Toward Teaching an Anti-Oppressive Past: Instead, Teach Hard Memories

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Loosing the Constraints: International Perspectives on Curriculum, Policy, and Memory

Abstract

This paper reads the “Teaching hard history” curriculum against Kumashiro’s (2000) advocacy for a post-structuralist anti-bias education. It argues that the curriculum frameworks’ underlying conception of the past as static and discoverable contributes to its problematic positioning of teachers as both the problem with and solution to students’ inabilities to connect past injustices to current struggles. Furthermore, the paper suggests that moving towards a theory of anti-oppressive education may require both an attention to anti-oppressive pedagogy and a transformed notion of the past as dynamic and socially contingent, much like that which has emerged in memory studies.

Author

• Errol C. Saunders, Teachers College, Columbia University