In a webinar, Associate Professor Bronwyn Wood of Victoria University Wellington explored concept-led teaching, one of the most well-established approaches to teaching social studies since the 1960s. Using contemporary social issues, she illustrated some effective ways to design your social studies teaching and learning. Key insights from the webinar include:
New Zealand’s social studies curriculum was based on the work of Estonian-American scholar Hilda Taba in the 1960s and 1970s. She argued that social studies should be based around three main areas:
- key concepts such as cultural change and power
- organising ideas or conceptual understandings, chosen based on their significance, explanatory power, appropriateness, durability, and balance.
- specific facts, to be learned through case studies
Hilda Taba describes concepts as words which represent highly abstract generalisations, while scholars Erickson & Lanning describe them as mental constructs that are timeless and universal. Concepts can and should be re-visited multiple times in order for students to understand them and appreciate their complexity. The goal is to provide richness and depth of learning for students.
The goals of social studies teaching are to help students to understand the world, and to equip students to be effective citizens of the world. These goals endure across all iterations of the curriculum, and concept-led teaching is a powerful and effective means by which to achieve these goals: it is what social studies is all about. The dichotomies that tend to dominate curriculum reform, such as the ‘knowledge versus skills’ or ‘teacher-led versus student-led’ debates are reflective of political ideologies and fail to acknowledge the complexity of teaching and learning. By contrast, concept-led teaching lends itself to increasingly abstract and complex teaching and learning.
It can be difficult to measure students’ progress in social studies, because it tends not to have fixed content that can be learned and demonstrated, but rather is agile and changes over time. However, it is possible to show progression in working with concepts. In the primary school years, students may begin by learning to define concepts, and then move on to defining and explaining them. At intermediate school, students learn to and can demonstrate their ability to make connections between concepts. By secondary school, they will be able to use conceptual understandings to develop generalisations, and to explain their understanding that ideas are contested.
You can also view the slides from Bronwyn’s presentation here.
