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...

For a very long time, history education has been thought of as consisting solely of the teaching of substantive knowledge — facts, concepts, or generalizations that have to do with past events. Students have been taught, for instance, when and where the Spanish colonization of the Philippines began, what colonization means, or how the Spaniards conquered the Philippines. It cannot be denied that knowledge of this type is important for students to acquire. However, the view that history education is nothing more than a repository of this type of knowledge, has been the object of criticisms from social educators over the past two decades. These social educators pointed out that a history education that concerns itself exclusively with teaching substantive content is dismissible as a lightweight subject. For under such education, students’ progress in history education would mean only their accumulation of information about past events, and their ability to regurgitate this informati...

One of the faculty marked assignments  that were given in our graduate studies class involved the conduct of  a brief survey of locally available resources for teaching history. This assignment afforded me an opportunity to improve my competence as a social studies teacher. In particular, I realized the wealth of instructional materials available in our local community that we teachers could utilize to enrich our students’ learning experiences, develop their understanding of the dynamics of culture change and continuity, and teach them the procedural skills involved in the study of history. I conducted my survey of resources in two important repositories of records of our town’s residents: the Central School, and the  Civil Registry. One of the important finds that I made during the conduct of my brief survey in the town’s Central School was the bank of old student records in its archive. Some of these records date back to 1980’s, 1970’s, 1960’s, and 1950’s. They c...