Historical events and individuals, cross-cutting themes and concepts, essential skills and dispositions, connections to multiple communities and the present—a history/social science teacher’s course and scope and sequence is far-ranging and crowded to say the least. To teach their students well, teachers know all kinds of things and are both generalists and specialists. But there is nothing like an opportunity to collaborate with other educators on investigating, sharing, and learning ways to integrate a specific topic, approach, or skill into daily classroom practice.
To that end, HCP and the larger CHSSP have been facilitating on-going teacher inquiry groups in recent pandemic years. These groups focus on a topic, approach, or grade level and allow for educators to learn from, and with each other, as they delve deeper into a particular topic. In 2021-2022, HCP co-facilitated two inspiring groups, both of which will continue in 2022-2023.
Cover of when the mission bells rang.
Critical Missions Our Critical Missions Teacher Inquiry group built on some zoom meetings in early 2021 and then fully took off in in October 2021 to meet monthly on zoom. Participating teachers spanned grade levels ranging from 2nd grade to the community college level, and in addition to teachers, participants included Amah Mutsun Tribal Band members, UC Santa Cruz professors, parents, parks educators, and community members invested in changing the way that indigenous histories are taught (or not!) in K-12 classrooms.
In the inquiry group, teachers shared best practices, resources, and troubleshooted challenges together. We brainstormed ideas for using Dr. Judy Scott’s book When the Mission Bells Rang, and shared ideas about infusing indigenous perspectives into teaching across grade levels. Check out our the draft of our Critical Missions website or visit here. Sign up here if you are interested in joining this group this year. (Our Kick-off event will be October 10 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History but we will also have online meetings.)
Media Literacy Collaborative
In partnership with UC Irvine, we worked with a group of secondary teachers on teaching and learning media literacy for civic engagement. This teacher-researcher group shared a commitment to helping students build skills, dispositions, and knowledge to navigate the cacophonous media landscape and engage with their communities.
An outline of the work done in 2021-2022
In this online monthly group, we had the opportunity to share ways of organizing existing and new high quality classroom resources and also investigate students’ thinking about their online lives. If you’re interested in this group in 2022-2023, please sign up here for our Open House or to receive updates via email.
Ethnic Studies 
We look forward to participating in, and helping facilitate, a teacher collaborative Fall of 2022 regarding Ethnic Studies. Details regarding this collaborative will be available soon, but we hope to meet together to build communities that support teachers’ in developing and implementing powerful Ethic Studies learning.