Community History, Student Knowledge, and the Third Space: Sociocritically Analyzing Black and Brown Relations

• In Event: Social Design Experiments, Third Space, and Sociocritical Analysis Across the Disciplines

Abstract

This paper focuses on how a social studies ninth grade classroom can purposefully create a third space (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995) to engage students in a sociocritical analysis of their community history and past to discuss current-day Black and Brown relations. The social design experiment, motivated by a need to discuss with students school/community race relations, focused on placing their lived experiences in a historical context. The social design experiment aimed to reenvision the history classroom as a place of transformative learning that encouraged students to use their unofficial and official knowledge to deconstruct Black and Brown relations, often instances of tension between students.

The findings are based on an ethnographic study in a predominantly Black and Brown high school where I was a ninth grade social studies teacher. During this time I taught four sections (122 students) of a 20-week social studies course that included a six-week unit on local community history. The unit exposed students to their shared history as members of the same neighborhood. By the virtue of living in the community, the students were community historians, a source of knowledge that is often ignored and undervalued. The students were historical actors’ (Espinoza, 2003) who invoke the past in order to re-mediate it so that it becomes a resource for current and future action” (Gutiérrez, 2008, p. 154).

Using historiography (Jenkins, 1991) and urban planning theory (Soje, 1996) to deconstructs urban spatiality and community history, the students and I worked towards creating a third space that began to function as a site of historical and spatial analysis. Students used the third space to mediate (Wertsch, 2008) what they learned in class. They combined their community knowledge with theory and historical content learned in the community history unit to critically analyze their daily racial/ethnic experiences. Third space became a place of student empowerment in which all participants became learner-student-teacher, to the point that the students led class discussions. The creation of a community of learners lead to the construction of new knowledges in which the history master script (Swartz, 1992) and racial epithets were unmasked, and concepts of urban spatiality (Soje, 1996) redefined.

This paper is unique in that it centers on history content in a social studies classroom, a place where social design experiments, particularly regarding third space and sociocritical literacy have often been overlooked. Thus, this paper has implications for both social studies education and social design experiment research. The findings complicate previous research regarding how people’s collective memory can limit their understanding of the past (Novick, 1999). Students’ knowledge about the past can be explored through and merged with formal history to mediate history (Wertsch, 2008) in ways that helps them contextualize present day race relations and create new knowledge of the past. In this process, the thirdspace became a transformative experience that motivated students and myself, the teacher, to demand school change, justice, and equity.

Author

• Maribel Santiago, Michigan State University