Elementary Education Introduction

The Auburn University Elementary Education Program uses a constructivist philosophy for conceptualizing teaching and learning. Content is centered around the problems and dilemmas of the elementary school teacher. Listed below are examples by content area. 

Language Arts: 

The language arts include reading, writing, listening and viewing. Our program emphasizes whole language, constructivist, and child-centered learning approaches. Engaging pre-service teachers in literary discussion groups enables them to use a similiar structure with children in the elementary schools. Using a problem-solving approach, reading-writing workshop builds on the students own interests to enhance and developed language arts skills. The Elementary Program in Language Arts includes a strong Lab component where the pre-service teachers spend 50 percent of their time in elementary schools applying what they have learned at the university with real children in classroms. Authentic assessment, such as portfolios, are used to collect and examine pre-service student and elementary student writing in all four modes (descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive). Different learning styles and multiple intelligences are also considered throughout the course.

Science:

All too often science teachers present problems to their class that lack context. The motivation to solve the problem may only be that it is required by the teacher. Problem-centered science teaching requires students to investigate a problem that they are interested in and see a reason for understanding and solving. In the same way our preservice elementary science course focuses on authentic assignments-ones that will be used by the students in a teaching situation with children. For example preservice students plan a Project WILD activity that they will present to children at a local camp. In addition most of the lesson plans that they write will be ones that they actually use during their field placement and internship in an elementary school classroom. Just as we hope that our graduates will creative authentic opportunities for their students to investigate science we make every effort to create authentic opportunities for our students to solve real problems involved in planning, implementing, and assessing science lessons they teach.

Social Studies:

Pre-service teachers are presented with the "problem" of relating social studies to the lives and experiences of the children they teach. Historical confrontations are dealt with from the many perspectives of the people involved at that time period. A literature focus and cooperative learning model relate the content to the children's lives and across the curriculum. 

Mathematics:

Problem solving is considered as a topic in mathematics, as a logical process, and as practiced in daily life activities. For example, we look at how the teacher in the elementary school decides on classroom tasks to reach national, state and local curricular goals. Pre-service teachers spend much time evaluating, designing, and practice-teaching problem-related classroom activities for children where the elementary students work in heterogeneous groups to think through a problem together, create their own method to solve the problem, often with hands-on materials, and defend their thinking to the whole class. Teacher dilemmas that arise from such teaching include guiding the natural thinking of the child while being open to a wide variety of creative thinking strategies.