HSSE Online EDITORIAL

Humanities and Social Studies education are undergoing significant changes in terms of classroom practice: the firm centrality of inquiry methods, authentic fieldwork experiences, the greater use of discussion, the focus on controversial issues, greater attention to students’ ideas, and a conceptual focus for teaching and learning have gained greater traction in classrooms. The articles in this issue of HSSE Online address and support these changes.

What are our purposes in these efforts? Why should we use these approaches with our students and in our professional learning? These efforts serve greater, more important purposes than exam preparation or the transmission of knowledge; they are designed to help people think carefully and critically about issues, understand different views, discuss and deliberate problems, and develop a shared sense of humanity with commitments to tolerance, open-mindedness, cooperation, compassion and justice. They are intended to help people become active, concerned and participatory citizens who can lead meaningful and productive lives.

In this issue of HSSE Online, several articles point the way towards these goals by offering practical suggestions for classroom practice. Suhaimi Afandi and Eulalia Han provide specific strategies for helping students develop historical habits of mind through inquiry and the use of historical concepts. They show how historical concepts, such as significance, diversity, causation and accounts, can be used in inquiry to help students understand key topics in the Secondary History syllabus.

Sim Hwee Hwang offers two articles to help Primary Social Studies teachers think about using classroom discussion as a shared inquiry approach. Her first article highlights the Walsh and Sattes’ (2015) framework for quality discussion and guides teachers through the selection of issues for discussion in primary classrooms, how to frame high quality questions for discussion, and how discussions can be effectively organized and facilitated in practical ways. Her second article draws on three other models of classroom discussion and demonstrates how they can be utilized with specific content in the Primary Social Studies syllabus.

Karthikeyan Rajah Jefferson’s article on causal layered analysis provides the lenses of litany (precipitating causes), social causes (systemic causes), discourse/worldview (ideational causes) and myth/metaphor (core narratives) to analyze the 2015 General Election in Singapore. These lenses can easily be modified and used with Secondary and JC students to push their analytical thinking about social, economic and political issues and events. They provide a useful toolkit to help students probe deeper levels of causation and meaning.

Tharuka Prematillake Thibbotuwawa’s article, “Shifting Scales of Time and Space: Establishing Connections Across the Humanities,” encourages History and Geography teachers to think more about the interdisciplinarity of their subjects and suggests the use of common concepts and perspectives to help students make connections across time and space. To make sense of the world, the past, present and future, she suggests a more integrated toolkit for building knowledge and thinking about the world.

Siew Fong Ng’s article addresses students’ ideas in economics and helps us understand why students might think about economics in these ways. She highlights the role of students’ prior knowledge, their learning preferences, challenges related to reading and understanding graphic representations in economics, and the role of language in shaping students’ ideas. Each of these is important for teachers to consider in order to address misconceptions students may have in understanding economics.

I hope you find these articles enriching and useful.

Mark Baildon
Editor, HSSE Online
June 2016