Curriculum: Social Studies

Its Special Role as the Core Curriculum

Lucy Sprague Mitchell believed that rich, but unified, educative, experiences were necessary for learning, and that the ideal context for this approach was a geographical study. For Mitchell, it was within the study of geography, what people do to the earth and what the earth does to people, that all the arts and sciences met. She felt that learning math, literature, and science could be accomplished more effectively by linking them to an active study, for example, of the neighborhood, or of South America, instead of reading and memorizing facts and statistics from a textbook. Children need to use facts, not merely repeat them back.

Today, the School for Children continues to create learning environments that provide children with rich and varied opportunities to study the human and physical world. Their participation in these learning situations creates the contexts from which children make meaning out of human knowledge and experience. While geography is still an essential part of all our studies, we have broadened this center to include cultural anthropology, economics, history, political science, and technology. These six subjects, in conjunction with the arts and sciences, comprise the core of the social studies curricula in the classrooms.

In looking at the social studies program from the youngest to the oldest children, the following themes and concepts recur with increasing complexity:

people and their physical environment;
community, from the family to the world;
continuity, that is, communication from generation to generation through which we build upon and transform the past;
meaning through myth, religion, science, and art;
values, in the systems people develop to structure individual and group behavior;
change as a basic fact of life;
how people solve problems.

Through our work in social studies, we foster children's abilities to think analytically. They develop skills in relationship thinking; problem solving; making generalizations out of details and facts; posing questions; answering questions through research; and integrating the use of skills from other academic areas. Along with their cognitive growth, children develop a sense of caring and social responsibility through their collaborative and independent work.

We include as part of the social studies curriculum what we refer to as implicit social studies¡Ìthe life of the classroom itself. How we organize and manage our classrooms, indeed the whole school, sends a powerful message to children about values and community. The children themselves, from many different cultural and racial backgrounds, family configurations and learning styles, bring to school an infinite array of experiences and knowledge that become a part of this spontaneous, implicit, curriculum. These diverse and complex interactions become resources for our experiments in living democratically and facing issues of social justice. We strive as a school to examine how our organization and current student population can bring us further opportunities for our social studies teaching and learning. This goal is integral for our work with our multicultural and diverse population within the school and in the larger society.

Our classrooms are working and living representations of the scientist's laboratory and the artist's studio. From their observations, experiences, and research, children collect and record scientific data. They make and then discuss hypotheses that will be subjected to further testing and analyses. And as children work with the sensorial materials of art, they can imagine and project themselves into the time and place of the culture being studied. They are integrating and accommodating their own personal feelings and ideas with those experienced in the here and now of families and friends, and from the long ago and far away such as ancient Egypt or Greece, or of present-day Middle East or India.

Not all learning at Bank Street is intentionally linked to all other learning. As children grow intellectually and become reliant on thoughts and words less bound to the evidence of their senses, the possible directions learning can take grows significantly. No single topic can provide enough rich and varied opportunities to acquire skills, concepts, and information in all the disciplines. Working with their division coordinator or with other experts in a particular field, teachers use their expertise and current research to provide basic skills and understandings in a particular discipline. Each teacher takes into consideration what students are studying as well as the developmental tasks and needs of the group. Throughout the grades, children learn concepts and skills that may or may not be tied to a Core study. By the time they reach the 13/14s, students may have as many as seven teachers for Social Studies, Math, Science, Second Language, Art, Music, and Physical Education.

When natural and stimulating opportunities for interdisciplinary projects and activities arise, teachers cooperate to make them happen. Annual examples of these experiences are the Winter Concert and the Science Expo. Art and Music teachers plan curriculum with Core teachers and projects between disciplines occur often. For example, Lower School children studying Riverside Park wrote a song with the Music teacher about what they liked to do in the park; students studying medieval feudalism in Social Studies created puppets in Art that represented the different roles of the people they were studying.

The Social Studies program at Bank Street seeks to provide students with the skills, understandings and knowledge that will enable them to:

find answers to questions;
be curious, involved learners;
understand, appreciate, and relate to the multicultural nature of their school, their country, and the world;
acquire the skills and knowledge they need to function effectively as individuals, as community members, and as citizens;
understand themselves and others;
participate constructively in solving problems and conflicts;
improve the quality of their own lives and the lives of others.