piqued, I read the article, and in doing so I was shocked: shocked at the barbaric use and types of torture against so-called “enemies of the state,” the pervasiveness of torture across the globe, and the fact that I had never heard or read about such atrocities and horrific human rights violations in high school or college.

This incident virtually changed my life, and from that point forward I became increasingly immersed in issues germane to the protection of international human rights, including the issue of genocide, which I’ve conducted research into and written about for the past 25 years.¹

At the very outset of my teaching career as a student teacher at Costa Mesa High School in Costa Mesa, California, where I taught Freshman Composition and American Literature, I was pretty much locked into what Freire (1985) refers to as a “banking system of education.” That is, I was a stickler for detail and insisted that students learn specific literary definitions, concepts, theories, etc., not only to be tested on them but to apply them to their study of literature. Still, the way in which I set the tests up meant that the students pretty much had to memorize the material and regurgitate the answers. The one saving grace, I suppose, is that I purposely incorporated into the curriculum topics, issues, themes, and readings (along with a few unique learning activities, though not many) that were rather unusual and out of the ordinary. Each of these was tied to social issues-related topics. For example, there was a month-long theme on African American history and literature, during which the students read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son, short stories by Wright and James Baldwin, and Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and listened to and engaged in discussion with an African American pastor from a nearby city who spoke about parishioners who lived in homes with dirt floors and without running water. The students even took a facsimile of an actual exam that African Americans in the South were forced to take in order to qualify to vote. In the process I attempted to prod students to be more aware of their lived lives and the world around them. Unfortunately, there was more prodding than assisting and nurturing them to thoroughly analyze or reflect upon their lived lives in comparison to those of others in the world—and the ramifications of such.

Later, after becoming immersed in the field of human rights and volunteering with Amnesty International, I began incorporating even more diverse readings into my English classes (in Australia, in California, at the Walworth Barbour American International School in Israel, and at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Page School), along with research projects tied to the readings. As a result, various students in those settings read and discussed, for example, such fictional and nonfictional works as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Elie Wiesel’s Night, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, and Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

Gradually, I added projects on other social issues, including but not limited to apartheid, child and spousal abuse, the pervasive use of torture by various governments around the world, censorship, and totalitarian states. Some topics were suggested by my students, others by me. All potential topics were voted on by the students.

It was not until my fourth year of teaching that I even realized that there were other educators who were keenly interested in engaging their students in a study of social issues. Our superintendent at the Walworth Barbour American School in Israel saw to it that faculty had ready access to educational journals and encouraged us to read them. It was during that time that I came across both Social Education and Educational Leadership, each of which periodically included articles related to educating students about one social issue or another. Over time, I gradually became familiar with the writings and efforts of such scholars as Richard Gross, Donald Oliver, James Shaver, Fred Newmann, and Carole Hahn, among others.² My introduction to the aforementioned scholars’ work, and the history of the National Council for the Social Studies’ efforts vis-à-vis the incorporation of social issues into the extant curriculum, vastly altered my own efforts, in that they became more in-depth, more systematic and, ultimately, more sophisticated.

My Pedagogical Creed

Dispositions Apropos to Studying and Coming to Care About Social Issues

I believe that both experienced and prospective teachers need to be conversant with, and ponder long and hard, the ideas found in Herbert Spencer’s What Knowledge is of Most Worth? (1884) Indeed, it is one that all teachers need to ask themselves throughout the school year and whenever they are planning their units and lessons. This is just as true for those teachers who find themselves boxed in and constrained by curricular programs and state standards that ostensibly leave little wiggle room for any deviation from the “set” or “standard” curriculum. In that regard, I firmly believe that even those teachers who face a top-down curriculum driven by state and/or federal standards, textbooks, and/or standardized tests have the wherewithal, if they choose to take it, to infuse key social issues and radically different perspectives into the extant curriculum. It, of course, takes more energy, thought, imagination and work—not to mention gumption—but, in the end, it is what the most professional and creative teachers do in order to provide their students with the best education possible.

I believe in Socrates’ dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I believe that individuals who do not probe their own lived lives (why they think, believe, and act the way they do, etc.), who are not well informed about the world they live in (locally, regionally, nationally, internationally), and who do not take the time and effort to thoroughly think about and wrestle with key social issues and problems are less than fully alive intellectually and hardly the type of citizens so essential to a healthy democracy.

I believe that helping to nurture “wide-awakeness” in students is critical to the educational endeavor. In regard to the critical need to be “wide-awake,” Thoreau (1963) eloquently asserted the following:

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

pp.66–67

More apropos to the study and confrontation of social issues, Maxine Greene (2008), one of my professors at Teachers College, Columbia University, comments as follows:

The only way to really awaken to life, awaken to the possibilities, is to be self-aware. I use the term wide-awakeness. Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

pp.1–2

I believe that it is imperative that teachers, in conjunction with the curriculum that is taught, nurture and sustain curiosity in the mind of each and every student. If teachers truly aspire to assist their students in becoming life-long learners, then nurturing curiosity seems to be the first step in that direction: curiosity about the world in which they live, curiosity about their place in it, curiosity about why things are the way they are and how they possibly could be different, and how significant change has been, and can be, undertaken. This is where students begin to learn that a “taken-for-grantedness” view of life is not only limiting but intellectually and morally vacuous. Here, I think, for example, of all those whites in the U.S. who accepted Jim Crow as a given (i.e., “the way things have ‘always’ been, how they are, and how they should always be”). The same, of course, is applicable to those South African whites who accepted apartheid as “a given” or those “good Germans” who accepted and lived according to the beliefs and dictates of the Nazis.

Given that complex social problems do not simply disappear over time (that is, it often takes Herculean efforts over the long haul by individuals and groups working together to ameliorate them), and that the appearance of new social issues is inevitable, I believe that life-long learning is critical to both the health of individuals and the nation.

I believe that students need to be taught the value of being a reflective thinker and citizen. While one can often be swayed by facts presented in a particular light, it is also important to weigh the issues against what is fair and just when supporting one side of an issue or another. Without deep reflection about as many possible sides of an issue as possible³—as well as the many ramifications, positive, negative, or otherwise, that might result from one’s support of a particular side or another—one can hardly consider oneself to be a truly conscientious citizen.

Incorporating the Study of Social Issues into the School Curriculum

I believe that teachers in most curricular areas should strive to incorporate the examination and discussion of social issues in order that it constitutes an integral part of the daily curriculum. It should not be a stretch to do so, for numerous social issues/problems are germane to topics studied in social studies, history, government, English, the sciences (general science, biology, chemistry, and physics) and even mathematics. Moreover, it is not merely contemporary social issues that are important: it is vitally significant for students to learn how certain social issues arose and were dealt with in the past (e.g., women’s right to vot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface Education in a Time of Crisis
• Introduction
• Part I The Imperative
• Part II Underpinning Democratic Society
• Part III Critical Studies
• Part IV Continuing to Move from the Classroom into the World
• Appendix My Pedagogic Creed
• Contributors
• Index