In 1990, the American Social History Project at New York's Hunter College produced what at the time was viewed as a groundbreaking multimedia CD entitled Who Built America?. The resource offered a social history of the United States from 1876 and 1914 in a highly visual, nonlinear format that provided a uniquely new way to organize and present social studies subject matter. Teachers used resources such as Who Built America? (and similar Laser Disc based social studies materials) as supplements to traditional textbooks, but rarely broke free of the teacher-centered pedagogies that these resources supported. In fact, the recent history of technology use in social studies might be read as a reinforcing traditional teacher-centered pedagogies (e.g. PowerPoint, LCD projectors, and interactive smart boards – all typically utilized in whole-class teacher-centered instruction). Although these technologies were integrated into social studies teaching, there use did not emerge as a result of any transactional or systematic engagement by educators between knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology. Instead, we might suggest that much of the social studies technology integration that occurred in the early days of personal computing took pedagogy for granted.
The theory of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPaCK) suggests that considerations of content, technological, and pedagogy are central to the meaningful use of technology education. The following two descriptions of technology use in social studies are situated in content and pedagogical considerations and are offered as exemplars of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPaCK)
Digital history is one of the premier examples of TPaCK in the social studies. “Digital history is the study of the past using a variety of electronically reproduced primary source texts, images, and artifacts as well as the constructed historical narratives, accounts, or presentations that result from digital historical inquiry” (Lee, 2002, p. 504). Digital history involves the use of historical resources from previously inaccessible collections that are organized in idiosyncratic digital formats. These resources are reflective of the multimedia capacity of the Web as well as the presentational capabilities of new technologies for telling and retelling stories about the past using authentic digital historical resources. What makes digital history unique is the way in which work in this area can meet teachers’ pedagogical needs for creating and sharing representations of knowledge. Learners working in the area of digital history are typically asked to construct their own knowledge using authentic resources. Such work emerges from what Doolittle and Hicks, (2003) describe as constructivist approaches to teaching and learning social studies that are capable of generating authenticity in the history classroom, allowing students to pursue ideas of personal interest while building on prior knowledge in autonomous, creative, and intellectual environments. Work in digital history involves students generating questions that lead to the analysis of authentic historical resources on the Web. Technologies that enable students to create and share their findings further encourages digital historical work as socially relevant or even public forms of historical interpretations. Archival resources such as American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov) enable digital history inquiries, while social resources such as Voice Thread (http://voicethread.com) and Flickr (http://filkr.com) enable students to present and share their work in a variety of social context.
Digital history example – One example of a teacher applying TPaCK in a classroom setting can be found in the work of Guy Clarke in Cherokee County. Students in Guy’s high school history class collected and digitized images and related information about historical properties in their home area. The students worked with their teacher and pre-service teachers in an education program at Georgia State University to create a digital archive of these properties. In addition, each student was required to construct a written interpretation of their work on one of these properties (for more on this project see Clarke & Lee, 2004). The digital archive is currently available online at http://www.rockbarn.org/resources.php (see Cherokee County Digital History Project).
Similar to history, geography-related TPaCK has emerged in recent years as an alternative to the pedagogical thinking that supports traditional teacher-centered social studies instruction. These approaches to geography teaching and learning includes the TPaCK notion of digital geospatial inquiry. Such approaches to geography, as with digital history, are student-centered and constructivist oriented. Technologies such as Google Earth enable students to interact with spatial information in new and creative ways. In fact, we might argue that these technologies are changing the way we understanding spatial information, providing new perspectives on spatial information and enabling new ways for creating and sharing content that are less centralized and more authentic, democratic, and emergent. The following example outlines an a specific approach to using spatial technologies at the middle school level.
Digital geospatial inquiry example – One powerful approach to inquiring about the spatial dimensions of the world around is geocaching (see McFedries, 2007 for a general description of geocaching). In this example, students used global positioning systems (GPS) devices to locate physical items in an historical location. A series of clues were provide for students as part of a larger inquiry related to the history of a place. The GPS device were used by students to navigate to a location where historical and other social studies information relevant to the inquiry could be found. This example of geocaching involved middle school students in Raleigh North Carolina using GPS devices to navigate through downtown Raleigh collecting historical information about African American history in Raleigh. Students navigated to three specific locations in order to locate three separate resources sets related to a general inquiry question about the history of Civil Rights Movement activities in Raleigh. Resources included a set of images related to the historic St. Paul AME church, newspaper articles about a Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in on Fayetteville street in downtown Raleigh, and documents related to the founding of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University, also in downtown Raleigh.
These two examples of TPaCK emerged from a close consideration of how technologies can support specific content and pedagogical aims. In both examples, a constructivist pedagogical approach framed the uses of technology and specific content needs drove the application of technologies to learning situations. As new technologies continue to provide intriguing opportunities in social studies, serious consideration about how these technologies meet the content and pedagogical needs of teachers and learners should be at the forefront.
References
Clarke, W. G. & Lee, J. K. (2004). The promise of digital history. The Clearing House 78(2), 84-87.
Lee, J.K. (2002). Digital history in the history/social studies classroom, The History Teacher 35(4), pp. 503–518.
McFedries, P. (2007). The new geographers. IEEE Spectrum, 44(12), p96-96
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