I Heart Social Studies
So y'all know what STEM is, of course. Conversations about whether STEM's "engineering" component is just a convenient vowel or truly another gaping hole in the shabby American curriculum are long past. Everybody's talking STEAM now--A is for Arts. STEAMed up! That's the ticket!
My friend Sam Chaltain recently tweeted that, maybe, what we really need is STREAM-- expanding the acronym to include Reading. (Welcome back, reading!) Actually, I tweeted back, isn't STREAM what we used to call a "well-rounded" education?
But--thinking it over--I was wrong. In addition to science, technology, reading, engineering, arts and mathematics, any definition of a complete educational package would have to include social studies. And stop your sneering. "Social studies" is a perfectly good umbrella term for an incredibly wide-ranging collective of knowledge and competencies--despite its recent, policy-driven depreciation in the curricular pantheon.
Here, off the top of my head, are some of the things that fall into the realm of social studies: History, political
My friend Sam Chaltain recently tweeted that, maybe, what we really need is STREAM-- expanding the acronym to include Reading. (Welcome back, reading!) Actually, I tweeted back, isn't STREAM what we used to call a "well-rounded" education?
But--thinking it over--I was wrong. In addition to science, technology, reading, engineering, arts and mathematics, any definition of a complete educational package would have to include social studies. And stop your sneering. "Social studies" is a perfectly good umbrella term for an incredibly wide-ranging collective of knowledge and competencies--despite its recent, policy-driven depreciation in the curricular pantheon.
Here, off the top of my head, are some of the things that fall into the realm of social studies: History, political