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.
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.”
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.” 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.” 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
