Social Studies for the Twenty-First Century: Methods and Materials for Teaching in Middle and Secondary Schools - Hardcover

Social Studies for the Twenty-First Century, Second Edition offers practical, interesting, and exciting ways to teach social studies. Its reflective and integrative framework emphasizes building imagination, insight, and critical thinking into everyday secondary classrooms.

Like the popular first edition, this thoroughly revised and updated edition offers an overall framework to guide teachers in setting objectives, devising lessons, and choosing classroom strategies, as well as assistance in constructing tests, and planning lessons, units, and courses for some of the field's most popular and enduring programs. Throughout the text, all aspects of curriculum and instruction are viewed from a tripartite perspective that divides social studies instruction into didactic (factual), reflective (analytical), and affective (judgmental) components. These three components are seen as supporting one another rather than acting in opposition.

At the center of this text is the author's belief that the heart and soul of social studies instruction, perhaps all teaching, lies in stimulating the production of ideas; looking at knowledge from others' viewpoints; and formulating for oneself a set of goals, values, and beliefs that can be explained and justified in open discussion.

Features of the text:
* weaves theory, curriculum, methods, and assessment into a comprehensive model for social studies instruction,
* offers a practical, hands-on approach to lesson planning and curriculum design that features data, documents, and visuals teachers can try out with their students,
* encourages problem-solving attitudes and behavior and provokes analysis, critical thinking, reflection, and debate,
* uses a personal approach to teaching in a reflective framework, with a minimum of educational jargon and polemicizing, and
* includes separate chapters on teaching each of the major areas of the social studies curriculum.

New in the second edition:
* two completely new chapters on using all sorts of media--from print and photography to computer games and the World Wide Web--to supplement and enrich the social studies classroom,
* new material in the chapter on evaluation on using authentic assessment and student portfolios,
* discussion of the standards movement, with examples from major new guidelines, and
* new examples and response 'boxes' throughout and an extensive, updated, and reorganized bibliography of agencies and resources for the social studies, including internet and e-mail addresses where available.