Social Sciences

At Rock Creek, the goal of our social sciences curriculum is that every student has tools they can use throughout their lives to understand and contribute to our society.

The social sciences give us tools to discern fact from fiction, ideas to understand humanity, and knowledge to understand our place in the world, in history, and in time. Our program is cohesively sequenced so that knowledge builds from year to year. Like the best classical programs, ours teaches students key skills of historical scholarship that culminate in capstone research papers. But we also incorporate modern methods through data science, real world relevance through fieldwork, and more lenses for understanding the world through the full set of social sciences. At key points in our academic sequence, our English classes also sync with our social science curriculum, adding humanistic depth. Finally, we build a habit of civic participation with our students The result of our program is that at Rock Creek, students learn more than just historical facts–they learn how to read, write, investigate, hypothesize, predict and communicate with the social sciences. This will not only prepare our graduates for collegiate study but also to be engaged and active participants in our democracy.

We sequence our courses so that they build on each other, creating relevance and leading to more durable learning.

By sequencing our courses to connect to each other, we take advantage of how our brains learn and store information. As the cognitive science authors of Make It Stick write, “If you practice elaboration, there’s no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.” Because each of our social science classes shares connection points with the one that follows it, Rock Creek students are able to make the type of connections that make learning durable over the long term.

In middle school, students start by understanding their city geographically and historically, and they build this understanding outwards. We start in 5th grade with Citizenship: Local & National, where students learn about DC’s history and present–political, demographic, geographic, and political–before broadening out to learn citizenship and geography at the national level. In 6th grade, the scope of inquiry continues to widen as students apply geographic knowledge and themes from the prior year to Global Human & Physical Geography, finding patterns across the economies, governments, customs, and environments of various world regions. Consequently, when students begin a two-year study of world history in 7th and 8th grade, they arrive with knowledge of the world, prepared to ask questions about our place in history and in time.

We return to America in high school, examining it from three different perspectives, beginning with a survey of U.S. history in 9th grade. This course delves into six key historical questions, starting in the colonial period and moving forward to the present. In the first semester of 10th grade, students have the opportunity to go deeper on an aspect of American history, with topic electives like Immigration & Xenophobia and The Civil Rights Movement. In the second semester, students place the history they have learned in conversation with the structure and activities of the government in a semester-long course on U.S. Government and Politics. Yet, history and government alone cannot illuminate America’s story: other social sciences offer skills and concepts to re-examine American society in new ways. So in 11th grade, students complete Social Sciences for Social Problems, a class that introduces the five other major social sciences–economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science–as lenses for analyzing and addressing contemporary issues in America.

We teach students the skills of historical scholarship, not just historical facts.

Starting in 5th grade, we introduce discussion, source evaluation, argument construction, and peer review, incorporating them into both independent work and collaborative class activities. We also teach students the value and process of auditing and contributing to research in the real-world. This starts in fifth grade, where students submit edits to improve a local Wikipedia entry in conjunction with a site visit. By 8th grade, students are prepared to develop, research, and write a 10+ page capstone paper and by 10th grade a 20+ page capstone paper on topics of further interest to them.

The social sciences are qualitative and quantitative–and so are our classes.

From 5th grade, we sync our required Data Science courses with our social science courses, enabling students to analyze others’ insights and to create their own. For example, in their Citizenship: Local & National class, 5th grade students analyze DC’s budget, first in and of itself, then in comparison with another city, drawing out common trends and differences in priorities. They compare their own analysis to reporting, using qualitative information to provide context to explain trends. Over their time with us, students will develop from answering their teacher’s questions on provided data sets to being able to independently download, clean, and analyze data, drawing insights from them. By combining work in qualitative and quantitative methods, students have more tools to understand and improve their local community or to more deeply understand new ones.

We integrate weekly fieldwork into our middle school curriculum.

As the cognitive science authors of Make It Stick write, “Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.” By connecting fieldwork to our curriculum, students’ learning is stronger. Our middle school students spend one afternoon per week engaged in fieldwork tied to their courses, most often to their social science or science courses. These trips are not a ‘break’ from coursework but rather integrated into it, adding dimension to the ideas students are learning in class. For example, as 5th grade students in Citizenship: Local & National learn about the wards of DC, they visit sites in each ward–from the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens to the Frederick Douglass house. As they learn about the structure of government, they make visits to each branch–executive, legislative, and judicial–to witness them firsthand. And as they learn about how rights were established and expanded in the U.S., they visit relevant exhibitions, from the National Museum of American History and Culture’s American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith exhibit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Making a Way out of No Way and exhibit. These experiences transform the city into a dynamic classroom, enriching students' understanding and bringing their studies to life in meaningful and memorable ways.

We introduce all students to all of the major social sciences, each of which offers a toolbox for understanding–and maybe even changing–the world.

Over their time at Rock Creek, all students will not just learn history and civics but also receive introductions to economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, and geography. In middle school, students study civics, human and physical geography, and history. In high school, 11th graders take Social Sciences for Social Problems where they are introduced to scholarly disciplinary methods and apply them to projects of their choice. For example, they will build skills in observation, interviewing, and synthesis as part of writing an ethnography for the anthropology unit. In 12th grade, students have the opportunity to continue to dig into more complex methodologies and concepts from the social sciences in another set of topic electives.

At key junctures, we sync our English classes with our social science ones, adding humanistic depth.

In 5th, 6th, and 9th grades, the focus of English class coincided with that of social sciences. In 5th grade, Citizenship: Local & National is complemented by an English course on American regional literature. In 6th grade, Global Physical & Human Geography is complemented by an English course on global literature. And in 9th grade, U.S. History is paired with an English course on the American canon. Social science scholarship benefits from what it learns about different ideas, communities, and the world, and completing interdisciplinary work allows students to see and practice this.

Our courses move beyond the academic and analytical to engage students in civic participation.

Civic participation is a muscle you can build, and one that we will build from the beginning. For example, in their 5th grade course Citizenship: Local & National, students don’t just analyze 311 requests, they file their own. Even where students’ ideas can’t immediately take effect, we teach a bias toward action. For example, in our 10th grade US Government & Politics course, we don’t just have students study for and pass a citizenship test, we have them evaluate and rewrite its questions. Thinking beyond yourself to improve the communities you are a part of–whether your school, your city, or your country–is the bedrock of a democratic society, and a habit we therefore cultivate in our students at Rock Creek.