Into the Black

One of the major problems that social studies teachers often encounter in the classroom is the students’ lack of reading comprehension skills. Many students, regardless of grade level, are hard put to digest the meaning of texts that they are reading. This is a serious obstacle to the students’ understanding of concepts and skills in social studies (especially skills specific to the discipline),  inasmuch as many instructional materials in social studies are in textual form.  For this reason, social studies teachers must come up with a viable strategy to integrate the teaching of reading comprehension skills in their lessons. A Reading Teacher journal article, How to Teach Expository Text Structure to Facilitate Reading Comprehension by Masoumeh Akhondi, Faramarz Aziz Malayeri, and Arshad Abd Samad, discusses one such strategy, and this involves the teaching of the different text structures to students.  Said strategy is premised on the idea that there is a connection bet...

Filipinos have always been known for placing a high premium on education. One does not need to be an anthropologist to know that. If one only bothers to cast a cursory glance at the facade of his neighbors' houses, one would instantly notice a common sight: a metal or wooden plate indicating that a son or daughter has made the grade by becoming a physician, an attorney-at-law, or an engineer. The Filipino attitude towards education can also be gleaned from the high respect accorded to people with long strings of suffixes attached to their names (MA, Ed.D., Ph.D, etc.). We believe that the achievements embodied in those suffixes make their owners a cut above other mortals. That is why, in addressing them in correspondences, or in introducing them during formal functions, omission of those suffixes is considered a horrible mistake.   This "fetish" for education or its trappings, however, is quite understandable. In a country where poverty is rampant, and manual labor is loo...

    One of the most difficult challenges faced by social studies teachers in the elementary and secondary level is how to enable their students to grasp concepts and big ideas that are essential to the latter’s development as good citizens. Unable to surmount this difficulty, many teachers have been tempted to take the path of least resistance, which is to deliver content through traditional methods of instruction, e.g. lecture. On the other hand, some well-meaning teachers try to employ methods that allow for student participation in the class. A closer look, however, would reveal that for these teachers, student participation consists of nothing more than asking students to read or listen to questions, scan books or modules provided by the school, and draw answers from these modules or books. No provision is made to enable students to form their own understanding of the concepts or principles being taught. This problem could be mitigated by contextualizing social studies...