Shame, U.S. History, and Social Studies Teaching

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Seventeen
  In Roundtable Session: UnSettling Social Studies: Difficult Knowledge and (Post)Colonial Legacies (Table 6)

Abstract

Shame has emerged as a dominant affect in the American zeitgeist. Recent scholarship has explored how shame moves in educational settings, and this article builds upon this work by training an empirical lens on the complicated relationship between social studies teachers and affects of shame. Using qualitative research methods, this article explores how four social studies teachers make sense of shame in relation to their work as teachers, an inquiry that spanned teacher sensemaking, teacher experiences of shame in the classroom, and teacher analyses of how shame moves through curricular texts. Findings show teachers conceive of affects of shame as embedded in social studies education, but embodied differently according to their identities and other factors.

Author

• Peter M. Nelson, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author