Historical Consciousness in the Margins: Learning From Black High School Students’ Engagement With Monuments

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

Abstract

This paper explores the reactions of a group of mostly African American high school students (n=10) to the presence in their city of multiple monuments that valorized the soldiers and statesmen of the Confederate States of America (CSA). The statues were placed on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia from 1890-1929 to promote a memory of the Civil War that vindicates the southern cause and its pro-slavery stance. In 1995, a monument of African American tennis champion Arthur Ashe was added to the Avenue to challenge that memory. The students studied controversies related to Monument Avenue in their English class as part of a project on rhetoric.
This paper will report on an attempt to make sense of the participating students' work using Rusen's (2005) theory of historical consciousness. That attempt was only partially fruitful and this paper will address a question that emerged from that attempt: how can current theories of historical consciousness be extended and amended to better describe the historical reasoning of minoritized students in a diverse and unequal society?
The data consist of letters the students wrote to their mayor addressing the past, present, and future of Monument Avenue. After using Rüsen’s (2005) typology of historical consciousness as an analytic heuristic, I found that I was not able to account for significant evidence of students‘ sense-making. To do so, I needed to pay more attention to identity, affect, and the African American experience in the South. I used King’s (2019) theorization of Black historical consciousness that describes the collective memory, historiography, and ontologies developed by members of the African diaspora to make sense of their own experiences. I drew on the work of Zanazanian (2012; cf. Du Bois, 1993/1903) to account for identity as an ongoing dialogue with members of one’s group and with groups he calls the “significant Other.”
I further drew on Helmsing’s (2014) work on the essential role of affect in historical sense-making, and how it impacts learning when dialogue with the significant Other is contentious (Bermudez, 2012) . Theory is the result of an ongoing dialogue between highly contextualized empirical research and decontextualized synthesis. As historical consciousness is taken up by researchers and curriculum developers in different social contexts, we stand at the precipice of growth and change. I will conclude the paper with suggestions about how to adapt and extend Rüsen’s typology for empirical historical consciousness research in local contexts.

Author

• Gabriel Aaron Reich, Virginia Commonwealth University