"If you're not from California...": Creatively integrating social studies and literacy with effective pedagogy

Social Studies Review, Fall 2002 by Gallavan, Nancy P

Special Interest

Teaching social studies education methods courses to pre-service teachers encompasses many different goals and challenges connecting social studies content with effective pedagogy meaningful within today's socio-cultural context. Pre-service teachers bring a wide range of personal prior knowledge, skills, and experiences related to the social sciences as well as elementary school environments. And, just like most preservice teachers, the curricular expectations of the course exceed the allotted instructional time. Therefore, modeling powerful reading and writing response strategies that integrate social studies content and pedagogy provide ideal opportunities for pre-service teachers to participate actively in authentic student-centered conversations.

Recently I spent an academic year on a Faculty Development Leave from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to pursue several different educational endeavors including teaching social studies methods courses at California State University, San Marcos. Naturally, this course emphasizes the California History-Social Science Framework and its supporting literacies. To develop an understanding of Geographic Literacy, I designed one lesson featuring California geography. During this particular lesson, the pre-service teachers would access three supplementary texts: The California History-Social Science Standards; Pages of the Past: Literature Aligned to California History-- Social Science Standards for Grades K-6; and the California Atlas: A Geographic Journey.

The lesson began by my dividing a class of 20 pre-service teachers into four cooperative learning groups placing five people in each group. Each group was given a set of five index cards with information printed on each card. Each pre-service teacher drew a card determining which role for which they would be responsible during our upcoming cooperative learning group learning experience. The five roles included: task monitor (ensures that the group stays on task), people manager (ensures that everyone is provided an equal opportunity to participate), supplier/time-keeper (ensures that the group has all supplies and completes the task within the given timeframe), scribe (records all ideas and the final composition), and reader (shares the written composition orally within the group and to the entire class).

The suppliers provided their groups with large sheets of paper, markers, and a copy of the same book: 'If you're not from the prairie..." by David Bouchard from a central supply table. As I read the entire book aloud to the pre-service teachers, they silently followed along in their group copies. This book consists of one long poem written in eight stanzas reflecting upon life in the prairie describing the land, weather, and people. This charming poem details the physical and human geography through both cognitive and affective domains with a strong use of expressive adjectives, sensory verbs, and colorful illustrations.

As a class, the pre-service teachers and I reviewed the text, identified the various characteristics of physical and human geography incorporated into the book, and listed them on the board. Each cooperative learning group selected one geographic characteristic and was instructed to compose a stanza of poetry describing California's geography replicating the pattern and meter presented in the book. Cooperative learning groups were guided in referencing the Geographic Literacy section of the California History-Social Science Framework for vocabulary, the literacy strategies section of Pages of the Past for literary responses and analyses suggestions, and the California Atlas for relevant geographic information. After an hour of writing within their groups, the poems were shared with the whole class.

This student-centered lesson modeled an effective strategy for creatively integrating social studies and literacy meaningful to today's socio-cultural context. The pre-service teachers were amazed at the rich diversity of their descriptive compositions, the wealth of information they could share quickly through their cooperative learning groups, and the ease of both designing and facilitating powerful social studies conversations.

I repeated this lesson with a second class of pre-service teachers with one modification. The second class could not select any of the physical or human geographic characteristics selected in the previous class. Between the two classes, eight stanzas describing different geographic characteristics were combined to construct one book-length poem, which was shared with both classes. Extending from this rewarding experience, the pre-service teachers generated many different lesson plan designs for use in any grade to integrate social studies and literacy effectively.

Two sections of Bouchard's poem about the prairie are presented here followed by the entire text of our poem about California:

If You're Not From the Prairie... by David Bouchard (1995): Aladdin, Simon & Schuster.