69传媒

When Valerie Ziegler鈥檚 high school social studies students seek out political news, most of them don鈥檛 turn on the television or browse the homepage of The New York Times. Instead, they get on their phones and open up TikTok.

So Ziegler, an economics and Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics teacher at Abraham Lincoln High School in the San Francisco Unified district, spent time in September teaching her class to parse these videos as savvy consumers.

After the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Ziegler asked students to investigate the provenance of the TikToks they watched that analyzed the back-and-forth between the nominees. Who鈥檚 providing this information? And what鈥檚 their agenda?

鈥淎t its root, we鈥檙e trying to make informed citizens. 鈥� I鈥檇 like to think that we鈥檝e given them the skills to navigate the media, to be able to navigate the content that comes to them,鈥� said Zielger.

This adversarial stance鈥攅valuating a source鈥檚 bias and possibly challenging its claims鈥攊s central to teaching civics and history, educators and experts say. It鈥檚 different from how students would approach a novel or an expository essay in an English/language arts class. And it鈥檚 a key example of how literacy skills operate in social studies.

69传媒 need these discipline-specific literacy skills to do well in history, government, civics, and economics classes. But they also need them for life after school, said Sam Wineburg, the co-founder of the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit social studies curriculum organization, and an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University.

They teach young adults how to 鈥渃ontend between the cacophonous voices of a democracy,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 just look at something at face value. You say, 鈥榃ait a second, who wrote that?鈥欌��

What 鈥榣iteracy鈥� means in social studies

This distinction is important now as districts nationwide consider how best to structure their overall literacy programs.

One idea that鈥檚 slowly gained traction is the notion of building students鈥� general content knowledge about science, social studies, the arts, and culture through what鈥檚 known as 鈥渒nowledge-building鈥� reading programs鈥擡LA curricula that incorporate those topics, often through groups of paired fiction and nonfiction texts. Research shows that when students know more about the world around them, their reading-comprehension abilities benefit from this background knowledge.

But these reading programs can鈥檛 take the place of dedicated history or civics instruction, experts caution. In part, that鈥檚 because they don鈥檛 always teach the ways of reading, thinking, and writing that are unique to social studies.

鈥淭here are important disciplinary literacy skills and practices that aren鈥檛 going to show up in your ELA program,鈥� said Nell Duke, the executive director of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization.

Literacy is an umbrella term, Duke said. It can refer to reading and writing skills in a reading class, but it鈥檚 not restricted to that subject. 69传媒 use literacy skills throughout the school day.

At a basic level, students need to be able to read and write well to access content in other subjects, Duke said. To read a textbook in history class, for instance, requires general reading-comprehension skills and an understanding of academic vocabulary. 69传媒 might use skills like summarizing text or using evidence to support their claims in written responses to questions.

But there are literacy skills that are specific to the social studies subject students are studying, said Duke. In economics, students need to be able to make sense of different graphical representations of data. In geography, they need to be able to read a map.

And in history, students need to be able to identify a text鈥檚 source and explain why that provenance matters.

How historians read documents, and how it differs from other fields

鈥淭here鈥檚 a very specific way that historians read documents,鈥� said Joel Breakstone, the executive director of the Digital Inquiry Group.

Historians want to know who wrote a primary-source document, and for what purpose, because those factors shape how the reader would interpret the information. They triangulate information presented in one text with others, 鈥渟eeking out points of similarity and departure,鈥� Breakstone said.

And they want to place text within a moment in time, he said. To analyze the Gettysburg Address, for example, students need to understand what was happening during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln delivered it.

Placing documents in context is essential to reading in history, Breakstone said, and the way a student might approach it in that class differs from how they might approach it in another class.

69传媒 could analyze the Gettysburg Address 鈥渁s a piece of rhetoric鈥� in an English classroom, he said. (In fact, the Common Core State Standards as a sample informational text that 9th and 10th graders could work with in ELA.)

But, he said, 鈥渋t鈥檚 a different thing to read it as a particular document delivered by a particular politician at a particular moment in time.鈥�

Teaching students to 鈥榞et the facts鈥�

The distinction between general literacy and discipline-specific literacy skills can be murky, and, in general, teachers say that students should master the former in elementary school, while work on the latter becomes increasingly intentional in middle and high school.

To prepare students to think this way in social studies, they need to get comfortable reading and writing in the subject鈥攁nd teachers need to explicitly foster those skills, said Monica Brennan, a K-5 instructional coach at Hillside Elementary School in the Farmington district in Michigan.

As a former 2nd grade teacher, and in her current role, Brennan has used a few different curricula that attempt this goal.

In one, social studies lessons included a lot of reading and writing prompts. In another, students explored the same topic across disciplines in an interdisciplinary unit鈥攍earning about rice, for example, by exploring what the food means to different cultures and investigating how seeds grow.

In the reading curriculum she works with now, some lessons are centered on social studies topics. She helps teachers draw connections between those topics and the content in their social studies periods.

鈥淚 think there鈥檚 not one way to do it. But what I鈥檝e started to learn as an educator is that we want some fluidity in our classrooms,鈥� Brennan said, referencing the delineation between social studies and ELA. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 part of my role, helping teachers to see that it鈥檚 OK for there to be blurry lines there.鈥�

Before elementary schoolers can get to more discipline-specific ways of reading and writing, they need to master the basics, she said.

In one civics lesson that Brennan taught, students wrote to their local government about improving equipment at a local park. Lessons on persuasive writing had to precede that activity.

鈥淚鈥檓 giving a really clear framework of what it is鈥攜ou give an argument, you elaborate on it,鈥� Brennan said. 鈥淭here are still some ELA activities that need to take place in order for that social studies lesson to be successful.鈥�

By the time students get to high school, they鈥檙e learning and refining discipline-specific ways of evaluating text and persuading audiences.

When Ziegler, the California teacher, has taught U.S. history, she asks students to .

鈥淚nitially, students look at that and say, 鈥榃ow, 鈥� it must be like this, and they鈥檙e all happy,鈥欌�� Ziegler said. But she guides students to investigate further questions鈥攚hen was this painting created? By whom?鈥攖hat uncover that it was painted in the 1930s, hundreds of years after the event supposedly took place.

The lesson she uses prompts students to consider how an author鈥檚 time and place, and their motivation, might influence the source they create.

Ziegler wants her students to pose those questions to the information sources in their own lives, too, whether they鈥檙e learning about local ballot initiatives, seeking tips on filling out student financial-aid forms, or trying to understand headlines about unemployment numbers.

鈥淚 hope that we鈥檙e giving them the skills to say, 鈥極K, I鈥檓 going to get the facts and I鈥檓 going to sit down with people and discuss this and not just see what I get online but really make an informed decision,鈥欌�� she said.