Constructivism and its Application in Teaching Social Studies at Secondary School Level

Abstract

Education is an important aspect of the social, economic, political and cultural life of an individual. Thus, fruitful learning cannot be achieved in isolation. The students of secondary level are very smart and always thirst for some new ways of learning. Teaching means not merely the transfer of information to students. Instead of this, the students themselves must construct and reconstruct learning/knowledge based on their previous knowledge. General belief about social science curriculum is that it is boring and a non-utility subject than natural sciences and social science subjects are text-centred and theoretical. But unfortunately, many of the social science teacher’s follows old traditional methods like lecture method, memorization of facts and incidents etc. Therefore, the objective of the present study is to provide an intense look into the constructivist theory and its need for teaching social studies at the secondary level. Because social studies subject is equally important like other sciences, the teaching–learning approach in social science needs to be revitalized. Constructivism is a dynamic approach and that could be applied in a classroom by the teacher to make social studies teaching and learning more effective. The study, therefore, concluded that teachers need to reflect on their practice to apply these ideas to their work and the constructivist teacher's role is to work as a facilitator in the teaching– learning process and encourage the students to construct the knowledge themselves.