History and Identity: Teaching for the Common Good 1&3

"Establishing who we are also means establishing who we aren't." (p.30)

I'll apologize in advance for this being rather rambly! As an aspiring history educator, I found these chapters moderately insightful, though connected to what we've been taught throughout the program. Chapter three's Identification Stance had some thought provoking points--particularly this quote. But the notion of teaching history through concepts of identity ties directly to the idea of making content relevant for students, which is hardly an earth shattering idea. The authors introduce a few interesting complications when discussing this idea of using the identity to teach history: that it can alienate students from a variety of perspectives, and the discipline, because it makes history less objective (which is a requirement of it being taken seriously, scholarly). They resolve this, too, through a familiar concept--a more multicultural understanding of American history and what it means to be American. What this selection did for me professionally was reinforce these previously taught ideas, and get me started thinking about how to hook kids in the classroom by having them self identify their "communities."

I guess I found this quote interesting because it is relevant in so many ways. When we teach a national identity, properly, we also teach the ills of the formation of America as a country and bust some myths of greatness and freedom (Native Americans, slavery, the treatment of most marginalized populations). When we learn about ourselves through family history, we are able to identify with some communities, and we also learn those which we aren't a part of. When we teach students to identify with something--be it a community, or a country, or their familial roots--we have to draw distinctions that may be alienating, or divisive, or cause us to make decisions about what a community, or an identity, is or isn't.

Pesonally, this passage made me reflect on my understanding of my family history as well. I have always understood it as simple; my mother comes from a fresh off the boat Italian heritage, and my dad comes from a Pennsylvania farming background, with roots in Great Britain. This year, however, my mother discovered that my father is a descendant of a man named Herman Husband, who was a representative and "rebel" in MD and NC right before the Revolutionary War.

This means I am unofficially a Daughter of the American Revolution, which complicates my understanding of my family heritage and where I--and my parents--came from. My father's side was blue collar--he didn't go to college. None of his family really know their heritage besides the name "Poole" is English in roots. Aren't DARs rich people? I thought of myself as the descendant of recent immigrants, until now. It took my mother, with skills, time and means, to locate this information online through genealogical records. My father, who still doesn't know how to use Internet, would have never discovered this.

This new discovery muddled my understanding of who I was, and served as an additional illustration of how important identity, even at the most personal level, is wrapped up in history (and vice versa).

Week One Response, Symcox 4-6 & Conclusion

Week One Response, Symcox 4-6 & Conclusion

Chapters 4, 5, 6, and the conclusion of Linda Symcox's Whose History? is littered with names and acronyms of organizations who participated in, and ultimately dismantled, the nineties quest for what should be taught in schools through the social studies discipline. I found it incredibly easy to get bogged down in Symcox's history of history standards, with it reading like a textbook.

But what I did pull from the final pages of Symcox's discourse was an interesting complication in the standards debate that, ironically, stemmed from a conservative viewpoint in the text.

I'll disclose fully that I'm a bleeding heart liberal, so to find truth in even a couple of words of conservative rhetoric--even about something such as social studies standards--is rare. But on page 123, Paul Gagnon lambastes the world history standards set forth because the document "offers no help to teachers... than any massive world history text would do. The document fails to set priorities."

I side with the argument Symcox puts forth--that a conservative agenda unfairly crushed a set of well-written standards that set out to overhaul the white-male dominant presidential synthesis curriculum, and do justice to those traditionally underserved by social studies education. But this comment by Gagnon is relevant. The conservatives involved in this conflict may have had an agenda, but they set out to define social studies education (even if incredibly limited in scope). The NCHS standards, however, failed to really offer a definition of what should be taught, because it lacked priorities. Perhaps this is a misreading of Symcox on my part.

I came to this conclusion as someone who will eventually be faced with making choices about what to teach, and what to exclude. And while I already plan to complicate a traditional history with the types of information that the NCHS standards include, I know I'll face classes who lack fundamental knowledge and skills, and my time will be diverted to remediation. As an educator in training, anticipating these realities, I believe standards should seek to prioritize curriculum by daring to answer WHY we teach social studies. How can I answer that for my students, if I can't answer the question myself? (sidenote: I do have a personal answer to this question, but I'm not arrogant enough to think it's the best one)