Woeful Joys of Teaching Social Studies

It is that time of year again, the start of a new semester and the welcome of new fifteen-year-olds to what I hope will be their favourite course. Full disclosure: Social studies is rarely a crowd favourite among teenagers. How do I know this this? Aside from the dramatic groans that become the classroom anthem, part of my classroom routine is assigning an opening survey.

The survey helps me get to know and support my students throughout the semester. I ask them how they learn best, their preferred pronouns, what they are excited to learn in class and their most and least favourite school subjects. Social studies rarely make the favourite subject list, nor is there much enthusiasm to learning about the past, whether that is because of preconceived knowledge, disinterest or an overwhelming fear of too much reading, research and writing.

As the semester comes to a close, a similar survey goes out. Sometimes, students change their minds, and social studies becomes one of their favourite courses. However, the subject cannot compete with art and science-related courses. Why is that? What factors contribute to a lack of enthusiasm for studying history?

As part of this exploration, I will walk through some of my experiences teaching students and trends my colleagues, and I have noticed regarding our students learning and research habits. Before diving in, it is essential to note that this discussion is far more nuanced and contains more complexities than one blog post. We have the pulling of a single thread in the fabric of education. With that, let’s dive in.

Many resources are available for teachers to glean from and develop applicable, thought-provoking content for students to engage with. However, before students even engage with that information, it is pivotal to consider how Generation Z sift through online information and what skill sets they are working with. Growing up with an influx of information at one’s fingertips can be overwhelming. Often, students' technological skills are grossly overestimated, particularly regarding online research, which requires consistent lesson-building to frame the research process.

What colleagues and I have noticed about students’ research tendencies is that they believe the research process is complete with one quick Google search. A common occurrence is that students will be confident that the tiny informational drop box panels at the top of their Google search contain the “right” and “enough” information to complete their assignments.

Figure 1: Screenshot of information drop-box panels when searching for the Second World War information. Photo taken by Shannon Putnam, September 10, 2023. Accessed September 10, 2023

If I type the “Second World War” into the Google search engine, as indicated in Figure 1, my students would be led to view their “research” using the drop-down arrow. They can read topic-related questions without considering the connections and critically generate their own research questions. There is a difference between these questions as scaffolding pieces for teaching critical thinking rather than the final research destination. What would be interesting to know is the specifics of whom Google used to influence the additional questions and answers. How would the questions shift based on factors such as demographics and location? How often have my students received the same question-and-answer sequence represented in Figure 1 if each student Googled the same historical event while in the same classroom?

Teaching research skills is part of British Columbia’s digital literacy curriculum, emphasizing the validity of sources, disinformation and misinformation at the secondary level.[1] What is worth pondering is the intersection of teaching content in a way that is engaging for students while recognizing the source's agenda.

Teachers are encouraged to generate engaging lessons with hooks and multimodal components in the teaching world, fostering critical and creative engagement. Often incorporating many forms of e-history like YouTube videos and podcasts. Jason Steinhauer’s work History Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed The Past examines the discipline of history and the role of historians in conjunction with e-history formats that are user-centric. [2] What stands out is that e-history has determined what people engage with, even if that engagement is less meaningful and based on virality and quick learning. As a teacher, I want meaningful engagement and quick learning content-wise (repetitive for skills-based) to maintain learners' attention span. The goal is to capture the limited attention span of these e-history consumers, who do not necessarily value expert-related information. Steinhauer even includes author Hank Green’s “CrashCourse” series on YouTube as an example that does not contain an expert in the examined field. [3] Yet, are his videos engaging enough to capture the limited attention span of teenagers? The answer is yes, but if high school students are only learning history through e-history, do they have an accurate representation of what it means to study history and how to study history?

Education should not be limited to students learning history in one traditional format for what they are learning to be deemed as history. The new challenge is generating thought-provoking, accurate e-history that is engaging and accessible for teachers and students.

Notes

[1] Province of British Columbia, “BC’s Digital Literacy Framework,” Accessed September 10, 2023, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/kindergarten-to-grade-12/teach/teaching-tools/digital-literacy-framework.pdf.

[2] Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past, (Spring Nature: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 6.

[3] Steinhauer, 14-15.