This book reviews research on elementary & middle schools students' historical thinking.Grounded in the theoretical context of mediated action,it addresses the breadth of social practices, settings, ...purposes & tools that influence students.
Although the social realist position is grounded in the fundamentally important observation that schools must engage students with knowledge that deepens and extends their understanding, rather than ...simply reproduce what they learn in everyday life, this approach commits a fatal flaw by equating such 'powerful knowledge' with the work of academic disciplines-a position also taken by many scholars working outside the social realist tradition. The social realist and related disciplinary approaches mischaracterize the cohesiveness and boundedness of disciplines; they evade the culturally, historically, and institutionally situated nature of disciplines and dismiss the extensive knowledge produced outside them; and they ignore the societal purposes of knowledge within general education, which necessarily differ from those of academic disciplines. In a world beset by social, political, and environmental crises, schools must engage students with systematic knowledge, but that knowledge must be selected and organized on some basis other than a simplified portrait of imagined academic disciplines.
This study used task-based group interviews with young adolescents in four countries to investigate their understanding of the causes of human rights violations, means for protecting human rights, ...and their own potential role in ensuring human rights. Although students recognized the role of personal and institutional factors in both violating and protecting human rights, their ideas for influencing human rights focused primarily on the personal contexts with which they were most familiar. Their understanding of political and economic mechanisms was much less elaborate. These findings suggest the need for curricula that equip students with the complex and specialized knowledge that would enable them to engage in a range of meaningful civic action, both in their lives now and as adults.
Elicitation techniques are a category of research tasks that use visual, verbal, or written stimuli to encourage participants to talk about their ideas. These tasks are particularly useful for ...exploring topics that may be difficult to discuss in formal interviews, such as those that involve sensitive issues or rely on tacit knowledge. Elicitation techniques can also reduce power imbalances between interviewers and respondents, and they can enhance participants' ability to elaborate on their own conceptions of the world, rather than limiting them to categories derived from theory or previous research. Among the most useful of such techniques are those that involve respondents in arranging stimulus materials, constructing materials in response to stimuli, and explaining stimulus materials. Each of these has been used to explore important topics in social education, and familiarity with a range of elicitation techniques enables researchers to overcome many barriers to productive interviewing.
To expand students’ preparation for civic life, many teachers regularly engage students in discussions related to contentious issues. These discussions, however, typically restrict the range of ...communicative styles allowed and prioritizes disagreements between fixed and competing choices. Keith C. Barton & Li-Ching recommend that educators instead engage students in collaborative deliberation — an authentic problem-solving model of discussion that is premised on relationships, mutual trust, common interests and concerns, and diverse forms of communication. To support collaborative deliberation, teachers need to pay attention to how they frame issues, how they organize student groups, and what kinds of discourse they encourage.
This paper makes the case for including critical harmony as a complement to justice within civic education. The concept of harmony is significant for civic education because it acknowledges the ...crucial role that relationships play in society-an important moral, ethical, and social ideal in many cultures around the world. Harmony must also incorporate a critical dimension, however, by embracing conflict and tension, valuing difference and diversity, and striving for balance among divergent voices. By using examples of public issues such as housing and gender identity to illustrate the relational dimension of public policy, this paper argues that the concept of critical harmony can contribute to a more comprehensive foundation for students' deliberation of civic issues.
A central goal of civic and multicultural education is preparing young people to participate in deliberatively informed action on important social issues. In order to achieve this goal, educators ...need to cultivate young people's innate but partial 'sprouts' of benevolence, which are rooted in feelings of empathy and compassion. Without a sense of benevolence, students are unlikely to be motivated to deliberate and take action on the needs of others. Consequently, curriculum related to public issues should begin by engaging students with knowledge of other people's lives and concrete circumstances. By encountering rich and emotionally compelling accounts of the lives of others, students' sense of benevolence can be extended beyond the people and situations they know best. This forms the basis for subsequent curriculum encounters with differing perspectives and worldviews, as well as with structural causes of social issues and potential implications of civic action taken to address them.
Narrative medicine demonstrated positive impact on empathy in medicine and nursing students. However, this pedagogical approach had not been evaluated in pharmacy education. This study sought to ...apply and evaluate the narrative medicine approach in extending empathy in Asian undergraduate pharmacy students.
Narrative medicine was applied through workshops which used narratives of people with different experiences and perspectives. First-year undergraduate pharmacy students who volunteered and attended these workshops formed the intervention group (N = 31) and the remaining first-year cohort formed the control group (N = 112). A sequential explanatory mixed methods approach was adopted in which quantitative methods were first used to measure impact on pharmacy students' empathy using the Jefferson Scale of Empathy- Health Professions Student (JSE-HPS), and qualitative methods (i.e. group interviews) were then used to assess pharmacy students' emotional responses to narratives, and the perspectives of pharmacy students and faculty of this pedagogical approach.
There was no difference in JSE-HPS scores between intervention and control groups across baseline (i.e. upon matriculation), pre-intervention, and post-intervention timepoints. Pharmacy students in the intervention group had lower scores in Factor 3 ("Standing in People's Shoes") following the intervention. Five themes, guided by internal and external factors in cognition, emerged from the Group Interviews: (1) incongruence between students' motivation and faculty's perception, (2) learning context, (3) academic context, (4) cognitive system, and (5) affective system. Themes 1, 4 and 5 referred to internal factors such as students' motivation, perceived learnings, and feelings. Themes 2 and 3 referred to external factors including workshop materials, activities, content, and facilitation.
This study is the first to demonstrate that pharmacy students engaged with the narrative medicine approach as narratives elicited emotional responses, exposed them to diverse perspectives, and deepened their appreciation of the importance of empathy and complexities of understanding patients' perspectives. Scaffolded educational interventions using narratives and real-life patient encounters, alongside longitudinal measurements of empathy, are necessary to bring about meaningful and sustained improvements in empathy.
This study investigated how young adolescents thought about the location of human rights issues and the nature of violations in differing geographic regions. Open-ended, task-based interviews were ...conducted with 116 students in Colombia, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the United States. Although students in each location pointed to a combination of global, national, and local human rights issues, as well as those found in nations distant from their own, the salience of these varied by setting. Variations were consistent with the contexts in which students had learned about human rights; these included personal experience, school instruction, and broader national discourses. This research indicates that students’ understanding of human rights is influenced by a variety of contextual factors, and it suggests that educators may want to consider how they can complement the messages and experiences students encounter in settings outside school.
Civic education historically has focused primarily on preparing students to influence politics and government policy. Less attention has been paid to the curricular implications of civil society, ...even though it is a crucial site for deliberatively informed action and one of the primary ways in which students will enter the public sphere. This article highlights the importance of civil society as a component of civic education and critically examines why it has been neglected or disparaged by many civic educators. The article also emphasizes the role of formal curricula in systematically preparing students to critically engage in civil society as they work toward social justice; this preparation involves acquainting students with the knowledge necessary to evaluate the work of such organizations, as well providing students with experience in the kinds of collaborative deliberation that takes place there.
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