Chapter 7: Collaborative Development Of Technology-Based Social Studies Materials

The focus of this chapter is on the remarkable and largely unpredictable tale of a group of high school and university teachers who initially came together simply to create a new social studies course for a high school. Several years later, this same group had evolved into a close-knit team that revolutionized and technologized the pedagogy sequence for secondary social studies teachers in training at Michigan State University (MSU).

Social Studies textbooks have traditionally purveyed static knowledge to generations of Americans. Unfortunately, while a knowledge base of cultural and historic information is clearly still necessary in the year 2003, it is no longer, in and of itself, sufficient. To train teachers to singularly disseminate static textbook knowledge in a day when national and state tests call upon school students to reason and to demonstrate proficiency in higher order thinking skills is to prepare teachers for social studies classrooms which are doomed to failure.