Science, Technology, and Society
Social Studies teachers should possess the knowledge, capabilities, and dispositions to organize and provide instruction at the appropriate school level for the study of Science, Technology, and Society.
In my opinion this theme is one of the most difficult to include in history and social sciences, especially in Government. This was the only theme that I had to really plan to use. I was required to use all ten themes in my internship, and while I kept all the themes in mind as I planned, this was the only theme I had to specifically incorporate. The other nine came up naturally during the internship however with three weeks left I had not utilized Science, Technology, and Society. Knowing I had to I decided to design a lesson that ignored politics but instead looked at media and the proper uses of technology to promote a candidate.
In this lesson we looked at the website Living Room Candidate. The lesson served many different functions. The first of these functions was an introduction to a project that I had students do going into my last few weeks teaching. The students were required to create their own political campaign ad, based on the criterion of emotion, persuasion, truth, and style. In the lesson we looked at many different presidential campaign ads that and evaluated them on the afore mentioned criterion. It also served as a great look at the relationship between the media and political parties. In the VA SOL
Framework, political parties are mentioned as having the role of raising funds and running campaigns. This was a great investigation into how the political parties spend the money they raise to run campaigns. Lastly, this lesson served as a great example of how technology has changed over time, as well as how society can dictate the style and message of an ad. We first talked about society, and we defined it as the audience. We looked at a Nixon ad that was very bland and full of facts. We decided that this was an example of a campaign trying to reach a more conservative and serious audience. Directly following we looked at an ad called, “Yes We Can”. This ad was run by President Obama and can be viewed on the right. We noticed it was longer and learned it was meant for the Internet not the television. It was also meant for a much younger audience. This ad, by itself was a great example of the changing technology around us. Over the next twenty ads we discussed how the ads have been getting better and better. I was truly impressed with how the students were able to put their personal feelings aside and simply look at the relationship between
technology and society. I had conservative
students raving about the Obama ad and liberal students laughing and talking about how effective the Bush ad seen to the left was. This was the example that I used to stress what I wanted the students to do in their project.
Overall I thought this was one of my best lessons because even though I thought it would be forced, it was the perfect crossroads lesson. I think it is so important to make an instructional sequence a progression. Students should be able to see connections from one day to the next and I believe this is a perfect example of how I incorporate this into my teaching. Technology is one thing that is so important to history, but not other genres as much. If teaching history I will have no problem incorporating Science, Technology, and Society, however, with other social sciences, this is another theme that I will include in my lesson plan cheat sheet.