Logan High School Social Studies teachers Candace Mullen and Jason Soffe talk to KVNU For the People host Jason Williams.
LOGAN — On his monthly spotlight of the Logan City School District and education in general, Logan School Superintendent Frank Schofield talked social studies and history last week on KVNU’s For the People program. History is a subject Schofield has experience teaching.
“Most people think of me as a former Spanish teacher because that was the majority of my teaching, but my major, my primary degree was actually in history teaching. The best year of my time teaching at Logan High was when I had a portion of my day teaching Spanish and the rest of the day I taught Social Studies to English learners.
So, I got to teach geography and U.S. History and U.S. Government to kids who were coming from different countries with different perspectives on government and history and the role of social studies in their lives,” he explained.
Schofield said over the last couple of years there have been concerns in the U.S. and Utah as well, about the content that is covered in social studies and language arts classes.
Worries that the information is too sensitive or promotes one side of a narrative. Even in extreme cases concern about teachers using it as an opportunity to present their own personal beliefs and use the classroom as a ‘bully pulpit’.
“My experience, as I work with our Social Studies teachers and I visit their classrooms, is that we have teachers who are extremely skilled at making sure that as students study history they are aware of the challenging aspects of the history of our country, and there are many of those. And they’re also be able to show how people have worked through those challenging aspects to accomplish great things.
History is one of those subjects where you get to see the highest highs of human endeavor, people supporting and accomplishing great things. You also get to see the lowest lows of really bad behavior.”
He said students are helped to learn from that and going forward to embrace good behavior that helps people grow a successful society.
Schofield brought two Logan High School Social Studies teachers with him– Candace Mullen and Jason Soffe. Social Studies, as it touches on history can be a sensitive subject nowadays as it might invite bias of one particular viewpoint. Soffe talked about how he addresses the subject.
“When we learn about history, we can learn why the problems that we have, we have them, what successes we have, what’s the promises of this country. And we can learn that sometimes the challenges we’re having are nothing new, and we can get some insight into how to overcome some of those challenges. But we also learn a little bit of empathy for others around us and the different points of view that they have,” Soffe explained.
He said there should be a reflection of us in all the things we’re learning in U.S. History.
Mullen said what they try to do is help students to not put their own values or understanding on the people in the past when they study them.
“Think about what their world was, what they knew, how they were living. And really what’s beautiful about history is it’s just the study of human beings. As we try not to put our own knowledge, and we just kind of focus on what their challenges were at that time, what events were happening, and as we dive deeper, we can kind of understand why they maybe were choosing the things that they were choosing,” she explained.
Mullen said human society has improved in many ways, but we are still like the humans of the past as well.