Chapter 1: Introduction

When we first started thinking about this book, we brainstormed a list of chapter topics a mile long. We just had so much we wanted to say, and this seemed like our shot at sharing everything we have learned in our collective 41 years of experience teaching and working with teachers. About five minutes later, we realized that no publisher was going to allow a 5,000-page book and we would need to curate a smaller set of ideas to share. The irony was that we already knew that the driving force of the book was going to be the idea that it isn’t possible to teach all the social studies content we wish kids could know, even in a dream world where social studies is a regular classroom fixture with unlimited instructional time (Fitchett et al., 2012; Heafner & Fitchett, 2012). Rather, we planned to argue that the real value is in teaching the transferable skills that students need to access any social studies content—that of the curriculum and that of their choosing—because isolated bits of content, even thousands of them, will never be enough to create the engaged citizenry we’re striving for.