Power, Authority, and Governance
6) Social Studies teachers should possess the knowledge, capabilities, and dispositions to organize and provide instruction at the appropriate school level for the study of Power, Authority, and Governance.
This theme was a no brainer in my classroom. As I talked about in some of my other reflections, there are certain themes that are closely tied with certain genres of Social Science. Power, Authority, and Governance is very closely correlates with Government. Basically they are the same thing. Throughout my internship there was one question that I kept continually asking, no matter what we were discussing; what is government about? The answer I was looking for every time was power. Government is about a struggle between groups for a greater share of power. My emphasis on this shows a strong correlation to the theme.
On the first day of my semester I designed a role-play to investigate who had the power in the British system of government. The answer of course was the king. From this point forward in the class we talked about the power of the legislative branch, everything was related to power. We looked at the distribution of power and then went into specific powers. I designed a great lesson on the Congressional powers. I asked students to develop a list of the powers that they would give to a mythical legislature. This was meant to be a fun little exercise to get the students’ minds going but they actually gave some really good responses. A few groups even included an elastic clause. From this point the students paired up and were assigned two clauses. They were told to look at each clause and paraphrase into one or two words. I then wrote all the powers on the board and as a class we grouped them and put them into a FRAME. We also looked into the implied powers and included some of these in the FRAME. We discussed how through the elastic clause Congress has been attempting to expand its power ever since the drafting of the Constitution. We decided that for the most party they have done a very good job until recently.
After the powers lesson we moved onto other small unofficial groups that attempt to grab power. In this unit there were no particular lessons that show Power, Authority, and Governance more than any other. The theme as a whole is truly entwined in every lesson. The goal of political parties for examples is to receive more votes than the other to gain power. One of the many examples that I could use for this reflection was a slot note lesson. In this lesson I taught the students about the different functions and roles of political parties and was sure to remind students that each role, each function was designed to increase the power of the individual political party. It is all about power.