Chapter 33: Teachers as Decision Makers: Using a Document-Based Activity Structure (DBAS) to Create Social Studies Curriculum

Using a Document-Based Activity Structure (DBAS), teacher candidates create a disciplinary inquiry learning experience that highlights the integrative nature of the social studies in two ways: (a) across the disciplines and (b) with literacy.

K–12 social studies teachers face curricular challenges that can thwart their efforts to engage students in historical inquiry and disciplinary thinking. Those challenges include the struggle between literacy and subject matter priorities, the press for content coverage over interpretation, and the scarcity of good classroom resources.

The Task: Given such challenges, we developed a task that structures teacher candidates’ knowledge development of historical inquiry and disciplinary thinking. Reisman’s (2012a, 2012b) activity structure for the teaching of historical inquiries focuses on discipline-specific literacy instruction—the document-based lesson. We adapted Reisman’s work to create a Document-Based Activity Structure (DBAS) to guide candidates’ thinking and curricular decision-making. The DBAS delineates core practices for historical inquiry (Fogo, 2014) within three sequential lesson segments: (a) framing the inquiry and building background knowledge, (b) employing sources, and (c) determining and communicating results. Using such a structure allows the complex teaching practices within each segment to be decomposed, examined, and practiced independently of the larger framework. The DBAS, then, provides a practical tool for candidates to make sense of the complexities in social studies teaching and learning and scaffolds their future social studies curriculum work.