Towards Writing Civic Histories

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Scaffolding, Inquiring, and Writing: Teachers' Approaches to History Education (Table 12)

Abstract

Historical writing has increasingly become an integral part of civic discourse in the United States, so much so that it has been described as the “lingua franca of online political conversations” (Kang, 2022). Yet, writing in history classrooms, with its focus on academic written historical argumentation, remains stubbornly disconnected from the more civic nature of historical writing in the real world. This conceptual paper presents a framework for how teachers might use identity exploration (Kaplan et al., 2014) to support their students in writing “civic histories”: written histories that investigate past-present connections in authentic contexts while raising students’ voices and giving them space to explore their identities and figured worlds through historical inquiry.

Author

• Andrew del Calvo, Rutgers University - New Brunswick