Educator PD: Cheryl Medearis- Addressing OSEU Five

Addressing OSEU Five with Cheryl Medearis It's always a challenge, working with our social studies teachers and our social studies methodology teachers at the university, to say, how are you going to teach this? And the first time I went to the bookstore and I said, this is the text for social studies, and it was a lie my teacher told me. They're like, is that really what you want to use? And to go back and look, and not to gloss over what's in the textbook, because we have to meet those standards, but to look at it and say, this is one perspective. Now do your homework, or have children do their homework, and come back and say, let's talk about this, and look at those parallel understandings of what it is. And it broadens the knowledge base, but it's a very difficult thing to do. You have to cover the curriculum. I say we have to uncover the curriculum to bring in many different ways of knowing. So it could be through stories. It could be through the books that are fictional books, but they spark something there that's not in the history books. So being able to look at history through the eyes of many people and many different perspectives. And again, it's something that we've used that understanding to change and shape the way that we do our history and sociology, and our social studies methods classes at the university, hoping that those teachers will go out and model that in the classrooms that they're in.