Unit 2: Teaching History

After reading about history in the classroom and the impact of students’ ideas on history, I found I had many conflicting ideas in my mind about how we teach our students history.  Even after reading these articles it does not give us a clear answer about what is right and what is wrong about teaching kids history. 

One thing that stuck out to me was how interconnected the ideas of citizenship of students are to how we teach history.  It appears to me that how much of the country currently teaches history further conditions students in the path of personally responsible citizens, whereas it could stretch them to be social justice citizens.  As Greenwalt says, “The goal of teaching American history has long been the creation of citizens who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.”  This makes me think as teachers we are continuing to permeate the idea of the personally responsible citizen.  This does not give students a chance to think or question on their own. 

Again, this brings up the ideas and concerns about how to teach and confront young students with more “radical” ideas.  How do we teach young students to be social justice citizens?  How do we teach students history outside of a neatly packaged box?  As addressed in History-It Can be Elementary, not much history is explicitly taught in younger grades but often we still have the experience of discussing historical events with young students.  For example, when discussing President’s Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day we are confronted with the task of explaining why these men are important to U.S. History.  This very often leads to me glossing over the facts to present a simple and soft version of their history. 

One reason, even when I taught fifth grade, that I often felt unequipped to discuss and extend students in history was my own lack of knowledge in addition to the common constraint of time.  Having minored in math and ESL in undergraduate, my history knowledge is reduced to anything I can remember from my own schooling, which was sensationalized as many other students experienced.  As much as I was educated about many things in undergraduate education, a deep dive in the issues and topics I may be teaching was not one of them and I find myself in the same boat as many other elementary education teachers. Anderson reminds readers,  “Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that “much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun—foods and festival—approach to learning.”” How can we change our approach to teaching teachers to teach social issues?  This will continue to be a source of problem as we continue to write a difficult historical narrative. 

As we watch and reflect on the news today, history and difficult topics are not going away.  Students in the future will continue to be asked to learn about and understand issues that are not always pretty and can be simplified into a cute picture with fun type font.  As I said after reading, I still do not have a clear black and white answer about what and how to teach my students as I would a math or science concept but I do feel a renewed sense of responsibility to ensure facts like these, “among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War.” from Anderson do not continue to be  a reality for our students.