- Google slides on computational thinking (albeit across the curriculum)
I have long been possessed of the notion that there's a way to teach social studies – typically history, but not exclusively – so that it addresses more, that it goes beyond its curricular boundaries. My experience of learning social studies (up to and through majoring in history) taught me that social studies is, as a curricular subject, entirely self-referential: you learn history topics to later reference them...in other history classes. True, in an economics you need some math, and in civics you might need some persuasive writing/speaking skills, but these were always internal transfers – you bring other subjects into social studies; you don't bring social studies into the other subjects. As a result, social studies felt hived off from the rest of the curriculum. I knew that I loved social studies and felt it was vital and necessary...but most of my peers yawned and declaimed that they were merely suffering through it until they could get to study what they felt was useful (math, science) or lovely (English, art, music) or fun (languages, gym). Social studies somehow felt expendable to them, and I didn't know how to argue against it.
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