COLLEGE PARK, MD (July, 2014) Was the United States justified in going to war with Mexico in 1846? Did the Alien and Sedition Acts violate the U.S. Constitution? These questions may sound like essay prompts for a college-level course, but according to the Common Core State Standards, these are the sorts of questions students should be asking and writing on in middle and high school history classrooms.
A central concept of Common Core is disciplinary literacy subject-specific reading and writing that requires specialized knowledge. An excellent way to nurture this literacy is argumentative writing, where students analyze evidence, form a defensible viewpoint, and seek to convince a reader of that viewpoint. Such work has traditionally received little attention outside advanced placement classrooms, so middle school social studies teachers now face the challenge of crafting lessons around writing assignments as they adapt curricula. Dr. Susan De La Paz, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education, is helping history teachers meet this challenge with her new book from Teachers College Press, Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History: Teaching Argument Writing to Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6-12.
The book, which De La Paz co-authored alongside Dr. Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Michigan (formerly a faculty member here at the College of Education) and Dr. Mark Felton of San José State University in California, is the result of a three-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institution of Education Sciences. De La Paz, Monte-Sano, and Felton utilized the College's unique partnership with Prince George's County Public Schools to work with teachers on developing a curriculum that integrates reading and writing skills in the history and social studies classroom.
Recent articles in the Journal of Curriculum Studies and Theory & Research in Social Education have enunciated the authors' findings on the challenges and effects of disciplinary literacy. Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History, however, is a practical curriculum guide. Directed at helping teachers form a "cognitive apprenticeship" with their students, the curriculum stresses teacher modeling, whereby the "invisible" thinking and literacy processes that contribute to historical expertise are made visible to students. To help teachers model these processes, it introduces pedagogical tools that structure historical literacy practices around intriguing essay questions such as the ones above.
"Historical writing is more than mastering a set of rhetorical skills. It is a way of thinking about what ideas are most worthy of our belief," writes Stanford University education professor Sam Wineburg in the book's foreword. "In our networked society, where conflicting information bombards us from all sides, learning the skills of historical argumentation will not only make your students better writers. It will make them more thoughtful and discerning citizens."
The authors and the press are donating copies of the book to Prince George's County Public Schools in gratitude for the productive collaboration. The twenty-nine middle schools in the Prince George's system will each receive two copies for faculty use, and two students who contributed schoolwork to the book, Tamia Wren and Aaron Boston, will also receive copies.
Dr. Susan De La Paz is an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education. Her research focuses especially on adolescents with learning disabilities, and she has worked for fifteen years with middle and high school teachers, developing writing and history curriculum interventions for students with diverse academic abilities.
Click here to visit the book's page at Amazon.com.
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