The Conversation: Social studies as ‘neutral?’ That’s a myth, and pressures teachers to avoid contentious issues

As written in The Conversation by Kevin Lopuck, PhD candidate, Faculty of Education. 

With a world literally and figuratively burning around them, high school social studies teachers are charged with engaging students in sensitive topics.

Social studies curricula today, for example, is concerned with themes like residential schools and racism. It’s also important to understand that beyond following explicit pre-set curricula, student-centred education calls for teachers to attend to students’ experiences in the social world.

This means making space for students’ observations or questions about current events like the ICE raids in Minnesota and inquiring into how unfolding events fit into larger social and historical patterns or themes. These conversations are a legitimate and everyday part of many social studies classrooms.

Social studies education demands sustained engagement with difficult knowledge and a heightened sense of obligation to both students and society, even as neoliberal and neoconservative pressures call for a stance of neutrality, which is neither possible nor desirable.

Read the full story at The Conversation.