Thinking Past Discipline: Curriculum History and Teacher Subjectivity

• In Event: 34.023 - Curriculum History as Memory Work: Deterritorializing the Field

Abstract

Guided by the idea that the study of history in classrooms should not only consist of training in a set of disciplinary practices but also take into account the subjectivity of teachers and students in their encounter with artifacts of the past, this paper discusses an empirical study I conducted with history teachers about their personal connections to and understandings of the past. In this research, I convened six teachers who teach social studies in the Southeast U.S., asking them to reflect on how their own relationships to—and anxieties about—particular past events might relate to their practice. Using approaches to autobiographical writing and the critical discussion to which it leads outlined by Pinar and Grumet (2014) as well as Vagle (2014) and Van Manen (1990, 2014), I solicited narratives from the teachers, who then read each others’ work along with selections of scholarly texts chosen to prompt further reflection, including Hayden White’s (1973) Metahistory, Peter Novick’s (1988) That Noble Dream, Jill Lepore’s (1998) The name of war, and Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) On Collective Memory. We then convened in small groups for discussion.
Initial findings suggest that dialogue among teachers, provoked by the reading and writing of autobiographical narratives and texts about historical narrative, offer emancipatory and transgressive possibilities for the recovery of teachers’ own processes of understanding commitments to and ambivalences about the past, possibilities that, in turn, can lead to a study of history with young people that invites complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction, and acknowledges an interrogative stance toward history. For the past several decades, researchers in history and social studies education have studied the methods of “doing” history in ways that adapt professional historians’ approaches for use in the classroom (Monte-Sano, 2011; Monte-Sano & Cochran, 2009; Seixas, 2005; VanSledright, 2011; Wineburg, 1991a, 1991b, 2001). This approach—which teaches students how to examine evidence, contextualize, etc—and the language of “disciplinary” social studies education it advocates, have now been naturalized as the way to teach history. The paper argues that while the disciplinary approach in social studies curriculum holds promise for students and teachers in the face of testing and for the critical examination of the past against exclusionary curricular tropes of exceptionalism and post-racialism, they leave out the dynamism of pedagogical encounters with the past. These studies, and the methods of inquiry upon which they rely, have often ignored the subjectivity of individual teachers, portraying them as provincial, reliant on collective memory and nationalist master narratives of progress when the reality might be far more complex.

Author

• Stephanie Konle, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill