アメリカ社会科成立期におけるコミュニティ参加に関する考察 : アーサー・W・ダンの公民科教育論の実践例に注目して

抄録

Generally speaking, Social Studies, the school subject, was organized in the early 20^th century within the USA. In the beginning, civics played the central role in the social studies curriculum. At that time, civics was called "Community Civics", which emphasized the relationship between community and citizenship. And, Arthur William Dunn was a famous civics leader during the formative stages of social studies. This paper attempts to focus on his civic educational theory. So far, historical educational researchers have regarded Dunn's Civics educational theory as one which emphasizes community participation by students. Besides this fact, there are some researchers that regarded Dunn as a pioneer of Service-Learning. On the contrary, there are other researchers who evaluated the civics theories in those days as educational theories which emphasized the assimilation into American culture. Those researchers' interpretation was that community civics in those days decreased the importance of political participation. For those researchers, community participation meant that citizens were made to be obedient. However, those two types of interpretations: research which evaluated Dunn as a pioneer of the social participation and research which regarded Dunn as an educator aiming to assimilate, mostly focused on the Dunn's civics textbook. So, those previous researchers didn't focus on his civics' lessons and the actual social situation where he worked in those days. To evaluate Dunn's theory as active education or assimilating education, it is necessary to prove the features of his actual lessons in his social context. That is why, this paper aims to prove the features of community participation in the formation of the subject of the social studies by analyzing the case of civics' lessons created by Dunn. Through the analysis of Dunn's lessons, this paper describes that Dunn's lessens followed four points: First, they considered ways children could participate; second, they involved learning through social participation; third, they incorporated changes to the beauty of their city by children; fourth, they also extended the value of citizenship to the people in their city. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that community civics had the feature of active involvement for improvement of living standards of people within the community. This result was obtained from the lessons of Arthur William Dunn. His lessons promoted the critical thinking and active, direct participation in the community. And, such features of these lessons have to be judged in the special context of those days, such as the Americanization movement. Finally, this paper suggests that we need to focus more on the features of the lessons in evaluating Dunn's theory.