Teaching as Complex Intellectual Work: A Phenomenological Study of Social Studies Pedagogy

Abstract High quality teaching involves deep content knowledge, understanding students and their learning processes, and complex skills of teaching and assessment. Students who experience high quality teaching tend to achieve higher annual growth rates. This study used a descriptive, qualitative research model to explore excellence in social studies teaching. Purposive sample was used to select district coordinators (n = 4) and their highest quality social studies teachers (n = 9). The process of phenomenological decontextualizing and recontextualizing produced five structural themes. Excellent social studies teachers have intellectual identities that focus on having deep content knowledge and a commitment to learning. They use their deep content knowledge to help students find relevancy. They view themselves as curriculum designers who find and curate their own resources. They facilitate student-centered learning experiences that engage students, encourage inquiry, and allow for student dialogue. Lastly, excellent social studies teachers design learning experiences to get students to think critically about different perspectives, synthesize multiple sources or viewpoints, and consider the lesser told stories of history. These contextualized, phenomenological structures reflect the teaching demands of common frameworks of social studies pedagogy including ambitious teaching approaches, authentic intellectual work, and the college, career, and civic life (C3) framework.