CULTURE
1) Social Studies teachers should possess the knowledge, capabilities, and dispositions to organize and provide instruction at the appropriate school level for the study of Culture and Cultural Diversity.
During my spring semester it was difficult to address Culture and Cultural Diversity for the vast majority of the time. I was teaching the legislative branch and participation in government. During the second unit there were some things that I could do with culture, through political parties. However, this was limited to the United States and was linked back to the political spectrum. My main teaching moments for culture came during my fall semester in the middle school. I was able to do a current event each week and through discussions about Syria the students were exposed to a new culture.
At the high school, I was able to teach about what types of peoples tend to lean conservative or liberal. We looked at rural communities and urban communities; and, as a class decided which we thought each was. The students seemed confused and did not seem to understand the cultures or even the definitions of the two political ideologies. They knew Democrat and Republican, but not much more. So, I thought to myself, teaching moment and I designed two lessons to try and hammer my point home. The first of these two dealt with the history of political parties in the US. I was attempting to show how political parties are not set in concrete, like any culture, it is fluid and ever-changing. I was able to teach about the culture surrounding each party through history. The second of the two lessons dealt with the political spectrum. I was astonished to find that nearly all the students did not know that we have a fairly conservative political culture here in the US. I had said that even our liberal Democrats our conservatives, on the world spectrum. By doing this I offended both the conservatives and the liberals in the class, but they could not wrap their heads around the idea so I decided to have a lesson that utilized concept maps for each. I was attempting to show the conservative and liberal cultures elsewhere in the world. We specifically talked about our culture and those of Iran and Sweden. I was very pleased with the results.
I thought I did a fairly good job at addressing the theme of Culture and Cultural Diversity considering my placement. In US Government it is harder to address culture than in say geography. However, I was able to discuss political culture and did use Current Events to talk about culture in the middle school. In my Methods class I also developed a lesson plan (link below) on the three major religions in the world today. It strongly correlates with the NCSS Theme of Culture and Cultural Diversity.
In the fall I was able to give much more explicit examples of culture to the students. While my main objective there was to observe, mirror teach, and become familiar with a classroom, my CT also gave me a chance to teach a Current Event each Wednesday. He did not require a lesson plan so all I have for these lessons, are my PowerPoints which appear on the right side as a video. Right before the second week came around the attacks in Syria happened and I kind of had to do it. I was afraid it would be a little too deep for 7th Graders, but they surprised me. They actually behaved awesome because they were so into what I was saying. Only during our discussion at the end of class did I understand why they were so interested. They had no clue what Islam was. Yes, they knew it was a religion and they knew the basics but as a young teacher, I had talked over their heads and they were impressively trying to catch up. So, a few weeks later when the bus bombing in Russia happened I jumped on the opportunity to teach about Islam and try and debunk a few of the myths that the students had. I quickly introduced the Current Event and jumped right into the basics of Islam with the goal of showing how these radicals are just that, radicals. I talked about Westborough Baptist Church and the IRA as examples of radical Christians. They took very highly to this because they hate WBC. Then we moved into Israel and talked about how this has set fuel to the fire. We talked about how this was an example of cultural diversity in close quarters. I had one student say, “why don’t we just blow them all up, kill all the Muslims.” And I knew I had them, I told the student that this was the point I was trying to make. In the Middle East every culture feels this way about the other cultures in the region and if that mindset could be eradicated then maybe peace could find a way.