Jane K. Doty, Gregory N. Cameron, and Mary Lee Barton, Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL)
2003
This manual, published by McREL, one of the ten federally-funded regional education labs, is designed to help social studies teachers teach their students the reading skills required to understand social studies texts. Unfortunately, it's grounded in an extremely narrow - and, to our eye, erroneous - set of assumptions about the subject itself: "The study of social studies is much more than memorizing historical facts; geographical statistics; or government, civic, and economic terminology. It is really about problem solving, decision making, reflective inquiry, and critical thinking." The authors even assert that memorizing facts can impede comprehension, because rote memory "stores isolated facts and skills that are unrelated to actual experience" and "probably interferes with the development of understanding." Building on this foundation of conjecture and nonsense, the rest of the text encourages teachers to focus on critical thinking and reading skills that help the student relate everything they read to their everyday lives rather than to impart essential content knowledge that could lay the groundwork for future learning. The Gadfly hasn't enough space to itemize all the curricular and pedagogical folly in this woeful manual, but stay tuned: the Fordham Foundation will soon release a book, Where did Social Studies Go Wrong?, that penetrates to the core of the problems facing this troubled field. Meanwhile, if you want to see an example of those problems, track down the McREL report at http://www.mcrel.org/topics/productDetail.asp?productID=140#.
