IntroductionFirstly it is important to define what is meant by social decision- making before beginning to track its development within the social studies curriculum. This chapter provides an overview showing the context for social decision-making to highlight the historical path of social studies and its development as a core curriculum subject.

It addresses the following aspects:

w Historical Influences
w The New Social Studies Movement
w The Social Decision-Making Process
w The Draft Curriculum
w The 1997 Social Studies Curriculum

Historical Influences
Social Decision making is about students learning to make decisions about issues in society and carry out possible actions that will improve or solve problems. This active participation in society is vastly different from the focus on disciplines involved in History and Geography, from which social studies evolved.

Issues surrounding what is necessary in a social studies curriculum have been widely debated since the 1920s. There have been many recommendations to support teachers’ work up to the present curriculum. The two drafts involved in releasing this final curriculum are indicative of the challenges that social studies has had to confront in order to exist as a core curriculum subject. As with the development of any curriculum, social studies was affected by broad issues concerning society and the changing nature of contributing disciplines in 20th Century thinking. In the 1930s the dominant worldwide theme in educational circles revolved around education for a better society.

New Zealander James Strachan, Principal of Rangiora High, travelled to the United States of America to further investigate this focus. His publication, “The School Looks at Life” (1943) was a result of the visits that he made to Teachers Colleges in Lincoln, Illinois and New York City. At the time his ideas were published there was a growing concern in New Zealand that direction for education should change so as to meet the needs of a wide range of pupils, not just the academic elite. Thus, the worth of the individual and community life began to replace the focus on the Monarchy and the rights and duties of the subjects that had developed as part of our colonial past. The emergence and recognition of the need to incorporate concepts and methods from sociology and anthropology meant a move away from the tradition of historical and geographical approaches.

Similarly theThomas Report in 1944 supported this new direction with a recommendation that social studies ought to become a core subject in the curriculum. The creation of social studies as a subject in its own right had relevance in the light of these concerns, but it was strongly debated by those who still perceived it as an amalgamation of history and geography.

The “New Social Studies”
The “New Social Studies” movement emerged in America in the 1960s. Formative work carried out in California in the 1960s resulted in the text; A Teachers Handbook to Elementary Social Studies: An Inductive Approach by Hilda Taba, Mary Durkin, Jack Fraenkel and Tony McNaughton.

There were two streams of thought regarding the social studies curriculum in the United States. One was the idea that social studies should focus on the ideas of effective citizenship and citizenship education that would focus on values shared by all social groups. The second stream of thought on the “The New Social Studies” favoured in depth coverage of a few areas of content, with learning sequences based on inquiry and discovery. For many reasons the movement failed to become fully established in the United States but it became a catalyst for review, discussion and change in New Zealand.

By 1961 New Zealand Social Studies reform was already well under way. The introduction of a new syllabus for elementary schools incorporated the application of concepts that were present in other social sciences.

“Social studies is a study of people: of what they are like – their beliefs, their
aspirations, their pleasures, the problems they have to face; of how and where
they live, the work they do, and ways in which they organise themselves.”
Social Studies in the Primary School (1961 p1).

More importantly the aims of this syllabus revolved around children taking a responsible role in the society they lived in, and encouraged children to take an intelligent and sympathetic interest in other cultures. These components were developed further in the 1977 syllabus guidelines and termed as the “Four Aspects of Social Studies”: Knowledge, Abilities, Values and Social Action.

Tony McNaughton, who was one of the writers of the “Teachers Handbook to Elementary Social Studies” returned to New Zealand in the 1970s and was active in ensuring “ The New Social Studies “continued to dictate curriculum development and design. An intensive process of curriculum and professional development saw the emergence of “The New Social Studies” in a New Zealand context in the form of the Form 1-4 Social Studies Syllabus Guidelines published in 1977. This was really the first step to create a unified curriculum in New Zealand since the 1961 syllabus.

Schools had received various discussion pamphlets and starter units with some of the most useful being the “Faces 4, 5, 6 and 7.” However, even though these did mention the skills of social studies, they provided little guidance for teachers who wanted to know how they could teach these skills. The justification for inclusion of these skills was evident in the 1977 curriculum document where they are referred to on page 4 of the Form 1-4 Social Studies Syllabus guidelines:

“Social studies should make students and teachers look at and think about human behaviour realistically objectively and with sensitivity. It should help us make decisions about our personal and social development and about our participation in a changing society.

Knowledge, Abilities, Values and Social Action are complementary and inseparable aspects of social studies. Together they should help students and teachers towards a better understanding of themselves and others, and of their involvement in society.”

Trends in Social Studies Development indicate that the 1970s and 1980s emphasised Decision making but as Barr (1992) argues this was not always clearly connected to content and knowledge, or learning activities. Social decision- making in Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum 1997 is described as:

Involving students in applying their knowledge and developing their skills as they make decisions about actions… (p.18)

In the 1977 syllabus, the terms social action and social participation refer to the types of skills that are evident in today’s social studies curriculum under the umbrella of the social decision- making process. In Faces 6, the ideas included in social participation overlap into the co-operative skills. The 1977 syllabus, states that this overlap is to be expected and that the skills are inseparable and of equal importance. The definition of social action in the 1977 syllabus includes the phrases “participation in the affairs of the community” and “students realise that they can contribute to the life of their community.” These lead into the inception of the Action element of social decision making. The following diagram shows how the action aspect is an integral factor in the process of decision- making. Without action the decision- making process is unreal or invalid.

(click to enlarge)

The Draft Curriculum
The 1980s saw a revision of the whole curriculum. A Department of Education publication in 1989 – “A Guide to the Syllabuses” began the process of updating New Zealand Social Studies to meet the needs of a more diverse and changing society. As emphasis on social issues evolved to become common place in our classrooms, social studies was the subject that expanded to incorporate these issues. Examples of this in the New Zealand Curriculum were Taha Mäori, equity issues, peace studies, and conservation issues. The subject became so broad that it began to lose credibility in some educational and political circles, as it was perceived as having no real depth or defined boundaries. Social studies was often seen as the “ragbag of issues which schools think should be covered somewhere but have no clear place within the traditional subject areas.” Education Forum (1995 Submission on the draft p.46).

With the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework in the 1990s, the process of developing a social studies curriculum with essential learning areas and prescribed achievement objectives began. The Draft Social Studies Statement (1994) mirrored the curriculum framework in its inclusive presentation format and content. There was a concerted effort to be pro- active in gender and culture inclusiveness. The trialling of this curriculum in schools resulted in positive feedback although there were many New Right concerns about the fact that the draft had a style and content that was perceived as being too far to the Left. Conservative criticism noted the use of the terms “Aotearoa New Zealand” and “Pakeha” and considered them unacceptable. Submissions on the draft were mostly of a negative nature, even though there were many people - Mäori and teachers in particular, who liked many aspects of the draft but didn’t feel the need to make positive submissions.

The Education Forum commissioned English academic Geoffrey Partington to write their submission. Principals, Company Directors and Chief Executives backed this forum. This submission attacked the drafts’ so called preference for indigenous peoples and further commented about the “reluctance to confront the unattractive features of traditional Polynesian culture” (Education Forum 1995 p ii).
The Forum clearly wanted a more empathetic approach to capitalism and individualism. Other submissions saw the draft as having shortcomings in the treatment of economics and in particular that students should be taught to recognise the advantages of competitive market conditions.

Although the submissions against the draft curriculum may have originated from different perspectives there seemed to be a common belief in the fact that knowledge ahead of skills should be delivered in our classrooms. The skills of critical thinking and social decision- making may have ultimately threatened the earlier knowledge emphasis that had existed previously. This change in emphasis may have been too different to the wider educational community, or perhaps it was perceived as a vehicle that could eventually change the current arrangements of power and wealth in the New Zealand economy. With such obvious dissension in the community the newly appointed Minister of Education, the Hon. Wyatt Creech, asked the government to commission a redraft with opportunity for feedback.

In 1996 the release of the “revised draft” and further reaction illustrated the polarisation of opinion that had occurred during the time of debate following the submissions on the first draft. Whereas the first draft was seen as being too open to interpretation, the revised draft seemed to be too specific and did not give enough scope in some of the strands. The first draft highlighted the advantages of open ended inquiry while attempting produce a new type of school leaver who had to exist in a bi-cultural society and be sympathetic to feminist viewpoints.

The revised draft sought to be more specific with a reformulated section on skills to include more research and inquiry skills. European culture and citizenship were prominent features of this curriculum, and there was a decided lack of appreciation of the culture that existed before a British colony was established, Harrison cited in Benson and Openshaw (1998). A number of supporters of the first draft claimed that this revised version illustrat
ed that the Ministry had given into pressure from the Education Forum and the “New Right”.
By early 1997, the debate showed no signs of abating. The Ministry could have at this point chosen to abandon Social studies altogether as suggested by the Education Forum but this move would have been contrary to the New Zealand Curriculum guidelines. The final option was to have a third revised statement. In October 1997 the final version of Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum was launched.

The 1997 Social Studies Curriculum
The document was a compromise in many ways. Its content and style steered a middle course between the extremes of the first two drafts. One of the new additions to the structure of the curriculum was a new skills aspect that clearly defines inquiry, values exploration and social decision -making as the processes by which the aim of social studies education can be achieved. The importance of these processes is made clear by the fact that there is a separate section allotted to them with their own set of achievement objectives and indicators. This was a different approach from the 1977 syllabus, which had referred to these skills under the general heading of the “Four Aspects of Social Studies” 1977 Syllabus Guidelines, Forms 1-4 (1977 p 17-18). However the Knowledge, Abilities, Values and Social Action mentioned in the 1977 syllabus had definite parallels with the three processes of Inquiry, Values Exploration and Social decision-making that were termed as processes in the 1997 curriculum document. The Social Studies Processes are divided into 4 achievement level and there are specific Achievement Objectives for each component of these Processes. (See Appendix 1).

The importance of these processes is implied within the parameters of the social studies curriculum. This aspect of the curriculum document gives opportunity for students to learn and think and act as responsible citizens who have opportunity to make thoughtful and critical social decisions. Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum (SSNZC) recognises that knowledge and processes are both important and that the development of inquiry, values and social decision making (the three processes) are tantamount in enabling students to develop the skills necessary to achieve in social studies. This research will focus on the achievement of the social -decision making process.

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