Contestations Over What We Should Teach: A Human Learning and Development Analysis

• In Event: AERA Distinguished Lecture: Carol D. Lee

Abstract

Public education in our democracy is the primary context in which as a society we can prepare youth to engage with the complex dilemmas in the civic domain. The current public disputations over how U.S. history should be taught, policies banning books to be read in schools, controversies around race, gender and sexual orientation, and threats of violence, punishments, and firing against teachers and school board members represent a consequential threat to public education as an instrument to prepare young people to navigate the possibilities of our system of democratic governance.

This presentation examines these disputations through the lens of the science of human learning and development in order to both understand their psychological and social underpinnings, but also to demonstrate how the science of human learning and development can address the fundamental assumptions that inform the claims being made: assumptions about race, about diversity along multiple lines, and about positioning children/adolescents as feeling unsafe when these disputed topics are addressed in schooling. This interrogation is further informed by an articulation of the demands of historical understanding and reasoning as resources for tackling the complexities of our democratic experiment, one designed to provide multiple pathways for navigating dissent and difference, but also one that is plagued with democratic contradictions.

Our ability to develop equitable systems to support robust learning and development must wrestle with these conundrums, ideally informed by comprehensive understandings of human learning and development, and rooted in historical context.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University