A Quick Look at Three Ways to Approach Picture Analysis

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C3, Inquiry, online, social studies education, Teachers

As educators, we are always looking for new ways to approach our content and engage our students. A few weeks ago, the FJCC had the pleasure of providing professional development to teachers in Highlands County, a small rural county here in Florida very similar to where your humble blog host spent much of his early career. While there, I had the chance to speak with Holly Ard. Holly basically functions as the social studies specialist in the district while still teaching her own classes, and does excellent work.

One of the most difficult tasks for students to do, particularly at the lower grades, is to interpret primary sources, especially visual sources. While we stress the importance of primary sources, we often fail to actually provide teachers or students with the tools necessary to use them! This, in a time when disciplinary literacy has re-emerged as an important element of social studies teacher education thanks in part to the C3 Framework. Holly has attempted to address this issue by integrating a Picture Analysis Strategy. The strategy she uses is aimed at students of differing ability levels, and in talking with her, it seems to work well in engaging students with somewhat difficult content!

Working with partners, students individually break down the image, using the guide below. Note that the four ‘boxes’ represent the four quadrants of the image, a popular approach for image analysis. Having students create a title for the image does a nice job getting to the Common Core/Florida Standards expectation that students should be able to summarize text of all kinds. What else is a good a title than a really short and really strong summary of text?

Another way to approach image analysis is seen below. This version of the analysis template can be done with a partner or individually. I appreciate how it seeks to have students connect it directly to what they are learning. Relations between content and context is important.

I especially love this version of the picture analysis activity, which may be most useful for paintings or photographs of a perhaps persuasive bent.

Thanks, Holly, for sharing these approaches. We look forward to more goodness from you! 🙂

By the way, if you are looking for resources in Civics or History that can help kids with primary sources, I encourage you to check out the Stanford History Education Group!

New FJCC Resource for Florida Elementary Civics!

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Common Core, elementary grades, elementary level

Friends in civics, I mentioned previously that I had spent a week in Miami last month, prior to my two weeks in Boston, working with our Val McVey and teachers and staff from Miami Dade schools. This work involved creating curricular materials for third through fifth grade that are aligned with the grade level Civics and Florida Standards for ELA. While we already have entire extended lessons for these, the new materials are actually intended to be 15 to 20 minute mini-lessons that we believe effectively get to the civics benchmarks without requiring a significant investment of time. Elementary social studies is the curricular equivalent of the Ottoman Empire in 1914: it exists,  everybody likes to pretend it matters, but no one wants anything to really do with it until they absolutely have to. I’ve discussed this briefly before: 

We know that both nationally and in Florida, social studies education is often lacking at the elementary level. This is NOT a new thing; generally speaking, social studies has been on the decline for decades, especially at the elementary level. The reasons for this are many and varied, but one can assume, rightly I think, that a decline in general social studies instruction could also result in a decline in civics instruction in the elementary grades.

The most pressing problem for elementary teachers is, most often, time. In our observations, and in the research, we just don’t see hard-pressed elementary teachers finding the time to do extensive work with social studies in general and civics in particular. To address this, we teamed with folks from Miami, with the support of their fantastic Social Studies director, Bob Brazofsky. The result of this partnership is our new collection of mini-lessons for elementary teachers, which we have termed

Civics in a Snap! For when you have just enough time to help your kids learn about being good citizens!

These mini-lessons will be shared with you once we get our new website up and running this fall. Miami-Dade is in the process of integrating them into their planning guides, and we will be hosting them on a new section of our website devoted to elementary civics. For now, I am sharing with you a sample of that work, in this case, the Civics in a Snap lesson for SS.3.C.2.1:Identify group and individual actions of citizens that demonstrate
civility, cooperation, volunteerism, and other civic virtues. Click on the images to embiggen them (embiggen is, of course, a perfectly cromulent word)!

If you have questions about these new resources, feel free to shoot me an email! We are so excited about what we hope will be a useful, and used, civics resource for elementary teachers!

View the recent iCivics Drafting Board 2.0 Webinar!

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iCivics, Inquiry, online, videos

On Friday, 05 December 2014, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship was pleased to host a webinar on behalf of our friends from iCivics. This webinar, led by Alison Atwater and Erin Lewis, discussed the new national and statewide support network established by iCivics for teachers using their materials. The heart of the webinar, however, introduced participants to the new Drafting Board 2.0. Drafting Board 2.0 is a brand new argumentative writing tool that helps students learn the elements involved in crafting, and refuting, a strong argument. Click on the embedded links above to go to the iCivics page, and be sure to view the Webinar below. Questions or comments can be directed to stephen.masyada@ucf.edu, alison.atwater@iCivics.org, or erin.lewis@iCivics.org.

The Common Core and Civic Education

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C3, Common Core, social studies education

We here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship take no position on the Common Core Standards/Florida Standards. They have strengths and weaknesses, like all standards, and the emphasis on using primary sources within ELA classrooms is a positive development. However, the rollout of the standards, and the associated assessments, has been problematic to say the least. In the spirit of discussion and inquiry, we do want to share interesting articles that address what we as civic educators are doing in the classroom. Nicole Mirra offers a critical take on how Common Core impacts civic education, and questions whether it truly does integrate civic learning into the classroom.

Furthermore, it is imperative to note that the simple inclusion of civic documents in the Common Core required reading list does not constitute a sustained focus on the civic nature of literacy…. Simply reading the Declaration of Independence for its main ideas, in my mind, is not a civic act. Debating the extent to which the promises of that document have been realized in your students’ neighborhoods and then developing community action projects might be. But that is not the focus of the Common Core – the Common Core is focused on students’ ability to read any piece of informational text and draw evidence from it in order to construct a sound argument so that those skills can be applied to any number of college or career assignments. Our founding documents, in the eyes of the Common Core developers, are simply sources of information. No context or democratic purpose necessary.

Dr. Mirra makes some good points here. One of my own concerns as a civic educator and even just as a social studies person is that many of these primary source documents students are engaging with are not addressed in context. To me, removing a primary source from the context in which it was written raises issues concerning whether or not students are truly understanding the document and whether than can effectively transfer the conceptual elements of the document into realms of civic life. At the same time, we also need to remember that the standards are aimed at ELA classrooms, not social studies classrooms (we only get an appendix), and what the history/social studies (hmm…issue there as well) part of standards focus on are elements of content-area literacy in using a document. But can you truly address content-area literacy without considering CONTEXT? And do ELA teachers have the content background necessary to address that context?

These issues are why I am a fan of the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework, and we have begun integrating elements of the inquiry arc into our own work here at the FJCC. The C3 Framework moves beyond simply interpreting documents; instead, it asks students to interrogate documents, to ask questions, and to DO something as citizens. The developers of the Framework HAVE sought to show how it may work with Common Core as well; while it does not conflict with Common Core, it does improve upon it.  Throughout the year, this blog will talk more about the C3 Framework and how it relates to Civic education.

Ultimately, what we should remember is that the Common Core State Standards/Florida Standards are just that: standards. They are NOT curriculum, and it is up to us as educators to really move beyond those standards to develop a strong curriculum that addresses the need for quality civic learning. The foundation of Common Core, which involves the use of primary source documents, is a start. The C3 is a path. We are the drivers of the curriculum.

Hat tip to FJCC Senior Fellow Dr. Elizabeth Washington for directing us to the article!