Now that I’m officially teaching Science and Social Studies next year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what these two fields have in common.

That is, unfortunately, the way that I think.  I know that a lot of people think this way, and I feel like we teach students early in life to NOT think this way.  There’s math time, and there’s reading time, and we don’t want them to mix the two up.  That would be bad, right?

I’m going to set aside the arguments for/against integrating the disciplines, because there are TONS and I don’t want to make this blog post a million words long.

Instead, let’s just say that I want to find connections between the two so that my students – who will remain with me for both classes, taught in six week chunks – can make sense of what I teach them, and find some continuity in my instruction.

I’m planning to build “structures” that we can continue through both subjects, such as student presentations on “wonders,” some type of “genius hour” structure, argument writing following some kind of simple structure, and an emphasis on “theorizing” or articulating essential understandings as generalizable “rules” that make specific predictions.  Most of this stuff won’t work if it can’t apply to both.  Or it will be easy with one subject, and hard with the other.

Maybe that’s inevitable – they are still separate subjects for a reason, and there are important differences that I don’t want to gloss over – but I want to emphasize the process of “doing science” or “doing social studies.”  That’s hard.  It would be even harder if I try to teach “doing science” and “doing social studies” as completely different things.

So, back to the first thing.

(I’m using quotation marks too much, but I hope to signal that I don’t completely buy in to all of these labels.)

I think that both science and social studies – or “social science” as they tend to call it in college – depend on a rigorous method that produces reliable, useful interpretations that are not merely (hopefully) the subjective opinion of the interpreter.  Both try to use the “scientific method.”

I should insert here that I’m skeptical of some of the claims of social scientists to objectivity.  I should also insert that social science/studies has historically been used as a tool for colonialism, control, manipulation, and all kinds of evil.  (Of course, so has science.)  I’m thinking of examples like the racist conclusions of well-regarded (in their time) books like Crania Aegyptiaca – a “scientific” analysis of human skulls that purportedly shows the superiority of “caucasians.”

What are the implications for instruction?

I’m planning to teach the scientific method.  I’m planning to teach it the same way that I teach the writing process – not as a lockstep march from “plan” to “publish,” but as a deliberate, strategic arrangement of steps that best fit the audience and purpose.  If you want verifiable, scientific conclusions, then you need to design an experiment that tests a specific hypothesis.  You need a real chance for failure.  You need to collect and interpret data.  And you need to come up with a theory, if you can, that explains the data and offers some kind of prediction.

This way, we can have an overarching focus on “theorizing.”  This feels like a worthwhile goal – it’s difficult, useful, and broadly applicable to the content.  Oh, and it fits standards.

I suppose I need to work on how to implement this day-to-day more specifically.  I also need to work on tiering this and differentiating.  As I’ve stated, this class will be hugely diverse.

Of course, I also want this class to be fun.  This doesn’t quite sound like fun, does it?  I might need to work on how I present that.