Stories From
The Classroom
| Stories from the Classroom Just about everyone agrees that the main purpose of the social studies is to educate for citizenship...the devil is in the details. The video clips and units found here promote reflective inquiry. The reflective inquiry approach prepares students for democracy as a reality-in-progress, a striving for a better society, rather than as a fixed set of facts and procedures. It promotes investigations into the ways societies work or have worked in the past so they can understand society and its social forces in order to operate actively within it. Students are taught to view knowledge critically and question dominant views. Various perspectives are valued for which a variety of primary and secondary materials are needed. As such, the beliefs, passions and sacrifices of real people (with all their biases) reveal themselves to us and are not smothered by seemingly objective descriptions. During the school year of 2001-2002, Elise Guyette of the Vermont Alliance for Social Studies and Jim Olinger and others of the Regional Education Technology Network visited 13 Vermont classrooms to create video vignettes called Stories from the Classroom to highlight programs whose methods and strategies convey important lessons about the big ideas found in human societies.
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This section presents a web-based overview of those vignettes along with units from our 2003 summer institute held at Lyndon State College. These videotapes and units show what the reflective inquiry approach looks like in theclassroom and other settings. They show a living curriculum that promotesan active examination of human societies across time and space in order to produce active citizens ready to create a better society for the future.