Teaching Social Studies: The Start of my Journey

An iconic image of Romanticism, but for our purposes, he is also a student of
Social Studies, about to embark on his journey.
Friedrich, Caspar David. "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." 1818
Oil on canvas. Kunsthalle Hamberg, Germany.

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
--Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays

"Context is all."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

An incalculable number of decisions, chemical reactions, and chance occurrences has  lead you and I to where we are today. To think that we are somehow divorced from all the tendrils and strings that make the world the way it is, that we are somehow individual, atomized, unique, is to have a narrow and honestly less full life experience. As a teacher candidate and future Social Studies teacher, I hope to help my students see the way they are connected to the past, present, and future, not only of Canada, but of the entire world. Sounds ambitious, but I think a healthy dose of idealism keeps my standards high and my mind active. 

As a student, teacher, and lover of literature, I understand perhaps better than some how essential it is to gain proper context. We are all products of our histories and in order to conduct a rigorous analysis of a text, one must have a proper understanding of the time and place in which it was crafted. Let's use Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal as an example. To properly understand what is at work in this text, it is important to have a basic idea of satire, if you knew it was Juvenalian satire, even better. It would also be useful to know a bit about English discrimination and attitudes towards both the Irish and the poor in general in the 18th century. Finally, understanding that the moral philosophy of utilitarianism was popular at the time Swift was writing would make his arguments that much more entertaining, as he uses much of the same reasoning as our good friend Jeremy Bentham, but uses that logic to argue that eating children is a viable solution to poverty. Without that background, a reader might think that Swift was a baby-eating villain, but with that knowledge, it is clear he's quite clever and rather funny. Beyond pure enjoyment, a reader can now also make connections to modern day, looking at the use of current satire, or the politics and policies surrounding poverty, the list goes on. 

I look forward to sharing my thoughts and what I'm going to learn in the coming weeks about teaching Social Studies. The idea of Inquiry-based Learning that the Ontario curriculum focuses on is of particular interest to me. Much better than just reading a textbook and answering questions like I did when I was in school.