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TLT 431, Spring 2026 - Course record

TLT 431, Spring 2026 - Course record

Wednesdays, 7:15-9:55 in Iacocca Hall room B-023 (might switch rooms) - did switch rooms! Maginnes 103 on main campus

First class = Wed, 21 Jan; last class = Wed, 29 Apr; no class on 11 Mar (Spring Break)

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - spring break - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15

Week 1 - Wednesday, 21 Jan

Before class

  • Buy a copy of the textbook (Singer, 5th edition). You can get it from the publisher (Routledge) or (of course) from Amazon

  • Cruise this wiki and the CourseSite.

  • Preview the syllabus. We will discuss it during class

During class (ppt)

After class

  • Assignments

    • Starting working on your first Original Instructional Material (OIM)

    • Writing-to-Learn (WTL): Complete your 'Social Studies Autobiography' (see forum in CourseSite)

    • Download all of the standards in the folder in CourseSite. Save them on your computer in an easily-accessible space

    • BRING IN for next week’s class any sort of social studies resource! Doesn’t matter what it is!

  • Reading

    • Skim the C3 standards ('College, Career, and Civic Life') from the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

    • Singer, Preface & Ch. 1 (just read enough to get a sense of who he is)

    • Read NCSS, 2023. In fact, the whole list of NCSS position statements is probably worth bookmarking!

    • Read Gaudelli & Laverty, 2017 (find it in the 'Copyrighted readings' folder in CourseSite. FYI: Gaudelli is the former dean of Lehigh's College of Ed, so give this a think!

    • Optional – again, you can find these in the 'Copyrighted readings' folder in CourseSite: Mehlinger, 1988; Crocco, 2004

 

Week 02 - Wednesday, 28 January 

Before class

  • Complete reading

  • Fill out your 'Social studies autobiography' WTL in CourseSite

  • Download & organize standards documents

  • Think about your OIMs

  • Bring in a social studies resource

During class (ppt)

After class

  • Readings

    • Read through civics standards, both PDE and C3 (in folder marked ‘Standards’ in CourseSite)

    • Skim Westheimer & Kahne, “What kind of citizen” (in CourseSite, ‘copyrighted readings’ folder)

    • Singer, Ch. 3 (we’ll circle back to Ch. 2, later)

  • Assignments

    • Complete & bring in OIM #1

    • Do WTL in CourseSite on ‘What kind of citizen?’ / civics standards

Week 03 - Wednesday, 4 February

Before class

  • Complete reading

  • Complete & bring in OIM #1 (no reflection required this time; you’ll do one with OIM #2)

During class (ppt)

  • Orienting ourselves: last week / this week / next week

  • Sharing OIMs, starting with rules of engagement. (I’m trying to talk as little as possible!)

    • Time permitting: We’ll play through a place-based civics game that I created using ActionBound (adapting a game created by Julie Oltman)

  • Connecting OIMs to frameworks, starting to fill out methods toolboxes (see spreadsheet link in CourseSite)

  • Connecting OIMs to standards

    • Example to play with: Community resources, community needs / Built environment scavenger hunt

    • Another example: NotebookLM to do a quick media comparison

  • Looking outside the standards for sources of authority & guidance

  • Act 35 in Pennsylvania: Civics, authority, and a permission structure for professional disrespect

  • What’s the point of social studies / What kind of citizen?

  • Instructional planning: FRAMES for planning instruction

    • Giving-prompting-making (for any content area)

    • Self-others-action (particularly for civics?)

    • Inquiry Arc (from the C3 standards)

  • Closure

After class

  • Reading

    • Singer, Ch. 4

    • Optional: Hammond & Manfra, 2009 (the giving-prompting-making article)

    • I also encourage you to re-visit the civics standards

  • Assignments

    • Complete & turn in HTCE

    • Think about OIM #2 – how will you challenge yourself?

    • Complete two WTLs on civics ed

 

Week 04 - Wednesday, February 11

Before class

  • Complete reading

  • Complete HTCE image prep; turn in via CourseSite

  • Complete WTLs

During class (ppt)

After class

  • Reading: Select something from this AI list

  • Assignments

    • Complete and bring in your OIM #2; don’t forget there’s a reflection!

    • Complete WTL on iCivics

    • OPTIONAL: Complete WTL on AI integration & AI literacy

Week 05 - Wednesday, February 18

Before class

  • Complete and turn in OIM #2

  • Complete WTL on iCivics (required); at least take a look at the optional WTL on AI

  • Read at least one thing from the AI list I have been (haphazardly) keeping

During class (no ppt! Just lots of links below)

  • Current events! Too good not to pause for this: Trump administration ordered to restore George Washington slavery exhibit it removed in Philadelphia

    • (happened just in time for Presidents Day!)

    • Citizen participation in protest against removal of exhibit = great opportunity to discuss civics / history duality

      • Something I’m catching up with: 1882 lecture by Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’un nation?”). Famous line: "Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation." This episode is one example (among many) of the Trump admin trying to memory-hole something in service of its vision of the nation. They lost this battle, but are they winning the war?

        • More from Renan on forgetting: “Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacre that took place in the south in the thirteenth century”

        • My one instance of running into this: Bulgaria’s forgetting its unique experience of the Holocaust. See my ArGIS Online map; apparently this is NOT taught in Bulgarian schools. I have no idea why.

  • OIM #2: In the interest of time, we won’t show-and-tell, but let’s take a minute to at least tell what we did, plus an invitation to share – see forum in CourseSite

  • Putting our civics discussion to be bed for now – revisiting topic of civics / attitudes & values being at the heart of civics (and history? and geography? and economics?). Will revisit slides from last week

  • Before we take our dive into AI

    • Speaking of forgetting: How to remember / recall / organize instructional ideas? We have our spreadsheet of methods…what else? What do we use, as individuals? Or are there collective actions we can take?

      • I have a humble Google Doc that I use (Dumping ground of AI ideas); I will eventually create a public-facing wiki page (or something else? A Wordpress blog?). What you’re seeing tonight is selections from this document

      • Going to the other extreme: There is a massive, open Google Drive that (AFAIK) anyone can join and contribute to: Social Studies Collaborative Drive, maintained by Joe Harmon. (Note: He is a big fan of iCivics. This is why you shouldn’t just listen to me & my stupid opinions)

  • AI stuff – I will be dipping in and out of these slides: AI literacy integration - LUSSC 21 May 2025

    • (Before we start: If anyone would like to collaborate on a manuscript, either now or in the future, almost all of this is up for grabs. Just let me know. And all of it is available for your use / adaptation / sharing, no need to let me know.)

    • Pass #1: Why I think AI matters / requires special attention (all of this is in the book chapter I did with Dr. Pan)

      • AI isn’t like any previous technology

      • No one is coming to save us; the only defense against the downsides lie in users' judgment

      • Social studies is interested in all technologies, but particularly one that has massive implications for the economy, for governance, for social interaction, for the climate….

    • Pass #2: People need to know at least a little about how AI works (or doesn’t work). Some examples

      • Human as a GPT activity – we will attempt a speed run of this, using Wikipedia. A treatment of this is being published in Social Education, in a few months. Katie Quartuch, now of Stroudsburg Area SD, for contributing to this!)

      • Things AI isn’t (currently) good at vs. things that it is already good at (and getting better)

    • Pass #3: AI is useful for instructional purposes

      • (Teacher productivity: coming up with lesson plans, assessments, differentiation strategies, language supports, writing emails, etc etc etc)

      • Student assistant: “Indefatigable tutor”: Pick a historical topic you know relatively well (for testing purposes; your students, by default, won’t know it well), ask a chatbot to explain it, ask it to create a metaphor or analogy to help you understand it, ask for a quiz to test your understanding, ask for a study guide, ask for a set of flashcards, a podcast, etc etc etc

      • Assessment idea: AI-generated images as an assessment object: Generate an image, then describe & critique it. Cite more authoritative sources, provide actual primary source images (if possible), etc.

      • Instructional idea: NotebookLM (or another tool) to curate the training data

        • Media comparison activity: FoxNews.com vs. MS.now; ChinaDaily.com.cn vs. bbb.com

        • Going deep on authoritative sources (often with a political gradient): Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist papers, Supreme Court majority opinions vs. dissents. (What is a dissent in one court can become a majority opinion in a future court, and vice versa. Most famous example is John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, opposing de jure segregation – became majority opinion in Brown, and now the SC is one its way to revising that view further to make de facto segregation acceptable)

    • Pass #4: We have to teach AI literacy…but it has to be a critical literacy.

      • So don’t do these sorts of things: “How to ask the magic answer machine the question in the right way”, aka prompt engineering

      • Instead, do these sorts of things, teaching students about AI in the context of its limitations and impacts, while also teaching them about social studies

        • Map fails → Code-to-Map → insight

          • (Thanks to Sarah Lazarchak of BASD for the key, Code-to-Map step!)

        • AI is a lazy reader: Use NotebookLM to examine AllAboutExplorers.com

        • Seeing how far you can get inside an epistemic bubble: Point NotebookLM at a misinformation source (ex: Heartland Institute, or the current iteration of WhiteHouse.gov) and ask follow ups using only the auto-suggestions; see what kinds of assertions get served up the more you iterate. Sort of like YouTube’s auto-suggestions leading you deeper down the rabbit hole

        • AI is watching YOU

          • Ask an LLM, “Tell me something about myself that I don’t know”

          • Ask your most frequent AI platform: “What data do you have about me?”

        • (Something about environmental impacts of AI – just ask an LLM to explain how many resources were consumed in answering your prompt?)

        • (Something about ethics and AI)

    • (Pass #5, and this is actually beyond the scope of what I’m trying to get at: With license for overstatement, AI will either end public schools or fundamentally transform them. LLMs were like the Terminator circa 1984; agentic AI is a 1991-style T-1000. Imagine a future in which every college applicant has created an app, done original research, run a charity organization, AND founded a literary magazine, all before breakfast)

After class

  • Reading

    • Singer, Ch. 13 – grab bag of topics, but starting with AI. Some sections you should read carefully, others you can breeze through. Sections on field trips and showing movies are worth slowing down for!

    • Optional: If you didn’t read it already, let me recommend my book chapter (in CourseSite): Hammond, Pan, & Oltman (2025) AI literacy and social studies. Rest of the book is also quite interesting! (AI in Social Studies Education )

  • Assignments

    • Complete & turn in Course Plan #1

    • Optional WTL: What are your takeaways from our AI work?

    • Required WTL – and this will be annoying – How do you organize the world?

  • CIVIC LIFE: Watch at least PART of the State of the Union on Tuesday, 24 Feb 2026 at 9:00pm. There will also be an alternative event hosted by the Democrats; I will be checking out both

Week 06 - Wednesday, Feb 25, 2026

Before class

  • Complete WTL (and I’d love it if you did the optional one! But that doesn’t mean you have to!)

  • Watch part of the state of the union and/or the Democratic Party events (“state of the swamp”)

  • Compete reading

During class (ppt)

  • Housekeeping, current events

  • Some attempted takeaways to put civics ed away (or rather, “away”, since it will be with us always). Relevant links include

  • Getting into geography ed – let’s do some things

    • Sketchmap of the USA

    • What’s in a (state) name?

      • If you want to cheat (and/or just see my sources), check out this spreadsheet and this map

    • Geography ed and our three “stances” of social studies instruction

    • An inquiry arc activity on the Gulf of Mexico (as in, what we call that body of water…not the actual region as a geographic phenomenon….)

    • Some mashups of geography & civics (and science and math!)

      • Human geography: Estimating demographics of the United States

      • Human-environment interaction: Sinkholes as a regional phenomenon

      • Watersheds & local water infrastructure

      • September 11th, in a middle school geography class (aka, the greatest geography lesson I’ve ever observed)

    • More on stances, this time tied to methods

    • Curricular packages for geography

After class

  • Reading

    • Geography standards: PDE, C3. THERE IS A HIDDEN SURPRISE IN HERE. Don’t overlook it!

    • Skim: Leeson et al., 2022 - example of tools of geography (GIS) in action

    • Optional: Walker, 1916, “The Sketch-Map as an Aid in the Teaching of Historical Geography” (for true maniacs…but worth a look!)

  • Assignments

    • Complete and turn in Course Plan #1

    • Complete WTL on geography ed resources (can complete later – not super time-sensitive)

      Hint: Google ‘Esri GeoInquiry’ and you’ll find something good

    • Fill out form for textile / shoes (see link in CourseSite)

Week 07 - Wednesday, March 04

Before class

  • Complete WTL, fill out form linked in CourseSite from last week