Navigating the Past/Present Divide in Historical Discussions About Race

• In Event: 63.081 - Teaching History in a Racially Diverse Democracy

Abstract

A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (2018) reveals that many history teachers avoid conversations about race for fear they will trigger “racialized conflict” (p. 13). In this paper, we explore the challenges of facilitating discussions about history that highlight racial tensions in the present. We apply three theoretical lenses to a charged episode of classroom discourse and demonstrate how each offers a different interpretation of the incident and different suggestions for how the teacher might respond.

Theoretical Framework
A key goal of disciplinary history instruction is the promotion of contextualized thinking, or fostering in students an appreciation for the strangeness of the past. History educators have argued that the mere effort to understand the strange past stretches us and allows us to better tolerate different perspectives in the present (Wineburg, 2001). Document-based classroom discussions in history class have been identified as a potential sites for developing such thinking (Author, 2015).

Presentism, or our tendency to impute contemporary assumptions and worldviews onto the past, stands in the way of contextualized thinking and often results in distorted renderings of the past. Research has found that students tend toward presentist interpretations of history (Dickenson & Lee, 1984; Wineburg, 1991). Understandably, historical discussions that deal with race often invite presentist thinking because race and racial equity continue to be a charged issues in the United States and historical racism is inseparable from its contemporary manifestations (Bolgatz, 2005).

Method
This case study features Mike, a white 7th grade teacher in his 6th year of teaching in a racially diverse, high-performing magnet school. We observed and videotaped 5 lessons and conducted 3 interviews. Classroom videos were coded for any moment in which students referred to the present in the context of a discussion about the past. For the purposes of this paper, we selected an episode from a lesson on the New Deal in which Mike became visibly flustered by the racial nature of the discussion and ask: How should Mike have responded?

Three Frameworks
Drawing broadly from the literature, we identified three literacy-based lenses through which the incident could be viewed: disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and racial literacy. A disciplinary lens views the moment as an issue of subject matter knowledge and suggests that Mike redirect the students to the historical context and draw a clear distinction between past and present (Author, 2015, 2017). A critical literacy lens would highlight the power dynamics inherent in the moment and call for Mike to work with students to leverage their insight into transformative social action (Freire, 1970; Freire & Macedo, 2013). A racial literacy perspective underscores the anxiety that racial issues trigger and prompts the teacher to reflect upon and attend to that anxiety and to encourage students to do the same (Coleman & Stevenson, 2014; Stevenson, 2014).

Implications

History teachers are often encouraged to connect the past to present. By specifying the competing goals and potential directions of racial discussions in history, teachers might be willing to embrace rather than fear them.

Authors

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Lisette Nnenna Enumah, The University of Pennsylvania