Decolonizing world history education in Mni Sota: Practitioner reflections on a land-based world history curriculum

• In Event: Decolonizing Transnational Education: Rethinking Curriculum Beyond Western Dominance Toward Multiplex Identities and Representations

Abstract

This paper engages in a “context-specific, self-reflexive, and recursive” inquiry into the possibilities and limits of decolonizing world history education using a land-based curriculum that connects local, national, transnational, and global contexts (Durand & Asher, 2015). In the United States, world history education has historically functioned to erase Indigeneity and justify settler colonialism. In 1874, a world history textbook stated “Caucasians form the only true historical race” (Dunn et al., 2016, p. 19). In 1892, the National Education Association’s recommended course of study for Grades 5-12 was limited to Greek, Roman, English, European, and American history (Nelson, 1992). Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of Western civilization was both disseminated in schools and challenged by ethnic studies, multicultural education, and world history scholars (Brown, 2010; Dunn, 2015). By the 21st century, world history education had fractured into three models—Western Heritage, Different Cultures, and Patterns of Change—none of which decolonize the curriculum (Dunn, 2000).
Indeed, each is insufficient. The Western Heritage model is White supremacist and historically inaccurate (Appiah, 2016). The Different Cultures model, also known as Western Civilization Plus, preserves the rise-of-the-West narrative despite coverage of empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Bain & Shreiner, 2005). The Patterns of Change model takes a global view yet Eurocentrism persists in its standards (Marino & Bolgatz, 2010), discourse (Abdou, 2017), and subfields like Big History (Conrad, 2019). In all three, colonial ideologies are “veiled under European categories of the nation-state [...] as it consumes non-European epistemologies under its categories” (Dozono, 2020, p. 8).
Truly decolonizing world history education would require addressing both “curriculum as Indigenous erasure” and “the persistence of Indigenous land as curriculum” (Tuck, 2015, p. 439). Accordingly, world history education must not only shed its Eurocentrism but also foreground the transnational interactions of local Indigenous peoples past, present, and future. It should also deconstruct the world history canon of civilizations, empires, and nation-states to yield curricular space to the histories of diasporic communities in relation to Indigeneity and Indigenous land.
As a social studies teacher in Mni Sota, I redesigned the world history curriculum at an independent school that I also attended as a student. Back then, the course followed the Western Heritage model; before I was hired, it was updated to Different Cultures; and in my second year, we adopted a land-based approach. The result, “Minnesota: A Modern World History,” featured eight units exploring the global histories of local communities omitted from survey courses: Dakota land recovery and Anishinaabe language revitalization; Black abolitionism in the Americas; Irish, Swedish, and Eastern European Jewish immigration; revolution in Mexico; decolonization in Bangladesh; civil war in Nigeria, Liberia, Somalia, and Ethiopia; Hmong refugee resettlement; and U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. Combining practical and critical teacher action research (Manfra, 2017), this paper is an autobiographical case study of how a land-based curriculum cultivates a sense of place and one’s relationship to Indigenous land. Ultimately, it finds that world history education can unsettle “the imagined unity of national identity” rather than justify settler colonialism (LaSpina, 2003).

Author

• Daniel Bergerson, University of Minnesota