Program Director: Diana Turk
Address: East Building, 635C
239 Greene Street
New York, NY 10003-6647
Phone: 212-998-5460

A New Generation of Teachers

Social studies classes should be the locus of middle and high school student learning about American society and the world, past and present. It is in social studies that students are supposed to prepare for their role as citizens by studying history, economics, geography, and government. The opportunities for exciting learning in social studies seem unlimited, since students can grapple with the great issues of our world: war and peace; democracy versus autocracy; poverty; racial, class, and sexual inequality; prejudice; technological change; and corporate economic dominance. Our Program in Teaching Social Studies, Grades 7-12, is dedicated to producing a new generation of middle and high school teachers who are equipped to take students beyond the world of bland textbooks and multiple choice tests and to generate real student interest in history, the social sciences, and the challenges of active citizenship.


Strong Liberal Arts Orientation

To teach social studies effectively, you have to start with a strong mastery of the content areas that students will be exploring with you. Since history is the core discipline in the social studies curriculum of New York and many other states, our program includes extensive historical study, which will introduce you to global and U.S. history and then enable you to develop an area of specialization, such as modern Europe, in which you complete advanced course work and a research seminar (in small class settings). To build a cross-disciplinary understanding of society and civilization, you take a wide range of courses in the humanities, social sciences, foreign language, the natural sciences, and mathematics.


Educational Emphasis

The curriculum's course work in educational methods and theory builds on this strong foundation in the social sciences and the humanities. As you develop expertise, for example, in American history, your education classes examine ways that you can use your knowledge to teach this subject effectively to young students. Social studies courses will familiarize you with ways to integrate history, literature, and the arts and how to involve students in inquiry-based history workshops, which engage them in analyzing historical controversies and primary sources. You will learn how community studies and local history can involve students in major research projects that relate to their own lives and neighborhoods and encounter the latest programs to foster citizenship and participatory democracy via service learning. You will be exposed to research on how adolescents and children learn and study the most innovative methods and materials being used in high school and middle school social studies classes. Other education course work will teach you how to deal with student reading and writing problems and ensure that you enter teaching with a strong grasp of the special education and educational policy issues that affect schooling.


The City as a Social Studies Laboratory

New York City is the home of some of the leading innovators in social studies education, and our social studies program involves these reformers in its course work. You will learn from them about projects that have succeeded in evoking student interest in politics and community studies, such as the Educational Video Center, which teaches high school students how to make documentary films about local issues. Our students have also explored ways that new technologies can be used to bring history to life by developing primary source activities for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute's New Deal website and for Witnessing the Early American Experience website. Our program has been a source of innovation on the New York educational scene and has involved our students in designing curriculum for our urban school partners, so that students have an opportunity to help in efforts to reform social studies education in the real world of public school students and teachers.


Nationally Recognized Faculty

Members of our faculty have participated in the key debates that have shaped the fields of social studies over the past decade, on issues such as multiculturalism, national history standards, service learning, technology in the classroom, women's history, and historical methods. Faculty members publish regularly in leading social studies journals, including Social Education, and also have published influential books on education and community, school reform, and American history. They have spearheaded social studies curriculum reform projects in primary, middle, and secondary schools. Current faculty projects include teacher development in U.S. history, historical understanding among African American and white students, and innovative methods of teaching history, including through technology. Faculty in our program collaborate with colleagues in allied fields in our Department of Teaching and Learning, most notably English education, with whom we have developed a course that integrates literature and history to prepare our graduates to take an interdisciplinary approach to social studies.


Fieldwork and Student Teaching

In your junior year, you begin your student teaching experience by observing middle or secondary school teachers and their students in their classrooms. Such observations in New York City's public schools, along with methods courses taught by veteran teachers, prepare you for your senior year of student teaching. In the fall semester of your senior year, under the guidance of your cooperating teacher (an NYU supervisor and methods teacher), you assume responsibility for teaching a daily middle school social studies class. This is followed in the spring with a semester of high school student teaching in social studies, which again will involve a collaborative effort among you, your cooperating school teacher, and your NYU faculty mentor.


Helping You Start Your Career

Many of our students receive their first job offer from the school where they do their teaching internship, and the New York City Department of Education recruits on campus at the end of each semester. There are also many opportunities in New York City to work for nonprofit international agencies that employ educators.


Career Opportunities

Our program in social studies education prepares you for teaching secondary school social studies anywhere in the United States or overseas. To qualify for provisional or initial certification in New York and most other states, you take the National Teachers Examination after graduation. Our program also provides excellent preparation if you wish to work in other positions related to social studies education, such as textbook editor in publishing or a curriculum developer in an educational agency.

Following is a small sampling of the positions obtained by recent graduates:
• Secondary school teacher at, for example, Hunter College High School, Stuyvesant High School, Norman Thomas High School, and Brooklyn Technical High School
• Educational filmmaker on an Australian aborigine project
• Consultant on social studies curriculum materials
• Congressional aide on education issues
• Guidance counselor, Cleveland Board of Education