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

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.

Jack, a product of Chicago public education, began his professional career after graduating from the University of Chicago by teaching high school in the Chicago Public Schools. He was awarded an NDEA Defense Education Fellowship for a doctoral program at the University of Michigan, which he completed while teaching public junior high school in Ann Arbor. At this time, Jack co-authored his first book with his mentor, Professor Byron Massialas, titled "Creative Encounters in the Classroom", which expressed the inquiry philosophy that he has followed in some form for his entire professorial career. Jack also served as a field teacher for many of the 'New Social Studies' projects including the Anthropology Curriculum Study, Sociological Resources for the Secondary Schools, and High School Geography Project, as well as other social science based curricula. After receiving his Ph.D., Jack married Iris, and accepted his first and only professorial position in social studies education at Queens College, New York, where he still is today, many articles, books, students, promotions, conflicts, accomplishments, and children later. During his years at Queens College, Jack has been very active in many roles, most particularly as a grant writer and project director of programs in geography, sociology, economics, and philosophy for children, all supported by grants from agencies like the NSF, NEH, and NCEE. His longest lasting product and favorite book isSocial Studies for the Twenty-First Century,which Jack wrote for and with his methods students, who desperately, in his view, needed a deeper and more engaging book than any he could assign at the time of its inception. Currently, he is teaching undergraduate methods, as well as a new course on strategies for teaching world history, "Teaching the World", a passion of his, and is working on several new books, one on Elementary Social Studies methods (with Lynne Boyle-Baise), and a sequel to "Teaching U.S. History as Mystery" (with David Gerwin). He is also working on a research project identifying and analyzing the historical and geographical "mental maps" of methods students, and is directing a Teaching American History grant for Regions 3 and 4 in New York. Jack has a great love for travel, especially to archeological sites, and is an avid reader of all kinds of literature, history, and social science, and is willing to argue almost any topic over a really good, strong cup of latte.