“What is true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well.  It helps men to rise above themselves.” -- Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

As I listened to my morning briefing on NPR while preparing breakfast for my family, a morning ritual now that we are sheltering in place, I heard remarks by Queen Elizabeth II from a rare televised address from Sunday evening: “I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge, and those who come after us will say that the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”  These words reminded me of a quote I read recently, “What is true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well.  It helps men to rise above themselves” (Camus, 1947). The lessons of history and of social studies teach us that in times of crisis, like the pandemic we are living through together, we find our greatest hour in our unity and self-sacrifice. My presidential remarks for this issue of TSSP will highlight the significant contributions of educators, the steps National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) is taking to respond to COVID-19, my professional advice for the transition to remote teaching, and some general reflections on how our collective efforts are leading in a time of crisis. 

NCSS celebrates the hard-working individuals in all aspects of the medical field who are selflessly risking all for the wellbeing of others and our great nation. This past week, I was moderating a webinar on the 1918 Spanish Flu, in which Kenneth C. Davis, our featured webinar guest who lives in New York City, paused at the eight o’clock hour to share the loud applause, a sign of humble gratitude from the city of New York, as windows opened and people in unison celebrated the shift change for medical workers.  In the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to engage with teachers and administrators across the country as we have collectively sought strategies and ideas for how to create powerful social studies learning and inquiry online. I have been inspired by the unsung efforts of PK-12 educators, heroes of our children and youth, who have worked endless hours to migrate brick and mortar schooling to virtual schools. Teachers have been asked to learn new technologies with little time to prepare, to find ways to connect and build community with their students, and to meet the educational and socio-emotional needs of their students without missing a beat.  While there are some districts that have thoughtfully planned and offered a transitional time to make this change, others dove in spontaneously with expectations that “learning will continue without interruption and students are accountable for all tasks.” Other districts chose to allow enrichment of prior learning but not advance new educational experiences to ensure that students without technology are not left behind in the mad rush to digitize education. Some districts, and teachers, have gone so far as to create paper packets for all students, and particularly those with limited technology or no internet access. The broad range of stories clearly articulates the diverse landscape of schooling across America and the digital, economic divide within.  What is consistent in each setting is the overwhelming concern of educators for all students and a stark awareness of the disparities in virtual schooling opportunities. Districts and school administrators have creatively sought ways to feed their students, to get technological devices and Wi-Fi to students without these technological resources, and to create counseling and health services at a distance. Moreover, teachers have taken up the mantle of the new digital opportunity gap to figure out how to support all students by offering meaningful educational experiences and providing the emotional support students need in a time of crisis. On behalf of NCSS, I raise my window and applaud PK-12 educators across the country, #NCSSCelebratesEducators.    

My interaction with educators across the country the last few weeks stems from efforts of NCSS to respond quickly to the needs of social studies educators caused by COVID-19 physical distancing and emergence of remote education. I am pleased by the hard work of NCSS Board of Directors, staff, and leaders who have spent numerous hours planning, collecting and organizing, designing and developing meaningful resources. We have also sought collaborative opportunities to work with other professional associations to expand the scope of our outreach.  In a short timeframe, NCSS has taken numerous steps to support #SocialStudiesOnline on behalf of its members and social studies educators more generally.  Here are a few examples of our association’s actions to respond to COVID-19: 

• NCSS created a new webpage for COVID-19 teaching resources available at https://www.socialstudies.org/ncss-covid19-resources. NCSS updates this page regularly with new resources and continues to support social studies educators as we all deal with unprecedented educational challenges.
• NCSS partnered with the World History Digital Education Foundation to publish in a short timeframe a special teaching module focused on COVID-19 for students in grades 9-12. The module is the first curriculum material based on the current COVID-19 pandemic and is available at www.worldhistoryde.org/COVID-19.
• NCSS joined ISTE and a national coalition of professional associations to share collective digital resources and technology tools for educators.  The LearningKeepsGoing.org initiative can be found at: www.LearningKeepsGoing.org.
• NCSS is a member of the Teaching for Democracy Alliance which also has produced content resources for social studies educators: http://www.teachingfordemocracy.org/classroom-lessons-and-activities.html.  
• NCSS hosted a free and open-source webinar, More Deadly Than War: How Do We Teach the Lessons of Pandemics — While We Are in One? https://www.socialstudies.org/professional-learning/online/more-deadly-war-how-do-we-teach-lessons-pandemics-while-we-are-one
• Due to the high demand for the webinar, we are offering a second opportunity on April 8, 2020, from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT to join Kenneth C. Davis and me in a discussion of pandemics and the 1918 Spanish Flu. Register here.
• NCSS hosted a free webinar with InquirEd on teaching in a pandemic, When COVID-19 Closes Your School: Ideas and Suggestions for Social Studies Instruction. In this webinar, leaders from Lakota District in Ohio, InquirEd, and I discussed best practices for online social studies instruction.
• NCSS hosted a webinar panel with the leader of the NCSS Technology Community and Chief State Social Studies Specialists (CS4) entitled, An NCSS Response to COVID-19: A Historic Shift to Online Learning and How to Respond.
• On April 8th at 4:30 PM EDT, NCSS, the Right Question Institute, and InquirEd are combining efforts to discuss how to use the Question Formulation Technique with the Library of Congress' treasure trove of digitized primary sources and how to deepen inquiry in social studies. Join us for Using The QFT with primary sources from the Library of Congress.Register here.
• NCSS also has a Live Learning Center where association members can access conference and professional learning sessions which are organized topically: https://ncss.sclivelearningcenter.com/MVSite/default.aspx

In my own professional efforts, I have sought to identify online resources for social studies educators and offer advice on how to teaching online.  As an early adopter of technology and a professor who has taught online for fifteen years, I offer a few words of advice and share resources and technology tools to facilitate dialogue, engagement, and inquiry online.  As social studies online teachers have an opportunity to do something new, something creative and enriching.  We can teach students to love learning in a different way and take time to do inquiry without the traditional constraints of time and coverage.  Although we cannot recreate school, we can create engagement.  

Focus on motivating student interest both online and offline.  Encourage students to explore topics of personal intrigue and invite students to dig deeper into the content that excites them. Take advantage of the numerous free webinars available for students and connect them with scholars, digital sources, and diverse ways of sharing your resources.  For example, I joined Ken Burns, along with elementary, middle, and high school students, last week in a webinar, The Constitution in Times of Crisis, provided by National Constitution Center. The NCSS webinar with Kenneth C. Davis is also available to students and would be of interest to help students leverage history, specifically the 1918 influenza pandemic as a way to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also many other NCSS webinars that educators will find helpful and past webinars are archived for continued use.  Along with many students, I recently attended an interactive webinar, Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, in which we explored together with historians, various primary sources, the historical interpretation of each and the significance of each source in understanding the zeitgeist of the eras in which they originated.  Other activities, might be to take a virtual field trip to Mount Vernon or the Great Wall of China.  While my travels have come to an abrupt end, I’m still enjoying all the places I can go virtually.  I visited my local museum, the Levine Museum of the New South, to explore community identity in Charlotte through Nuevolution.  I also asked a librarian at the Library or Congress for help in finding a primary source for Native American’s perspective on Women’s Suffrage (see Savagery to “civilization”).  The possibilities are endless for identifying interactive virtual content for teaching social studies. For example, I read primary source newspapers from 1918 using the Library of Congress collections and ESPN’s The Undefeated which revealed how race and ethnicity have been, and continue to be, enormous factors in determining whether people will receive medical attention when they become ill, and the sort of attention they will receive in a pandemic.  

To promote learning with technology, I recommend the use of technology tools, such as SeeSaw, GoReact, podcasts (e.g. Audacity, Nearpod), videos (e.g. Clips, iMovie, GoogleKeep, WeVideo), photo galleries (e.g. GoogleSlides, BookCreator, Flickr), drawing tools (e.g. Autodraw, Draw.io, Popplet, GoogleDrawing) that creatively allow students, including young learners to share their thinking from audio, videos, photographs, and digital image creations. Technology affords the unique opportunity for making thinking and learning visible in personalized and differentiated ways.  

From years of research about online learning, I also know that there is a difference in learning when synchronous tools are used in tandem with asynchronous learning (e.g. GoogleDrive, GoogleClassroom).  If possible, synchronous tools create interactive spaces where students can purposefully engage with others in reasoning and discourse. I like to use breakout rooms for small group activities (in programs such as WebEx, Zoom, or GoogleHangouts) and the interactive whiteboards or presentations (e.g. Flipgrid and Peardeck), polling features or add-ons (e.g. GoogleForms, Kahoot, PollEverywhere, and Socrative), and post-it note tools (e.g. Linoit, Padlet and Stickies) to promote real-time interaction among students. Other technology tools, I have found to be helpful are games (e.g. Building History 3.0, iCivics and KidCitizen), screen reading tools (e.g. VoiceOver, TalkBack, ChromeVox, GoogleVoice and DragonSpeak) and online books (e.g. GetEpic and Mims Books).  Many publishers and software creators have made their content materials freely accessible that can also extend learning opportunities for all students.

In closing, while we may not have control over the virus yet, we do have control over our response to it. Finding meaning in what we are doing is critical when we are all feeling so uncertain and helpless. This is what NCSS has attempted to do and educators can do as well in positioning social studies at the center of virtual and remote schooling. As we face the challenges of our “Pearl Harbor” moment of the pandemic, it is clear that there has never been a more important time to teach social studies- #SocialStudiesMatters @NCSSNetwork.  Social studies can help us understand how and why our lives are changing.  It can give us context for the present and reasoning to guide our thinking about the implications of this historic event.  Social studies offers a contextual understanding of the vicissitudes of COVID-19 from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the 1793 Yellow Fever. Pandemics don’t just influence people’s lives; they change the world. From the study of history, geography, civics, economics, and social and behavioral sciences we can collectively begin to grapple with the ramifications of this unprecedented moment in our generation. Here are a few useful resources for teaching about pandemics: 

• CDC page on past pandemics: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/basics/past-pandemics.html
• National Archives: The Deadly Virus: https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/
• Comprehensive archive of Spanish flu documents via University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, includes stories from 50-cities https://www.influenzaarchive.org
• PBS American Experience -multipart documentary (original air date unknown) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/influenza/
• NBC News: “Survivors Remember” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16194254/#.XnDM7i2ZPOR
• Check state and city health departments for local history resources, such as this one from Maine Dept. of Health. https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/documents/1918-pandemic-flu.pdf
• Library of Congress and 1918 newspapers about the influenza pandemic https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-spanish-flu/selected-articles
• The Undefeated in 1918 - A look at how Jim Crow affected the treatment of African Americans fighting the Spanish flu https://theundefeated.com/features/in-1918-and-2020-race-colors-americas-response-to-epidemics/
• The Philadelphia Parade and the spread of the 1918 pandemic https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/philadelphia-threw-wwi-parade-gave-thousands-onlookers-flu-180970372/

Other resources: 

• World History Digital Education Covid-19 Module
• Kids Guide to Coronavirus 
• History of Pandemics
• Media Literacy and the Coronavirus
• National Council for the Social Studies Teaching about the Coronavirus
• Parent’s Guide to Talking to Kids about Coronavirus

In fact, if you think about it, every teacher has become a social studies teacher over the last few weeks, helping to explain geography and all of those global connections and trade routes, economic concepts like supply and demand and global supply chains, psychological concepts – especially our need for some sort of control made manifest in our compulsive toilet paper shopping, civics concepts like the rule of law, jurisdiction, and the balancing of civil liberties with public health, and even good old historic concepts and skills like contextualization, corroboration of evidence, and causality. We can connect with each other around social studies—we can transform ourselves as we have in the past to be and do better.  We can rally to confront the coronavirus pandemic with the resolve and self-discipline that have seen our nation, and the world, through its greatest trials. In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, there may be dark days ahead, but social studies teaches us that we have hope for better days ahead and a more compassionate society fully aware of the now transparent deep inequities in this nation.  Our lessons from social studies is that history is the best mirror for us to reflect on what we were, who we are, and what we can be.  

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes" --Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)