Getting Beyond the Facts : Teaching Social Studies/Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century

Counterpoints publishes the most compelling and imaginative books being written in education today. Grounded on the theoretical advances in criticalism, feminism and postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Counterpoints engages the meaning of these innovations in various forms of educational expression. Committed to the proposition that theoretical literature should be accessible to a variety of audiences, the series insists that its authors avoid esoteric and jargonistic languages that transform educational scholarship into an elite discourse for the initiated.

In this second edition of Getting Beyond the Facts, Kincheloe presents a comprehensive view of complex-democratic social studies in the 21st century. He argues that the reform of social studies education requires a corps of rigorous social science scholars who understand the historical origins of the social studies, the conceptual foundations of the field, its strengths and weaknesses, and modes of social theoretical analysis and takes students through numerous intellectual encounters in social studies and the contexts that inform it. Focusing on the importance of knowledge production and interpretation, Kincheloe calls for the education of social studies teachers as researchers who can critique and reconstruct curriculum as they expose the covert, ideological functions of contemporary educational reforms and top-down standards-driven social studies subject matter. In an era of depoliticization and induced political illiteracy, Kincheloe calls for a new form of social studies/social sciences scholarship to counter such alarming trends.