Teaching of Social Sciences
The social sciences encompass diverse concerns of society and include a wide a range of content, drawn from the disciplines of history, geography, political science, economics and sociology. The
selection and organisation of material into a meaningful social science curriculum, enabling students to develop a critical understanding of society, is therefore a challenging task. The possibilities of including new dimensions and concerns are immense especially in view of the student’s own life
experiences.
It is important to reinstate the significance of the social sciences by not only highlighting its increasing relevance for a job in the rapidly expanding service sector, but by pointing to its
indispensability in laying the foundations for an analytical and creative mindset.
It is often presumed that only natural and physical phenomena lend themselves to scientific inquiry, and that knowledge areas pertaining to the human sciences (history, geography, economics,
political science etc.) cannot be, by their very nature “scientific”. But it is necessary to recognise that the social sciences lend themselves to scientific inquiry just as much as the natural and physical sciences do, as well as to articulate the ways in which the methods employed by social sciences are distinct (but in no way inferior) to those of the natural and physical sciences.
The social sciences carry a normative responsibility to create and widen the popular base for human values, namely freedom, trust, mutual respect, respect for diversity, etc. Thus, social science
teaching basically should be aimed at investing in a child a moral and mental energy so as to provide her with the ability to think independently and deal with the social forces that threaten
these values, without losing her individuality. Social Science teaching can achieve this by promoting children’s ability to take initiative to critically reflect on social issues that have a bearing on the creative coexistence between individual good and collective good. Critical reflection pre-supposes a comprehensive curriculum in which learners – both teachers and children – participate in generating knowledge without any latent and manifest forces of coercion. It is through this non-coercive and participatory mode that children and teachers stand the best chance of making teaching and learning interesting as well as enjoyable.
The disciplines that make up the social sciences, namely history, geography, political science and economics, have distinct methodologies that often justify the preservation of boundaries.
The boundaries of disciplines need to be opened up and a plurality of approaches may be applied to understand a given phenomenon. For an enabling curriculum, certain themes that facilitate interdisciplinary thinking are required.
