Chapter Eight SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION IN SCHOOL

There are three authors to this chapter. We are interconnected in this story because of our involvement with Social Studies Methods instruction (SSED) for the CITE Teacher Education Cohort at UBC. We are all involved in the practicum supervision as well. The seed from which SSED grew was collaboration on research for a doctoral dissertation (Collins, 2002). Dot was the teacher of a grade 1/2 classroom in search of a respectful, democratic approach to her primary classes. Steve was a graduate student with a 15year history of exploring democracy in schools as a teacher and now as a researcher. In the course of qualitative action research, Complexity Theory emerged as an important lens in understanding the often cloudy and confusing school environment. We noticed the irony of hosting an unpredictable, dynamic, “living system” within a reductionist structure of grades, categories, labels, hierarchies, and other cube-shaped containers for small people. This reductionism is further evident when we educate new teachers at university. We physically separate their instruction in how to teach from the context in which teaching actually takes place. Clearly, we are not referring to the practicum which is an example of the necessity of context in learning, especially something as complex as teaching. Rather, we are referring to methods courses, and in this case, the instruction of social studies methods. Steve successfully defended the dissertation that was born in Dot’s classroom. With an appreciation of the complex, living, adaptive, dynamic nature of the social system referred to as a primary classroom, he began to teach Social Studies Methods at the University of British Columbia as a parttime instructor. As stated, the first term of SSED is normally separate from the context in which the principles studied are applied. However, there is a rich social context for social studies exploration at the university. For