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With increased curricular and classroom demands, teaching social studies content and skills can be challenging, especially in elementary schools. Although educators are encouraged to promote critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving, classroom time is increasingly spent preparing students to pass state-mandated tests that emphasize factual recall. This article highlights the importance of self-study through the praxis of one teacher educator. To address the shifting instructional and professional demands, she modified and updated an elementary social studies methods course over a five-year period. Through analysis of documents, observations, and students’ feedback, the methods course and student learning outcomes changed significantly over time. This article addresses the need for social studies teacher educators to re-evaluate their own praxis, as some existing teacher education program models and course programs do not address today’s changing teaching and learning climates. Deliberate self-study, coupled with professional collaborations across school and university boundaries, can be key steps to improve learning outcomes for all.

In an effort to counter the effects of the reduction of social studies instruction that has resulted from the pressure to increase test scores in reading and mathematics, many educators promote the idea of integrating the curriculum. For many modern elementary teachers, integrating the curriculum has become a means for infusing social studies content in the curriculum while maintaining the focus on teaching reading and language arts skills. This practice of teaching social studies or other content areas while maintaining a focus on reading differs widely from the original purpose of curriculum integration. The following article asserts that the true purpose of integrating the curriculum has been to create children who will be able to use the disciplines to advance democratic thought and life. They will be able to fully integrate the disciplines into their own thinking processes in order to confront issues and problems in a democratic society. This article explores notions of curriculum integration throughout history and examines the ways in which teachers attempt to integrate the curriculum in schools today.

Research has shown that middle and high school students, historically, have had a less than favorable opinion of social studies instruction (Hobbs & Moroz, 2001), a situation widely attributed to teacher reliance on textbooks, lectures, and worksheets (Protano, 2003). Today, this problem is exacerbated as teachers are faced with students from a Media Generation who have grown up with “cell phones that have grown to include video game platforms, e-mail devices, digital cameras, and Internet connections” (Rideout, Roberts, & Foehr, 2005, p. 4). Recent studies, however, have found that student attitudes toward, and interest in, social studies can be greatly influenced by knowledgeable, passionate teachers who include them as active participants in the learning process through lively discussions and thought provoking activities (Alazzi, 2007; Chiodo & Byford, 2004). Teachers can further enhance this instruction by using the Internet to connect students to a wealth of authentic print, audio, and video resources (McGlinn, 2007). For students of the Media Generation, effective social studies teachers are those who foster inquiring minds and employ the tools that allow history to come to life in their classrooms.

Given the resurgence of Americans’ interest in the national electoral process and civic issues, social studies educators have a unique opportunity to highlight citizenship education and related activities in K-12 teacher preparation programs. Especially at the elementary level, educators can support pre-service teachers’ mastery of civics content, skills, and critical thinking strategies with experiential, as well as classroom, based learning. This article describes how two educators integrated a field experience component into an elementary social studies methods course to increase students’ civic knowledge and model standards-based curriculum planning. Collaboration with local experts provided opportunities for preservice teachers to start a learning community outside of the classroom, connecting course instruction to real-life civic issues.

Increasing reading achievement has become a nationwide priority resulting from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2005 (Dole, 2004). Due to this emphasis, coupled with the fact that an elementary school’s success is generally not correlated with test scores in social studies, teachers of the elementary grades find limited time to teach the social studies curriculum. However, in effort to combat this tragedy, elementary educators should be taught and encouraged to integrate content area teaching with literacy strategies. Using the appropriate.

Using morning meeting, an evidence-based practice that is part of the responsive classroom (RC) approach, the authors (two teacher educators [TEs]) created opportunities for teacher candidates (TCs) to experience representations, decompositions and approximations of practice in multiple iterations of an elementary social studies methods course.

The authors detail how TEs can expose TCs to social studies content (e.g. the National Council for the Social Studies themes) that can be incorporated into structured, daily classroom routines, such as morning meeting.

The authors include TE-created morning meeting facilitation guides with components such as a morning message, greeting, share, group activity and theme justification. Furthermore, the authors outline TCs' reflections on planning and implementing a morning meeting with a partner in addition to their own reflections on the TCs' feedback.

This work has implications related to TEs and TCs in elementary social studies methods courses as well as current and future students in elementary classrooms.