Marilynne Boyle-Baise

Young Citizens of the World takes a clear stance: Social studies is about citizenship education that is informed, deliberative, and activist—citizenship not only as a noun, something one studies, but as a verb, something one DOES. Its holistic, multicultural approach is based on this clear curricular and pedagogical purpose. Straightforward, engaging, and highly interactive, the book encourages students (and their teachers) to become informed, think it through, and take action. Each chapter is written as a civic engagement which is teacher-ready for use in elementary classrooms. A set of six teaching strategies that are constructive, inquiry-driven, dramatic, and deliberative bring the curricular framework to life through intensive, integrated meaningful studies of special places, important people, and significant times. Readers are invited to rehearse the projects in their social studies education courses and then to reinterpret them for their classrooms. The projects are supported by important resources for teaching, including supportive children’s literature, links to internet sites, and visual sources and by a Companion Website that enhances and extends the text.

Young Citizens of the World takes a clear stance: Social studies is about citizenship education that is informed, deliberative, and activist—citizenship not only as a noun, something one studies, but as a verb, something one DOES. Its holistic, multicultural approach is based on this clear curricular and pedagogical purpose. Straightforward, engaging, and highly interactive, the book encourages students (and their teachers) to become informed, think it through, and take action. Each chapter is written as a civic engagement which is teacher-ready for use in elementary classrooms. A set of six teaching strategies that are constructive, inquiry-driven, dramatic, and deliberative bring the curricular framework to life through intensive, integrated meaningful studies of special places, important people, and significant times. Readers are invited to rehearse the projects in their social studies education courses and then to reinterpret them for their classrooms. The projects are supported by important resources for teaching, including supportive children’s literature, links to internet sites, and visual sources and by a Companion Website that enhances and extends the text.

This in-depth look at the relationship between service learning and issues of diversity is a virtual blueprint for helping teachers (both pre- and in-service) to work better within their diverse classes and to bring increased understanding of diversity issues to all classrooms. Because there is only so much you can teach about culture, difference, and power in a university classroom, service learning is becoming an essential companion to multicultural teacher education. This volume shows how the author collaborated with community partners and pre-service teachers to jointly construct the service learning supplement to a multicultural education course - from the bottom up.