Social science education is effective only when both teachers and students can critically engage with its ideas and texts not merely in the classroom but also through a sustained engagement with our social lives. Foundational to the social sciences are concepts. At the school level, the syllabus introduces and explores a range of concepts such as society, community, family, social change, etc. These are also ideas that have meanings in everyday life. Social science concepts provide a lens to view reality and help students participate in their social worlds.

However, the concepts are complex entities! This workshop aims to unravel two interrelated questions: how are concepts created in the social sciences; and how these concepts relate to empirical reality?

In this workshop, we want to engage with pedagogical practices through which we can deal with social science concepts in classrooms, not as stable or static, but as dynamic entities. A concept is always directed towards the purpose of understanding empirical reality. 

Say, for example, let us consider the concept of ​‘family’. The concept of ​‘family’ can be defined and constructed in very different ways depending on the purpose of our investigation. ​‘Family’ can be defined universally with primacy given to biological descent. Or can it also be explored in terms of relationships we build beyond fixed gender roles? Each position leads to a different set of questions and possibilities for social scientists.

For a concept to be effective it must abstract and represent the diversity of phenomena and variations found in the world. But it must also not be so abstract as to have no relation to empirical reality. So, how do social scientists maintain a balance between these two competing demands?

We envision this workshop as a fundamentally collaborative venture, where we, as practicing social scientists and teachers in a university, can share our perspectives on the pedagogy of the social sciences with school teachers. We would equally learn from them the challenges and experiences of concept-building and teaching social science in school. We hope that this workshop bridges a critical gap in social science education, by bringing teachers at two distinct levels in conversation with each other.