Voting Day

Tuesday is voting day. I was one of 11,000 King County residents informed that my ballot was inadvertently not mailed on October 19th. As I was reading the assigned chapter in Walter C. Parker’s, Social Studies in Elementary Education this week, entitled “Democratic Citizenship Education,” my missing ballot came to mind. I began to see the connection. Children must be taught about civic responsibility, or they won’t know what they are missing. This includes teaching students about deliberation, what it means to vote responsibly, but another factor that Parker introduced was getting students to care.

I liked the way one teacher took care of this. Tarry Lindquist started her school year off by having her students brainstorm all the ways they could make their classroom a “terrible place, a place where no one would want to come, a place where we could guarantee no learning would occur,” (p. 85). Following their description, she then asked them how they would feel having to be in that kind of classroom all year. Her students couldn’t wait to reverse their list to create the opposite of that classroom.

Parker addressed voting, stating that elementary teachers should take every opportunity to involve their students in the voting process, including deliberation (p. 95). It continues to boggle my mind when I think that women, like myself, only received the right to vote less than one hundred years ago. I remember as an 18-year-old being so excited that I was part of the first group of 18-year-olds that were eligible to vote for the U.S. presidency. It made me feel so grown-up and excited to be given the privilege to vote.

Unfortunately, today I often see more apathy than enthusiasm, regarding the right to vote, than I did back in 1972 when I first voted. Parker brings out that a crisis often is the catalyst that diffuses apathy. In 1972, it was the Vietnam War. This last week my mini-crisis was realizing that if I did not receive my ballot, I was not sure if I would be able to vote. Needless to say, my family received our ballots a few days ago, but what if the error hadn’t been found, or what if it was intentional and never corrected? We teachers have the great opportunity to encourage democracy when we continue to make civic responsibility one subject we will always include.

Making Research Happen

There were six of us, and we signed up to research and present how teachers would use a resource guide to teach a third grade Social Studies lesson. Each group chose a different ethnic group to research. My group chose Hispanic Americans, but where would we start? Isn’t that often the hardest task, just beginning? One of our group members suggested opening up a Google Plus Circle so we could communicate with each other during the week, so we did. We did something! Now we could bounce our ideas off of each other in an open forum from anywhere at any time. We next checked out the third grade standards and found that in third grade, students learn that a community is made up of people from different cultures. That would be our focus – Hispanic American culture.

Our next task was to understand what a resource guide was. As we began, we realized that this was harder than we first thought. Does calling a resource guide make it one? What about sites that resemble a resource guide but are not called resource guides? We decided that calling a site a resource guide does not make it one. Our professor suggested a definition that made the most sense to me. It is a one-stop shop. A resource guide might contain primary documents that have been scanned, as well as secondary documents trying to explain those primary documents. There would definitely be links to other websites, and you might also find pdfs, pictures, graphs, maps, speeches, lesson plans, films, music, or even virtual field trips. The Internet has once again made an impact as it offers almost instant information at the touch of one's fingertips.

When we chose group roles, I volunteered to focus on finding appropriate EALRS and ideas for lesson plans. It turned out finding enough information was not a problem. Resource guides are filled with them. The problem seemed to be to limit the information and filter out the wealth of information one finds. I chose to focus on Jose Alamillo’s resource guide. Alamillo was born in Mexico but is currently the Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Chicano/a Studies Program at California State University Channel Islands. He’s also an author and researcher of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans.

With Halloween approaching, I thought a focus on holidays might be appropriate and looked for two in particular, Cinco de Mayo and El Día de los Muertos. I was not disappointed. Not only did I find examples of celebrations, I also found commentaries on the commercialization of the holidays and an interdisciplinary lesson plan about El Día de los Muertos, including studying the bones of the human skeleton to go along with the art of skull etchings made famous by Jose Guadalupe Posada.

My research helped me to see more clearly how one culture can influence other cultures. Civics EALR 1.1.1 informs us that students need to learn how communities benefit when including people from diverse cultures. How do they learn? It might begin with talk. When teachers talk about what we value, students notice. As students see teachers valuing students’ different skills and strengths, students begin to appreciate them as well. Our little group demonstrated this as we chose different roles to do our research. One person explained who Hispanic Americans were and where they came from. Another explained different things that resource guides offer. Another showed examples of different kinds of resource guides, and yet another talked about the pros and cons. Our group worked together using our different strengths and skills, and it became a better presentation.

Utilizing each others’ strengths not only lightens the load, but the whole group benefits. The Bible compares this arrangement to being members of a body and asks us to consider what would happen if we all wanted to do the same thing. What if everyone wanted to be an ear or an eye, for example? We wouldn’t accomplish much; would we? We need all the parts working together to be a whole body (I Corinthians 12:14-20). Communities work the same way. We are a stronger community if we accept what we have to offer each other and work together. That became the focus of our presentation on Hispanic American culture.