The program in History/Social Science Education is concerned with how young people make sense of both the past and their present in school and out-of-school settings. The program explores core issues of teaching and learning and, most broadly, engages the very nature of historical consciousness: What does it mean to live in a present suffused by the past? How can the skills of historical reasoning be leveraged to help us understand digital information that confronts us in the present? Over the past several years, our focus has increasingly been on what we call “Online Civic Reasoning,” and how to help students and teachers prepare for a world in which the very idea of truth is under assault.
Taught well, history fosters tolerance for complexity and intolerance for simple answers. How can schools teach young people to discern reasoned interpretations from stances that seek to extinguish--not promote--critical judgment? What can educators do to cultivate historical reasoning and teach young people that there's more to the past than just names and dates? Cutting-edge research shows that even elementary school children can learn to think historically, but such classrooms are rare. How can we design bold pedagogies and adventuresome curriculum so that such classrooms become the rule, not the exception--for all students, not just the privileged?
New technologies offer a potential answer but one that has yet to be realized. Digital media allow 10-year-olds to enter on-line archives that a few years ago required flights across the country and layers of written consent. How can we mobilize such technologies so that students embrace the rich complexity of the documentary record? How can we prepare future teachers who can turn digital materials into programs for advancing students' understanding? How do we develop curriculum that allows students to see through the falsehoods and deceptions that pervade the Internet?
There are no formal prerequisites for admission to the program in History/Social Science Education. Experience in teaching history/social science is definitely asset and provides a useful entry point to many of these questions. But more important than any set of prior experiences is a boundless curiosity to understand how the past shapes understanding in the present and how we can learn more about designing effective educational programs. Many backgrounds prepare one for successful graduate study in this Ph.D. concentration: teaching, filmmaking, web design, programming, and archival work are some of the many possibilities. Successful candidates will probably possess an academic background in one or more of the following areas: history, anthropology, geography, cognitive science, computer science, cultural studies, American Studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, or sociology.
For more information and examples of our latest research projects, please visit http://sheg.stanford.edu
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