Anthony J. Filipovitch in Teaching the Social Studies through Your Local Community provides some really good examples on how our students can get involved with the democratic process within their local community. The point of the article is that, although it may be fun to teach about civics, the amount of information within social studies textbooks will not do the students much justice. The article provides lesson plans and numerous websites with examples of how to teach kids about their local government from different states. I think the best part of the article that I will take with me is the Minnesota City/County Management Association website that has twenty-six lesson plans for Geography, Economics, Government/Citizenship that align with the NCSS standards. For example, in a lesson for this strand called “lobbyists” students participate in a role play where they act as different interest groups and City Council members (Filopovitch, 2012).
My midterm paper for Dr. Lynn Weber's Socy 705 class hits directly on institutions and the impacts that they can have on us as individuals. In a class recently, at Irmo, I referenced this paper and some of the information in it when a student of mine decided that he was fed up with the education system and the idea that CP classes are actually college prep in any way at all. In this student's mind, we are hurting these kids chances of moving forward and socially upward by putting them in classes that are named college prep classes when we really know that those are the "dumb classes." In some ways, this AP student had a good point but in other ways, he was coming across as insensitive to some of the CP kids in his homeroom class that we were sitting in. He tried to backtrack his statements by saying that if we just pushed them harder and taught them to work harder, than everybody could succeed at the same rate. The reason that I bring this up is because, as I stated in my paper and as Dr. Weber pointed out in class, when she first began working at The University of South Carolina in 1996, the African American enrollment at the university was about 21% and as we sat there in her class in the spring of 2015, the African American enrollment was at a mere 8%. There are systematic oppressive institutions and rules in place in some instances which lead to these types of numbers and it is our job to shed light on those types of injustices and bring about more social justice. The key in bringing this up in a discussion with students was to help them see that sometimes they are blinded by their privilege and cannot see the impact that institutions have on them.
My midterm paper for Dr. Lynn Weber's Socy 705 class hits directly on institutions and the impacts that they can have on us as individuals. In a class recently, at Irmo, I referenced this paper and some of the information in it when a student of mine decided that he was fed up with the education system and the idea that CP classes are actually college prep in any way at all. In this student's mind, we are hurting these kids chances of moving forward and socially upward by putting them in classes that are named college prep classes when we really know that those are the "dumb classes." In some ways, this AP student had a good point but in other ways, he was coming across as insensitive to some of the CP kids in his homeroom class that we were sitting in. He tried to backtrack his statements by saying that if we just pushed them harder and taught them to work harder, than everybody could succeed at the same rate. The reason that I bring this up is because, as I stated in my paper and as Dr. Weber pointed out in class, when she first began working at The University of South Carolina in 1996, the African American enrollment at the university was about 21% and as we sat there in her class in the spring of 2015, the African American enrollment was at a mere 8%. There are systematic oppressive institutions and rules in place in some instances which lead to these types of numbers and it is our job to shed light on those types of injustices and bring about more social justice. The key in bringing this up in a discussion with students was to help them see that sometimes they are blinded by their privilege and cannot see the impact that institutions have on them.