Research Assignment

For this research assignment, I chose to focus on Second Grade History curriculum in Massachusetts. This is what I found for a basic overview of the curriculum frameworks:

“Second graders learn world and United States history, geography, economics, and government by studying more about who Americans are and where they came from. They explore their own family’s history and learn about distinctive achievements, customs, events, places, or landmarks from long ago and from around the world. The chief purpose of the grade 2 curriculum is to help students understand that American citizenship embraces all kinds of people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and national origin. American students come from all countries and continents in the world. A history and social science curriculum should help students acquire a common understanding of American history, its political principles, and its system of government in order to prepare them for responsible participation in our schools and civic life.”

To prepare liberated, skilled, critical thinkers I would make sure to try and connect American history with my students’ history. Regardless of where their families are from, I think it would be really important and effective to bring some of their own history to the conversation in order to connect it with American history. This overview of the curriculum frameworks sounds very effective and almost has a “white-picket fence” feel to it. The idea of helping students understand that American citizenship embraces all kinds of people would be a bit difficult in a time like this when immigration is such a hot issue. Perhaps the fact that this is such a young age group would make a difference, however.

I would agree that students should have a common understanding of American history, but I what I think is missing here is the fact that it needs to be taught in different perspectives. Too often, I believe students only get “one side of the story” when it comes to history and from my own experiences, I dealt with that too. Students should be taught early that history could be seen from a wide variety of ways, not just through an American point of view. In terms of how much opportunity I would have to modify the curriculum, I think that simply following these guidelines; the framework would be easy to be meet. Any other perspectives that I would offer to my students would hopefully be accepted and embraced.