Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to consider a new resource: the Social Studies Network, a community of Social Studies teachers of all levels who are supporting each other and freely sharing their resources.  The resource specialist assigned to help you with this task is Gabriel Valdez, from Fort Worth, Texas. 

Social Studies (n.) – a discipline in North American schools focused on educating students about Civics, Economics, World Cultures, Geography, and History, or, more generally, the studying of current and past societies.

Welcome to another installment of the ‘Meet the Resources’ series where I feature the educational equivalent of Gecko Gloves, Smart Contacts, or Flute Guns: technology that has been created to make your impossible lessons actually possible! A reminder that Lesson: Impossible receives no compensation for featuring resources, just the satisfaction of knowing that somewhere a student might be more engaged in their learning or a teacher might be able to leave work a little bit earlier.

This was an especially fun Meet a Resource interview for me, as my teaching specialties are French and Social Studies.  Gabriel Valdez and I spent time talking about the actual resource, which is a database of more Social Studies lessons than you could possibly teach in a lifetime, but also ended up having a more general conversation about the joys and struggles of teaching Social Studies. 

In this episode we discuss:

• Gabriel’s background and the origins of the Social Studies Network

• The types of resources teachers are looking for

• Changing approaches to teaching ‘hard history’

• Including the community in curriculum

• Gabriel’s favorite unit: debating the rain forest

• How to get access to all the lessons on the network

• New additions to the network to help with Covid-era teaching

• Using written and visual primary sources and where to find appropriate resources

• Gabriel’s ideal school: collaboration between subjects

• Gabriel’s use of collaborative journals between different classes

How to get involved with the Social Studies Network:

• You can join the over 11,000 members of the Social Studies Network Facebook group

• You can share resources with their shared drive by emailing socialstudiesnetworkdrive@gmail.com

• You can join the Twitter Social Studies PLN

 Additional Social Studies resources to check out:

• DocsTeach – an online tool for teaching with documents, from the National Archives

• Facing History and Ourselves – resources that address racism, antisemitism, and prejudice at pivotal moments in history that help students connect choices made in the past to those they will confront in their own lives

• Eagle Eye Citizen – students solve American history and civics challenges online by exploring Library of Congress primary sources

• Teaching Hard History – resource from the Southern Poverty Law Center on how to teach about slavery in America

• Symbaloo – online collection of resources for SocialStudiesTx

• Stanford History Education Group – including History Assessments

• iCivics – civics website founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

• The Gilder Lehrman Collection of American History – historical documents and artifacts from American History, 1493-1945

• Teaching American History – helps teachers bring the documents and debates of America’s past into the present

• Bunk – a shared home for the web’s most interesting writing and thinking about the American past.

• Re-Imagining Migration – resources to explore a study of human migration, with a focus on building and sustaining welcoming and inclusive communities.