About the Program

Program in Social Studies Philosophical Statement

The Program in Social Studies combines history and the social sciences for purposes of instruction. The program particularly emphasizes the historical development of the field, the selection, and organization of subject matter, and analysis of instructional materials for students of diverse backgrounds in both urban and suburban school settings. Social studies teachers must be schooled in subject matter, practiced in the arts of pedagogy, attuned to the needs of students, and alive to the interplay of theory and practice.

The program prepares students for professional positions in schools, colleges, universities, and allied institutions. Our faculty's strengths in history and social education, as well as pedagogy, are well suited to that purpose. These strengths, along with the full resources of Teachers College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are, of course, available to every student.

The Program in Social Studies is one of the oldest programs in social studies in the country. Indeed, social studies as a distinctive school subject was, in a sense, "founded" at Teachers College in the 1920s. A number of the key theorists who helped create and develop the National Council for the Social Studies after its establishment in 1921 served as faculty members at Teachers College.

Since the establishment of the Program in Social Studies at Teachers College, its philosophy has been dedicated to advancing citizenship education, the defining ethos of the field. Imbued with the ideas of John Dewey, especially the notion that democracy is a form of associated living, the Program has sought to offer an educational approach that prepares teachers in history and the social sciences for the demands of citizenship, broadly construed along Deweyan lines. In this vein, for example, the faculty's research and writing has recently shown leadership in advocating for greater attention to gender and sexuality in social studies teacher education alongside other aspects of diversity.

Because of this legacy, the Program also emphasizes historical development of the field. Over the last decade, the faculty has dramatically altered the structure of the pre-service masters degree program in an effort to meet the needs of citizenship education in the present democratic age. Social studies teachers must be schooled in subject matter, practiced in the arts of pedagogy, attuned to the needs of diverse students, and alive to the interplay of theory and practice. In short, it is our mission to create educational professionals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions associated with both the historic and contemporary emphases of this Program. These individuals will serve as leaders in the field of social studies no matter where they ultimately take employment-in schools, colleges, universities, or publishing houses, to name just a few of the places where graduates are currently placed.

With regard to the matter of diversity, the Program in Social Studies takes seriously the admonition that teachers should not see their students as merely "other people's children." The philosophy of the Program rests, instead, on the belief that immigrant and inner-city students should be held to standards equivalent to those which middle class teachers expect for their own children. This philosophy aligns well with the NCSS curriculum standards as "Expectations of Excellence" for all the nation's students.

The public schools of New York today serve more than one million students, the overwhelming majority of whom are of color, whether immigrants or native born. Virtually all our pre-service masters candidates do at least one semester and typically two semesters of student teaching in New York City's public schools.

Critical to success in this effort is consideration of the central role of teachers as curricular-instructional gatekeepers, defined as the means by which teachers make the day-to-day decisions concerning both the subject matter and those experiences of the subject matter to which students have access. Whether performed well or poorly, consciously or unconsciously, teachers inevitably act as gatekeepers.

Considerations such as these suggest the various ways in which the Program's faculty members make their own curricular-instructional decisions based on a philosophy animated by concerns for preparing excellent social studies teachers committed to using their expertise for citizenship education, especially in the nation's poorest and most diverse schools.