With all of the social, political, and health movements and crises, our county’s teachers, and especially history-social science teachers, have faced many challenges in the classroom. In this current environment, with most teaching and learning occurring online, this is even more difficult. Educators are working harder, and longer hours in order to work with students, plan lessons, and reflect on how to help them to make sense of and to navigate the changing world.

In this edition of The County Crier, you'll find several professional learning opportunities, resources and more to help address some of these challenges. You will also find an important survey to help the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) help support your work in civic education.

History-Social Science Coordinator, SDCOE

858-295-8857

The California Department of Education will begin issuing the State Seal of Civic Engagement this year. In developing the seal, both State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and the State Board of Education emphasized that it was created as a way to encourage schools and districts to develop K-12 pathways for civic learning. SDCOE has been collaborating with local and statewide stakeholders to support this effort. Your opinion is important in informing this process. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey so you can provide information regarding what you think would be most helpful.

SDCOE is pleased to announce the creation of a new opportunity for high school students to participate in county board meetings and add their voices to important educational decisions. The application period for new student members of the San Diego County Board of Education is now open through March 5. Please visit the SDCOE Student Board Member page to learn more and to find the student application.

The California State Board of Education will hear public testimony regarding the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum at its March 17-18 meeting. As required by Ed Code Section 51226.7 the state board must take action on the model curriculum by March 31. Members of the public can still comment on the current draft by emailing ethnicstudies@cde.ca.gov.

SDCOE, in partnership with the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE), will host the second live webinar supporting California’s State Seal of Civic Engagement. In this webinar, educators, including school and district leaders, will collaborate around the State Seal of Civic Engagement indicators. Attendees will discuss ideas related to local criteria and resources for implementation. Click here to register.

SDCOE with OCDE and the California Global Education Project is facilitating this free, two-part, web-based workshop. Participating teachers will learn about the History-Social Science Framework, and the environmental principles and concepts embedded within. Participants will receive lesson plans and materials focusing on environmental literacy, and they will have time to collaborate and adapt the lesson plans to their own classrooms. After implementing the lessons, they will meet again to discuss how the lessons went and share ideas for how the lessons might be implemented in the future.

Register by March 1 to ensure that you receive all of the materials prior to the first meeting.

In 1957, nine black teenagers faced the threats of angry mobs when they attempted to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The desegregation of Central High following Brown v. Board of Education ignited a crisis that historian Taylor Branch has described as “the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War.”

This online workshop includes two hour-and-a-half synchronous meetings, with opportunities of asynchronous learning in between. It will introduce participants to the Choices in Little Rock unit and help prepare them to teach this unit in their classrooms. They will engage directly with unit materials, explore teaching strategies appropriate for this content, and reflect on ways to adapt and expand on this content with your students.

The first 20 teachers from San Diego, Orange, and Imperial counties to register will have their registration fees waived and will receive a FREE hardcopy of the Choices in Little Rock book.

The meeting dates are April 21 and April 28 from 3:30 to 5 p.m., and the registration fee is $100. Register here.

In an effort to help keep you up to date on current events in history-social science, we have added a new page to the SDCOE History-Social Science website. Similar to this section of the The County Crier, this page will include information about upcoming events, including workshops, educator resources, and student activities. The page is updated on a weekly basis, so you can receive timely information when you need it. Check out this page today.

In a world flooded with competing, conflicting, and contradictory information, students need tools and strategies to identify the purpose, audience, and motives of different information sources, including speeches, posters, advertisements, and social network posts.

Join this three-part series, Building Students' Media Literacy for Civic Engagement to hear from Allison Perlman, associate professor of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, connect with other teachers, and develop your own curriculum to use with your students.

There is no cost to participate in this series. For more information, including dates and times, click here. To register, click here.

This series is hosted by the UC Irvine History Project and the UC Santa Cruz History and Civics Project.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education is inviting educators from across California to participate in monthly webinars it is conducting in partnership with the National Constitution Center. Below is a schedule of workshops and registration links.

After much consideration, the staff of Colonial Williamsburg has made the decision to cancel all onsite residential programs for the summer of 2021. The Teacher Institute will remain virtual during summer 2021. The online programs will include:

Information about these programs will be available in the spring of 2021.

The Digital Public Library of America is a catalog of public domain and openly licensed content held by archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions in the United States. Some of the digital collections include Black Women’s Suffrage, This Land is Your Land: Parks and Public Spaces, and Activism in the US.

The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.