National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

THEME VIII:

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, & SOCIETY

How Far is too Far?

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Description: Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of relationships among science, technology, and society. Modern life as we know it would be impossible without technology and the science that supports it. But technology brings with it many questions: Is new technology always better than old? What can we learn from the past about how new technologies result in broader social change, some of which is unaticipated? How can we cope with the ever-increasing impact of change? How can we manage technology so that the greatest number of people benefit from it? How can we preserve our fundamental values and beliefs in the midst of technological change?

Reflection:

If I were to have used science, technology, and society within my lesson planning I would have definitely applied it within my World War II unit when discussing the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to force Japan to surrender in 1945. This theme helps to answer questions such as, are new technologies necessarily better and also, how effected are technologies within our society.

Even though I didn’t use this theme, it’s still relevant to the lesson I taught on the war in the pacific during World War II. For this particular lesson I had made up a worksheet to go along with a video I planned entitled “From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima”. During the video, I would stop it to make sure students were on task and elaborate a little information from the video. However, in the end after the video was over I tried to have students give their thoughts as to whether or not it was the right decision to drop not only one but to atomic bombs onto a civilian population to end the war. This was not very affective at all in one of my classes. Students were not willing to give their own opinion on the matter. I was not very successful in providing a questioning framework that would have made it relevant to the students. Maybe I should have stated something along the lines as to what if Japan had this technology and used it against the United States. What do you think would have happened if it was used and how do you think the United States would have responded? One of the questions I did try to get them to respond to was a question that centered on Truman’s decision use this technology. What if he didn’t use it? Overall, I did not have much success with this theme, even though I didn’t really use it.

In the future, I hope to use this theme effectively by not just providing a video, but also using better guiding questions and activities that perhaps puts the decisions in the students’ hands. I’ll use activities that’ll provide students with choices and consequences for technologies and also try to answer questions about how effective new technologies are and why we need them to further our advancement as a civilization.