When a Text Transforms a Course: Cowhey's Black Ants and Buddhists

Each semester, at a state university in northern New Jersey, I teach multiple sections of the only course in K-5 Social Studies teaching methods in an undergraduate elementary teacher preparation program. This course is taken in conjunction with a significant amount of time spent in the field (two full days a week and two full weeks in an urban public school classroom); the following semester is devoted to full-time student teaching, before our teacher candidates join the ever more challenging competition for teaching positions in the area and throughout the country.

Three years ago, as a new professor assigned the Social Studies methods course, I immediately chose a fairly traditional textbook by an educator and major scholar whose work on multicultural education is very well respected. This is how I had always seen it done. The textbook seemed useful in terms of teaching "big ideas" that were central to the course as I envision it: teaching with an understanding of sociopolitical contexts; exploring the many ways that race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. can affect the curriculum and the classroom; understanding social movements that have influenced and continue to affect American education. I stuck rather faithfully to this book, with Power Point presentations summarizing its concepts, and large/small group discussions of the chapters.

When I received my first two semesters' worth of evaluations, I noticed one consistently lower score in each section of this course: students responded in a lukewarm manner to my choice of text. I thought for a while about the textbook with more of my attention focused on my students' point of view. I knew it was time for a shake-up in the course's curriculum.

I decided to center class discussion the following semester around a very different kind of book: Black Ants and Buddhists, by Mary Cowhey (2006, Stenhouse Publishing). This book details a school year in the life of the author, a first grade teacher. Full of details, quotes, scenarios, and adventures taken directly from her experience teaching first grade in a highly diverse urban public school, Black Ants was immediately interesting to the students. Several students, then and in the three semesters since, said that they could not put it down.

Inspired by a Writing Across the Curriculum professional development workshop, I began assigning a Double Entry Journal, in which students briefly summarized favorite scenes in a left hand column and reflected upon them on the right ("note taking on the left; note making on the right"). Students signed up as discussion leaders for each chapter, fielding discussion on difficult topics, from teaching about historical and current catastrophes to talking to children about race to welcoming families of all sexual orientations and beyond.

Throughout her book, Cowhey engages her first-grade students in social action projects, such as food collections, using these events as a chance to teach about poverty, its transience and its systemic roots. Cowhey's lengthy list of community members invited into her classroom over the years serves as a reminder of and a guide to the richness of free, personally and culturally relevant Social Studies learning resources within communities. Throughout the course of a year, the young students of Cowhey's "Peace Class" engage in protests, create petitions, help people in their families register to vote, learn about the histories of their own families, discuss cultural relativism and conflict resolution, all while learning to explore history and science, literature and mathematics with a critical eye.

As this book allowed my teacher-candidates to experience the daily struggles and successes of a primary-level teacher striving to teach Social Studies in meaningful, critical ways, they asked themselves, quite naturally, if they would engage in the same activities themselves. It was difficult for some teacher-candidates to see themselves leading a protest around their school or registering people to vote, even though many felt sympathetic with these activities. Most teacher-candidates loved to read about the brilliant discussions held among children, facilitated but not controlled by the teacher; for example, ants seen in the classroom led to a...