The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. I taught American History to 8th graders for many happy years. But my “a-ha” curriculum moment, the experience that revealed the potential for engaging, knowledge-rich history content to excite students and accelerate literacy, happened in a 2nd-grade reading class.
At the time, I was working as an instructional coach, helping teachers implement a knowledge-building curriculum. I was regularly in and out of reading classrooms—but Mrs. Kohlrus’ room was different. Students were enthusiastically engaged in an investigation about the role of government and the decimation of the American bison population during a unit about the American West—activities that looked like history instruction to me. What was going on?
After class, Mrs. Kohlrus explained that, by using a high-quality ELA curriculum and focusing on pacing and tailoring instruction, she found she had the space to consider how to capitalize on her students’ curiosity about Theodore Roosevelt and his conservation efforts. Her students were looking at pictures, reading additional texts, and mastering topical vocabulary through intentional practice, structured discussions, and an overall deep dive into the topic.
For her, this was merely an extension of the literacy block. For me, it was a defining moment for how to include high-quality history, civics, and geography instruction in the elementary classroom. We need to ensure those types of learning opportunities, and the materials that power them, reach all American students.
Strong ELA Curriculum Is Not Enough
Teachers who have state social studies standards for which they’re responsible are constantly looking for opportunities, and instructional minutes, to fit that content somewhere, somehow into their day, week, or month. Often, an English-language arts knowledge-building curriculum is offered as the solution for the lack of disciplinary history, civics, and geography instruction in the elementary classroom. But it’s not enough. While the content may be rich in knowledge, it doesn’t scratch the surface of social studies disciplinary content, nor does it systematically or sequentially build deep knowledge.
At the same time, students—especially those who are engaged in a knowledge-rich English-language arts curriculum—often crave more information about the topics they are studying. While creative teachers like Mrs. Kohlrus can take it upon themselves to expand ELA curriculum to teach history, civics, and geography in their classrooms, we can do better. We can equip every teacher to guide deep exploration of historical topics, by providing them with high-quality, history-rich instructional materials and the time and support to implement those lessons.
What would this entail? Thinking back on her class, I have to admit that my 8th-grade history teacher’s heart is still envious of the level of enthusiasm her 2nd-graders displayed over federal land-conservation efforts, which even I consider a bit of a mundane topic. So I reflected on what I had observed. What were the critical elements that led to that instructional opportunity?
- Multiple texts: Students accessed the content through several historical fiction stories they had read in their literacy block. The narrative approach transformed a ho-hum historical topic into something that inspired curiosity.
- Rich vocabulary: Students drew from an intentional set of content-embedded vocabulary, which they reviewed, explored, and encountered in various contexts. This freed up cognitive space for students to think deeply about the history topic.
- Visuals: Students looked at historical pictures and analyzed art to build additional background knowledge about the topic. Students could easily create meaning out of these new sources because of the knowledge and vocabulary they had already built.
- Discussions: Students had ample opportunities to talk and ask questions about the topic. Their discourse was infectious, filled with rich vocabulary, and layered with genuine enthusiasm.
Incredibly, all this history learning took less than 90 minutes of instructional time each week. It was exciting and effective. And it was markedly different from what I had experienced as a middle-school history teacher. I love teaching and I love history, but I followed mile-wide, inch-deep standards and did not work with high-quality materials. I often saw my students disengage from the content.
But that wasn’t the case in this classroom of seven- and eight-year-old students. The kids were energized and curious during the lesson, not only because it was knowledge-rich, but also because they were working with rich, engaging texts to explore connections among historical events, a social studies skill called “cause and causation.” Similar to cause and effect in ELA, cause and causation in social studies draws on a story structure that is natural to students. It asks them to analyze, predict, and apply their understanding to a historical event, current events, or something else from history or modern life that they have learned. Cause and causation asks students to make sense of their world in the context of the past.
I can’t help but wonder about the knowledge acceleration that could have happened for my 8th-grade students if they had experienced this type of knowledge building and cause and causation analysis in elementary school. Rather than catching up on the basics, we could have dived more deeply into questions of fairness and historical accuracy, wrestling with the complexities that adolescents love to debate and preparing them to be engaged citizens in adulthood.
A Pragmatic Solution
The ties between literacy instruction and history instruction are strong—but too often, ignored. Research has shown a strong connection between expanding social studies disciplinary content and improving student literacy outcomes. It’s long past time to expand our understanding of literacy instruction to include disciplinary content, including in the younger grades. Hugh Catts and Alan Kahmi recently made a strong case for this approach.
So what if we approach history, civics, and geography materials and instruction with the intention of helping students learn to read and read to learn? While I deeply value knowledge-rich English-language arts curricula, they aren’t enough to systematically address the inferred and layered social studies knowledge surrounding students in various media, including literature, informational texts, television, social media, movies, music, and video games. Teachers and students need rich, literacy-forward history materials that systematically build disciplinary knowledge and support students’ literacy development.
I understand barriers exist to doing this. Yes, there are politics. Yes, there are limited resources and time in the classroom. Yes, there are 50 states, and no shared history standards. But these things have always been true, and yet history, civics, and geography instruction still happens. It’s happening in fits and starts, with teachers borrowing from this and that, not benefiting from tight instructional design or content that engages students in the story at hand. We can create high-quality content and products to work within today’s classrooms and constraints. We can do better.
If we are serious about improving students’ literacy outcomes, then it’s time to create new, literacy-forward, high-quality social studies materials. Let’s get started!
Amy Holbrook is a former history teacher and instructional coach. She is currently a lead curriculum developer for literacy materials.