7: My Experience with Social Issues and Education

Note: I have chosen to answer separately each of the questions posed by the editors.

What led you to initially begin thinking, teaching, writing and/or speaking about social issues and education?

As I began my training to teach social studies in the Harvard MAT program, summer, 1959, Dr. Donald Oliver taught a “methods” course that persuasively challenged conventional rationales for social studies grounded in knowledge of history and civics courses emphasizing the formal structure of government. What was later published as the Oliver-Shaver rationale (Oliver & Shaver, 1966, 1974 ) altered the focus of social studies to an emphasis on student analysis of conflicting positions on public issue, which made far more sense to me as a way of cultivating democratic citizenship. Prior to the experience at Harvard, I had not been actively involved in social issues; instead, I was probably more absorbed in the “easy times” (at least for the privileged) of the 1950s. Yet, two experiences may have heightened my receptiveness to the public issues approach. As a high school freshman, a civics-government teacher piqued my interest in government and communicated a vital, human sense of civic responsibility, and at Amherst College I majored in American Studies, which emphasized critical analysis of case studies in U.S. History.