Friday, April 30, 2021

Current Project: History SoTL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Some personal news: I've defended and deposited my dissertation. Hooray! As my time at the University of Illinois comes to a close, I decided to go for one last goal: finishing the requirements for the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning's Teacher Scholar Certificate, which you may remember from my teaching resolutions for 2019. As the deadline approached, the last thing on my list was (perhaps unsurprisingly) the longest one: a semiformal review of five to six articles about some aspect of teaching in my home discipline. This is necessarily a very preliminary look at the subject of DEI in History SoTL, and could certainly include many works which I either omitted for space or didn't come across in my searches. However, I was pretty interested in what I found in the literature, so I'm sharing it below. 

Empty desks and chairs in a classroom.
Empty desks and chairs in a classroom. Photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash.

In this review, I explore the way in which diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are addressed within the literature on history teaching and learning, with a particular focus on race and ethnicity. Although these topics are integral to every discipline, they are especially significant within history courses, as not only are students themselves approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds but there is also an expectation that our course material will include histories of, at the very least, race, gender, and class. Doing both of these projects well—DEI within the curriculum and within the classroom population—is critical, and they are intertwined, but an instructor doing one well does not mean that they are necessarily doing the other well. In my survey of the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in history, I have found far more attention to the second topic than the first; that is, historians working on these topics have paid more attention to incorporating diverse voices into the curriculum than to contemplating how to teach effectively in a diverse classroom and how to create a culture of equity and inclusivity in history courses. However, some of the most effective pieces showed the connections between these two themes, showing how the content and the classroom methods of DEI in history teaching are interwoven.

First, it is useful to look at two foundational pieces which set the stage for these two discussions to set some foundational elements of the discussion. The first gives a sense of what an inquiry into classroom diversity might entail. Mark A. Chesler’s “Perceptions of Faculty Behavior by Students of Color” deals with the experiences of students in the classroom, reporting concerns and negative experiences by students of color as well as things that made them feel welcome and encouraged. Negative experiences included singling students of color out as “experts” in racial/ethnic issues in class and assumptions about heritage, class, parental background. These examples stood out to me as particularly relevant to history courses. Faculty often want to engage students by helping them find relationships between their own lives and backgrounds and the material being covered; however, doing so uncritically can lead an instructor to assume connections that are not actually present or that the student does not wish to publicly engage with. Many in the focus groups also highlighted more broadly ineffective pedagogy as a key concern, and Chesler uses this information to contend that some of the examples seem to be “apparently race-neutral behavior that white students as well as students of color may object to or find ineffective. However, students of color may be especially vulnerable to alienated from the emotionally distant, impersonal and bureaucratic educational approach reflected in most large lecture classes.”[1] Thus, this article sets up the important claim that good pedagogy—engaged, personal, adaptable, and student-focused—is a key element of classroom DEI work.

The second foundational piece explores the functions and practices of history SoTL and takes up the duality of knowledge and its teaching. In “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” David Pace delineates the current boundaries and potential future of a scholarship of teaching and learning of history. While historical research practices have become ever more sophisticated, Pace suggests that historians’ approach to teaching history has failed to keep pace, and many write lectures and plan course material in isolation. Historians’ meticulous devotion to research did not translate into learning strategies for effective teaching from educational research or methodical observation, even when they cared deeply about teaching; there seems to be a notion afoot that one’s historical knowledge is the font from which good teaching flows. Pace suggests that these are separate considerations; that “behind every act of teaching there are two different forms of knowledge: knowledge of the subject matter, and knowledge of how it may be taught and learned.”[2] Considering questions that educational research considers can offer benefits, he contends, particularly if historians study their own applications of these principles in the context of history and come to some conclusions about effective strategies for the discipline; for example, in not assuming that students enter the classroom a blank slate, but rather knowing that they come in with a host of beliefs and experiences that cannot be assumed. This work is broad, not particularly focused on DEI topics; yet its emphasis on the distinction between the content and the execution of the content in a classroom setting, as well as the claim that students’ incoming knowledge and experiences will impact the way they experience and learn material, are foundational to considerations of DEI in a history learning context.

The literature I reviewed suggests that simply dropping more diverse historical figures into the curriculum has little efficacy, either as a useful depiction of the past and of the discipline of history or as a solution for the ills of U.S. racism. William L. Smith and Ryan M. Crowley argue that Barack Obama’s 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech has not only been used widely in classrooms to explore the history of race in America and promote racial literacy among students but also contains features that make it particularly valuable for that purpose. As part of this work, the authors contrast this approach with the common inclusion model, or adding more diverse figures to the course of study; they note that “Adding black and brown faces into the pantheon of curricular heroes does little to interrogate the function of ‘hero-worshipping’ as educational practice or how these historical figures may serve political purposes in the present.”[3] In other words, it is not enough to incorporate historical figures of color into the curriculum; instructors must use course material thoughtfully to provoke deeper understanding of race and racism. They set out to show how material like Obama’s speech provide current political and personal connections to students of race and racism in history and can serve as a more useful past for the purposes of history teaching than the inclusion model. However, they also emphasize that this does not necessarily follow just from using the speech in class. Many of the lesson plans they examine which use the speech do not actually encourage students to think structurally about racism or emphasize “fixing” the problem of racism rather than spending time in analyzing its function and its impacts.[4]

Some authors suggest that course material that incorporates diverse experiences and connects the historical to the personal can increase student engagement and encourage letting students’ personal interests lead some of the inquiries in their history learning. Writing for Teaching History, Joanne Philpott and Daniel Guiney discuss the power of personal narratives in history teaching, highlighting how such stories can compel an audience not only to listen and engage but also to think analytically about a period.[5] Yet to compel students personally also requires attention to the integral features of their personal lives; that is, diverse students need diverse stories. The authors set out to integrate these sorts of stories into an existing educational trip to World War I sites for Grade 10 students in Norfolk. Previously, the trip had been designed without much attention to the meaning students could find in and connect with the sites, either personally or culturally. The authors redesigned the experience to focus on local connections, diverse sites and stories (including ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, with a particular eye to how the demographics of Norfolk had changed in recent years), and making remembrance personally meaningful, rather than focusing on military tactics or politics exclusively. Overall, Philpott and Guiney’s work showcases the significance of course content as a site for diversity, equity, and inclusion, making course material—even that which seems as informal as a field trip—incorporate a range of experiences. This inclusivity in material not only gave a fuller, more accurate picture of the war itself, it also engaged students in the project of history, showing that they and people like them—or, for some students, both people like and people very different from themselves—were part of the making of the past.

Another piece explores the interwoven nature of the personal and the historical, as well as effective ways to construct a classroom that enables all students to feel safe in tracing that connection. Maia G. Sheppard writes her article “Creating a Caring Classroom in which to Teach Difficult Histories” as an ethnography of an undergraduate history classroom in which one professor of African history blended the personal and the historical in her pedagogical practice to “create a place where the local and the global, the abstract and the particular, are in constant communication as students are encouraged to construct new images and understandings about each other and the history of Africa.”[6] This description places the personal and the historical on equal footing—the project of the course is not merely to learn history in a safe environment, as Sheppard interprets it, but also to offer students the chance to construct a new point of view on their immediate lives. The pseudonymous Professor Lake encourages her students to bring personal experience into their analyses of the material and shared her own experiences and emotions in turn.

The limitation of the approach to linking the personal and the historical in each of these works to address DEI issues is that it elides the ways in which many ways we inhabit the classroom are not merely treatments of the course material—that is, that treating historical material with sensitivity and intellectual dexterity does not necessarily correlate with equitable classroom practices, and that encouraging students’ personal connection with the material, when done too strongly, may lead instructors to presume that students have experiences that they do not actually have, or to force disclosure of information students would rather not share. One potential solution to this is Philpott and Guiney’s plans for future trips, in which they hoped to incorporate greater student input into the planning and preliminary research of the trip through the selection of a diverse group of students to explore the options. They noticed that many students wished to return with their own families, and some had done their own research prior to the trip about things they wanted to see and aspects of their own family history which connected with the sites. Institutionalizing that creative energy and incorporating a diverse range of students into a planning and research committee for future years, they contend, would build in student involvement in diversifying the trip and helping draw personal connections to the sites. Likewise, the emphasis on blending the personal into the historical does not address the small details students mention in Chesler’s paper that should be of concern to history instructors concerned about equity and inclusion, like teachers only chatting and joking with white students before or after class or seeming afraid of their students of color; that is, it elides interactions that are unrelated to the course content but still make up critical parts of the course experience.

Overall, then, future work in History SoTL could further take up explicit questions of identity and power within the classroom as well as within our course materials. It seems almost as if many historians who teach assume that they may need help with content but are sure they have classroom management and implicit biases under control. Yet, in comparing experiences I have seen in history classrooms with the incidents disclosed by students in Chesler’s 1997 paper, many of these ways of relating to students of color are alive and well in the history classroom. Moreover, our courses grapple with deeply “felt histories” which still impact students and spark national debates; these necessarily demand more than good sources, but also good approaches to structuring discussions about them.[7] Perhaps, then, the approach taken by Philpott and Guiney and the teacher referenced in Sheppard’s article of interweaving the personal and the historical is more than just a method to engage students; it also engages history instructors to think about both content and classroom interactions—a small step, but a step nonetheless.



[1] Mark A. Chesler, “Perceptions of Faculty Behavior by Students of Color.” CLRT Occasional Papers, University of Michigan, no. 7, 1997, 4.

[2] David Pace, “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” The American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 1, 2004): 1171.

[3] William L. Smith and Ryan M. Crowley, “Barack Obama, Racial Literacy, and Lessons from ‘A More Perfect Union,’” The History Teacher 51, no. 3 (May 2018): 450.

[4] Smith and Crowley, “Barack Obama,” 459.

[5] Joanne Philpott and Daniel Guiney, “Exploring Diversity at GCSE: Making a First World War Battlefields Visit Meaningful to All Students,” Teaching History, no. 144 (2011): 26–33.

[6] Maia G. Sheppard, “Creating a Caring Classroom in Which to Teach Difficult Histories,” The History Teacher 43, no. 3 (May 2010): 413.

[7] Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961, 2015), 1.


PS: If you have thoughts on this literature or reading recommendations on the intersection of DEI and SoTL, I'd love to hear them, so send them my way! 

No comments:

Post a Comment