SOCIAL STUDIES COURSES

This page contains some general course resources for all of my Social Studies classes. For information on your specific course, please visit one of the course pages that is linked below.

 CURRICULAR COMPETENCIES & BIG IDEAS

Each course in the BC Social Studies curriculum helps students develop their understanding of 4 Big Ideas. To learn more about the Big Ideas that you will explore in your Socials course, please see the specific course page (linked above).

Every year, students will also develop their skills with the Social Studies Curricular Competencies. These skill sets remain the same each year, but students are expected to become more sophisticated in their understanding and application of these skills over time. The three Social Studies Skill Sets are:
  • Social Studies Inquiry Processes and Skills
  • Geography Skills
  • Historical Thinking Skills

​When we explore past or current events, these skill sets work together to help us better understand our world and our place within it. Because we rarely use these skills in isolation, they will be grouped into 5 categories for the purposes of assessment. These categories reflect the kinds of learning activities that we typically do in Social Studies:
  • Inquiry and Questioning: Conducting research and organizing information to answer our questions about the world.
  • Evidence and Interpretation: Examining primary and secondary sources to better understand people and events.
  • Analysis: Exploring the important people, events, ideas, and developments that shape our world to better understand the complexities of the past and present.
  • Ethics and Decision-Making: Critically examining actions and events to draw lessons from them and determine how we should respond to them.
  • Communication and Justification: ​Sharing our ideas and understandings with others and learning from their thoughts and findings.

The individual skills are described in more detail below. I have also highlighted the categories that they fall into.

​Social Studies Inquiry Processes and Skills
(needed for Inquiry and Questioning/Communication and Justification)

Students will learn to:
  • Pose questions and gather data to answer them
  • Collect, organize and interpret data from multiple sources
  • Assess the accuracy and bias of their sources
  • Draw inferences to define issues and draw conclusions from research
  • Give credit to their sources and document their research
  • Present their understandings effectively using a variety of formats and technologies

Geography Skills
​(needed for Evidence and Interpretation/Communication and Justification)

Students will learn to:
  • Locate relevant geographical information and places on a variety of maps
  • Interpret and compare scales and legends in graphs, tables and maps
  • Create various visual representations for specific purposes using different methods and technologies
  • Combine their geography skills with their historical thinking skills to better understand the world around them

​Historical Thinking Skills

Students will develop 6 historical thinking skills that help us explore and understand the past: 

Significance: How do we decide what is important to learn about the past?
​(needed for Analysis)

Students will establish the historical significance of people, places, events and ideas from the past as they begin to understand that:
  • People, places, events and ideas become significant if they result in change.
  • People, places, events and ideas become significant if they are revealing enough to help us better understand a current or historic issue.
  • Historical significance is constructed by historians who decide which people, events and developments fit within the story they are telling about the past.
  • Historical significance varies over time and from group to group

Evidence: How do we know what we know about the past?
(needed for Evidence and Interpretation)

Students will learn to use relevant and reliable evidence as they begin to understand that:
  • History is an interpretation based on the inferences made when we examine primary sources.
  • Asking good questions turns a source into evidence.
  • We need to ask questions about who created a source, when it was made, and what beliefs and values shaped its creation before we start examining it.
  • All evidence and inferences should be corroborated.

Continuity and Change: How do we make sense of the complexities of history?
(needed for Analysis)

Students will identify the continuity and change that characterizes different time periods as they begin to understand that:
  • Continuity and change are interwoven--even in the midst of change, many aspects of a society or culture will continue on as they did before.
  • Change is a process with identifiable turning points that mark important shifts in the direction or pace of events.
  • Change may lead to progress or decline; in many cases, progress for one group will lead to the decline of another.
  • Periodization helps us organize our thinking about history; determining the dates and events that make up a historical time period involves interpretation by historians. 

Cause and Consequence: Why do events happen and what are their impacts?
(needed for Analysis)

Students will analyze the causes and consequences of decisions, actions and events from the past as they begin to understand that:
  • Change has multiple causes and results in multiple consequences, many of which are interrelated.
  • The causes of historical events have varying levels of influence and importance.
  • Events are the result of interactions between historical actors (people or groups from the past) and their social, political, economic and cultural conditions.
  • Actions often have unintended consequences.
  • The events of history were not inevitable. Different actions, choices or conditions could have produced very different results.

Perspective: How can we better understand the people of the past?
(needed for Evidence and Interpretation/Analysis)

Students will learn take on different historical perspectives to help them examine the past as they begin to understand that:
  • There are often significant differences between our current worldviews and those of the past.
  • It is important to avoid presentism (imposing current worldviews on people of the past).
  • The perspective of a historical person or group must be understood within its historical context (events, worldviews, etc.).
  • Taking a historical perspective means inferring how people felt and thought in the past based on evidence; it does not mean that historians must agree with those historical actors.
  • Historical actors have diverse perspectives. Different groups will see the same event differently.

Ethics: How can history help us live in the present?
(needed for Ethics and Decision-making)

Students will form ethical judgments about past events as they begin to understand that:
  • Historians make ethical judgments in their work and these may be clearly stated or implied.
  • Our ethical judgments of the past must consider the historical context of the actions or events we are examining.
  • We must recognize that historical actors beliefs about right and wrong may be very different from our own. 
  • We have a duty to remember and respond to the contributions, sacrifices and injustices of the past.
  • While our knowledge of history can help us to better understand current issues, we must recognize the limitations of any direct lessons from the past.