History Nerdfest 2018: Fostering Civil Dialogue

It ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to live blog my way through it.

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If there’s a theme running through my choose of session this week, this would be it. How can we encourage and support conversations around controversial topics? How can we tie current events to broader topics and past events without . . . you know, setting stuff on fire and throwing desks?

First session of the day is a focus on that issue. The Newseum and the Religious Freedom Center are part of the larger Freedom Forum Institute. The Institute concentrates on the first five constitutional Amendments and this morning, Ben and Jessi are walking us through how we can protect the Amendments through civil conversations.

And full transparency . . . I’m a Newseum fanboy. Their @NewseumEd stuff is phenomenal. So start there and then come back here.

Informed and respectful are the buzzwords for this morning – with a specific focus on religious freedom and the First Amendment. A problem that Jessi points out is that most students have no idea of what the First Amendment protects and what rights it ensures.

Ben points out the two parts of the Amendment’s free exercise and free establishment clauses. Public school teachers are required, by the establishment clause, to remain neutral around the topic of religion. Private school teachers are governed by the free exercise clause. But it still all comes down to teaching religion or teaching about religion. There’s a difference. What is allowed?

So . . . how can we facilitate civil discourse around religion (and other topics)?

History Nerdfest 2018: Helping Teachers Embrace Controversial Issues

I love the National Council for the Social Studies national conference. Who doesn’t? Seriously. Thousands of social studies nerds all in one place? Talking about best practice, resources, tech tools, sharing ideas, getting smarter?

What’s not to like?

And it kicks off today. We’re all in Chicago for the next four days and it’s awesome.I can sit down and immediately get sucked into a conversation about the best way to use maps as a hook activity or how to use the latest Library of Congress mobile app or where I can find the best primary sources for AP World History. And that’s considered normal behavior.

These are my people.

Thursday is really just a warm-up day. The official NCSS conference jumps off tomorrow. Today is tours, pre-cons, half day workshops, and the National Social Studies Supervisors Association conference. I get the chance to spend all day with NSSSA folks learning more about working specifically with teachers.

But like every year at NCSS, I’ll try to live post most of the sessions I’m in. So there’s gonna be typos and weird grammar and strange paragraphs. I’ll try to fix them later. But feel free to follow along.

And right out of the gate,

Creating active, engaged, civil, informed, educated, & competent citizens (Free infographic included!)

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? I mean . . . active, engaged, civil, informed, educated, and competent. That’s a mouthful. And do we seriously need to kids who exhibit ALL of those traits? Can’t we just be happy with educated? I lecture, students take some notes, I grade a quiz. Boom, done. Everybody’s happy,

Mmm . . . yeah, not so much. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but no. Educated is not enough. A quote often attributed to Haim Ginott makes clear the importance of teaching more than the three Rs:

“I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness; Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So, I am suspicious of education.

My request – help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.“

I’m not comparing the situations most of us find ourselves in to the world of 1930s and 1040s Nazi Germany. Clearly not the same.

But I do think we’ve failed to focus on skills that our K-12 kids need to support a vibrant, inclusive, open, accessible, and empathetic democracy. Too often we concentrate on producing great test takers but not on creating citizens that can listen to others, evaluate arguments, use evidence to make claims, and respect differing viewpoints. Citizens who can exchange honest, well-reasoned views on controversial topics. Citizens who see the value of diversity, of openness to others, of being part of something bigger than themselves.

All skills that can help tranform our kids into people that other people like having around.

But finding ways to balance the 3Rs and citizenship skills can be hard. That kind of instruction requires more than lecture, notes, and a quiz on Friday.

A major first step in the process is to actually decide that teaching these skills is important. Kansas has stepped up and defined a successful high school graduate as having:

Prepping kids for a complex world

Last May, I pushed this out. It still seems relevant. So . . . today? A #mondaymemory post. Enjoy!

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Need a brain break? Ready for some current event / world culture / global literacy questions?

Here ya go. Six basic questions covering events of the day and an awareness of the world around you. (Check your work at the bottom of the post.)

1. In which of these countries is a majority of the population Muslim?
a. South Africa
b. Armenia
c. India
d. Indonesia

2. Which language is spoken by the most people in the world as their primary language?
a. Russian
b. Mandarin Chinese
c. English
d. Arabic

3. Which country is the largest trading partner of the United States, based on the total dollar value of goods and services?
a. Canada
b. China
c. Mexico
d. Saudi Arabia

4. Approximately what percentage of the United States federal budget is spent on foreign aid?
a. 1 percent
b. 5 percent
c. 12 percent
d. 30 percent
e. 40 percent

5. Which countries is the United States bound by treaty to protect if they are attacked? (select all that apply)
a. Canada
b. China
c. Japan
d. Mexico
e. North Korea
f. Russia
g. South Korea
h. Turkey

6. True or False
Over the past five years, the number of Mexicans leaving the United States and returning to Mexico has been greater than the number of Mexicans entering the United States.

Mary Beth Tinker, civic engagement, INspired leadership = epic win

How often do you get the chance to shake hands with a Supreme Court icon? Someone who has their name on a landmark case that’s in all the textbooks?

That’s right. Not. Very. Often.

But today was the day. Mary Beth Tinker, yes . . . THAT Mary Beth Tinker. The Mary Beth Tinker of the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District Supreme Court case was in Topeka speaking with teachers and students at the KSDE #KSCivics civic engagement conference.

And along with about 350 others, I got the chance to meet and then listen to Mary Beth share her thoughts on the events of 1965 and connect those events to contemporary issues. So cool!

But I also got the chance

Tip of the Week: Bias, civic literacy, and historical thinking skills

Back when my youngest was in fourth grade, I asked her to preview the very cool You Are the Historian website. It’s an interactive tool that asks elementary kids to use historical thinking skills while addressing the site’s guiding question: What really happened at the first Thanksgiving?

The site led her through primary sources, to video clips of colonial historians, and to the exploration of different artifacts. After she was finished, I asked her what she learned by “playing” the game:

The past is what really happened. History is what we say happened.

I couldn’t have been prouder. That’s exactly what I hoped to hear. (And good job, BTW, You Are the Historian creators.)

History is our interpretation of evidence.

We have a problem. We look at evidence. And we figure it out. But I’m not always sure that we’re teaching our kids how to do that very well. Part of the problem is bias. We don’t always make it clear enough that everything we have our kids use to solve the problems we give them is biased.

And just as there is no such thing as unbiased primary evidence, there is no such thing as unbiased secondary evidence. All news, photos, media sites, books – it’s all biased.

Need a few examples?