Aren’t Tools and Knowledge Supposed to Help? Preservice Teachers’ Learning and Reckoning at a Former Plantation Site

• In Event: What Happened Here? High School and Preservice Teachers’ Engagement With History at Local Historic Sites

Abstract

Nestled a little beyond downtown Grange lies Edgewood House, a plantation cottage that was built by one of the first white settlers in the area and in-law to the founders of the nearby land-grant Grange University. Recognizing the need to reckon with and teach local difficult history (Stoddard, 2022) in the pursuit of truth and remaking of just spaces in our community, the authors organized a field trip to Edgewood House with their elementary and secondary pre-service teachers (PSTs) in spring 2022. Through this experience, we wanted PSTs to learn the local difficult history in ways that humanized the experiences of those who suffered enslavement and land theft in this region of the United States and how these histories intersect. Although Duncan (2020) noted former plantations have potential to be sites of developing racial literacy, this is rarely the way visits are facilitated; therefore, drawing upon the Teaching Hard History framework (Learning for Justice, 2019) and Zembylas’ (2014) description of individuals' emotive responses with difficult histories, we organized the visit with guided learning stations, structured reflection, and pedagogical brainstorming. In the learning stations, PSTs analyzed primary sources such as slave census, Indian land territory maps, and oral history excerpts of a descendent of enslaved people from Edgewood House.
Using an instrumental case study, the authors explored how elementary and secondary PSTs encountered difficult histories at a local former plantation home on their university’s campus through analysis of PSTs’ digital story reflections, lesson plans they developed, and researcher notes from whole group debrief sessions. The findings suggested most PSTs deflected from wrestling with emotional responses within the encounters yet in differing ways. The elementary PSTs avoided learning the difficult history content knowledge by implementing superficial hands-on activities in lessons while the secondary PSTs focused on using disciplinary skills to understand the site. In effect, the PSTs avoided challenging their white epistemological knowledge (Barton, 2019; Stoddard, 2022) and the internal work necessary to teach difficult histories to K-12 students. While this gap represented troubling response on behalf of the PSTs, we are grappling with what it means for them to use the tools of disciplinary thinking and pedagogy to hide behind engaging their future students in the very questions and difficult history that we asked them to confront while at Edgewood House. What does it mean that they are hiding behind the very tools that we are asking them to use in the fight against passive history education? As we struggle with this reality, we hope working with teacher educators doing similar work will create useful insights and overlaps to help us reframe our work.

Authors

• Jesus Tirado, Auburn University

• Sara B. Demoiny, Auburn University

• Terrance Joshua Lewis, University of Alabama