Dive Brief:
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While curriculum standards typically serve as guidelines for what is taught in core subjects, one educator suggests history standards can be used to help students develop and exercise critical thinking skills.
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Stephen Jackson, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Kansas, has crafted a curriculum that South Dakota history educators can use to help students analyze the decisions that go into the creation of standards and who decides what information does or doesn’t make the cut.
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“I think it’s important for students to consider the focus that shapes their education,” Jackson said. “It should be a tool we use to bring students into a conversation about these changes.”
Dive Insight:
Before joining the University of Kansas, Jackson taught at the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota and took part in helping update the state's existing social studies standards in 2021.
However, the standards he helped to submit were redrafted, and a new version was ratified the following year despite pushback from groups including the American Historical Association, ACLU South Dakota and others. The primary points of contention? Disputes over “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory.”
The final version is set to be implemented in the coming 2024-25 school year, said Jackson.
The process ultimately sparked an idea for Jackson: With three versions of the standards available, students could examine the differences and consider what helped shape the viewpoints behind tweaking these documents.
“The big question is what gets left out and what stories aren’t told,” Jackson said. “Students get very passionate about what drove the choices.”
To that end, Jackson drafted a lesson published in The American Historical Review that focuses heavily on South Dakota but invites educators to apply their own state standards.
The outline also delves into the history of state standards across the U.S., offers analytical questions — again based on South Dakota’s social studies standards — and writing assignments, and provides a suggested reading list with links to available articles and papers.
To Jackson, this kind of approach may help students learn how to “take control of their own education.”
“They’ve had experience with textbooks and going to classes all their life, but [with this approach] they can look at how we got from point A to point B and question the authoritativeness of these documents,” Jackson said.
