Oregon’s 2024 Social Studies Standards introduce fresh perspectives and a more inclusive curriculum. Clinical Assistant Professor Cari Zall explains the new standards and how Lewis & Clark’s Graduate School of Education and Counseling is preparing future educators to work with these guidelines.
Oregon’s 2024 Social Studies Standards introduce fresh perspectives and a more inclusive curriculum.
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Big changes are coming to Oregon’s social studies classrooms, thanks to the state’s new 2024 Social Science Standards. To understand what this means for classrooms and future educators studying at Lewis & Clark, we spoke with Clinical Assistant Professor Cari Zall, who is the secondary content coordinator of social studies and math in the Teacher Education Program. Zall is a member of the Oregon Department of Education’s Social Science Standards Professional Learning Advisory Committee, which will design and plan professional development opportunities to support the launch of the new standards.
What prompted Oregon’s new Social Studies Standards?
It has been a years’-long process in Oregon as new legislative mandates have been added along with requirements around integrating ethnic studies into the curriculum. The mandates include required integration of Indigenous history and topics, coverage of the Holocaust and other genocides, and a new graduation requirement for civics topics. These changes have all been legislated since the last Social Studies Standards rolled out in 2018. So the new 2024 standards now integrate Oregon’s goal for students to engage in a critical examination of the world in which they live.
How do the new standards prioritize traditionally underrepresented perspectives?
The new standards particularly take a culturally responsive approach to the various topics in social studies by engaging students in a new canon of texts, perspectives in history, and current issues, and by honoring the voices that have so often been left out of the dominant narratives in social studies. Because the new standards cover all grades, K-12, the impact will hopefully mean that students will now advance through their education while building and expanding their perspectives and understanding of people whose stories often have been left out.
Also, the standards now offer content suggestions and ways to consider how each standard might apply in a grade-level appropriate way. This addition is significant for teachers, who don’t necessarily get professional development or direct support on updating their curriculum. For students, the standards ensure that no matter who they are, they will have the opportunity to see themselves in history, or geography, or economics, or civics.
Cari Zall, clinical assistant professor and secondary content coordinator of social studies and math in the Teacher Education ProgramHow will the revised standards affect the way social studies educators approach sensitive topics, such as genocides or ethnic studies?
The new standards offer consistent guidance in the form of concepts, democratic values, and skills, which teachers build upon from year to year. So even in elementary school, students will grapple with “conflict and cooperation,” which will lead to building a foundation of understanding about how discrimination and oppression can happen. Then connecting the concepts to skills, the standards integrate learning about cause and effect, demonstrating empathy, building global connections, and other perspectives that give teachers and students ways to access difficult topics and hard history.
How might these new standards look in the classroom?
One of the things that truly supports a critical look at social studies topics, particularly history, is the use of primary sources. In a history class, for example, students could compare the original Oregon constitution to various treaties that tribes were forced to sign and the resulting impacts of each. By implementing the use of original documents, like treaties or photographs, as well as honoring passed-down oral traditions, students can take much more agency over how they analyze information about our shared history and culture.
With the new standards, how are students being better prepared for active participation in our democracy?
We know that one of the primary engagement factors in democracy is a sense of belonging. Building that sense of belonging for each student in Oregon is essentially what is behind the details of these new standards. More than any set of previous standards, these build in connection, representation, empathy, and relevancy in a way that no matter who a student is, they can see themselves as having agency and being an essential part of building and sustaining democracy together.
How is L&C’s Teacher Education Program adapting its curriculum to ensure that new teachers are well-prepared to implement the new standards?
Beginning with this year’s cohort, we adopted a new model that introduces future social studies teachers to the new standards and mandates at the very beginning of their journey. As the social studies content coordinator, I initiated a new course for the opening summer term called Critical Studies in Oregon History, where we explore how to integrate the various requirements and standards using Oregon history as our topic. This also allows graduate students who did not grow up in Oregon to learn about Oregon history using a critical examination of our past, including the rich Indigenous history of the state, as well as the hard history that includes exclusion laws, white supremacy, and land conflicts. In between all that, we find creative ways to explore the new standards and talk about how they can be relevant for kids growing up in Oregon in the 21st century. Then, following that, the social studies methods classes throughout the program continue to integrate the new standards as teacher candidates learn to plan, teach, assess, and build relationships with their own students.
What long-term outcomes do you hope these changes will achieve?
I think my primary wish is that the mandates that were legislated by Oregon’s leaders around the need to integrate ethnic studies, holocaust and genocide understanding, Indigenous history and knowledge, and civics would be seen as topics that can be integrated into all content areas, not just social studies. In the end, building and maintaining a multicultural and equitable democracy means students get to see how these ideas matter in all areas of life including science, language arts, math, and even physical education and the arts.
But for now, these standards are primarily located in the social studies curriculum, so my hope is that current and future Oregon social studies teachers will see the broad benefits of a critical approach to understanding the world. Then all of our students can experience a sense of belonging and leave school with the agency to impact their world for the better.
