How the Past is Produced: Teaching Critical Historiographies for Civic Possibilities

• In Event: Civic Histories: Learning the Past, Understanding the Present, Possibilizing the Future

Abstract

Purpose
As part of a larger design-based study (McKinney & Reeves, 2019), this conceptual paper theorizes a ‘history of the present’ framework, based on critical historiography, to guide social studies curriculum theory and practice that meaningfully connects the past and present. While understandings of the present and democratic engagement have long been presented as the “why” behind history’s inclusion in the disciplinary core (Dewey, 1916), in practice, these connections are frequently oversimplified, grounded in mythologized histories or narrative manipulations to fit presentist agendas (Lowenthal, 2015). These narratives, rooted in an empiricist approach to historiography (Green & Troup, 2016), are presented as fact as teachers frequently operate under the assumption that historical products “faithfully and directly correspond to the past” with little consideration of historical interpretation and narrative production (VanSledright, 2002, p. 1091).

Theoretical Framework
To move beyond these superficial past-present connections, and towards histories that better frame questions of contemporary civic concern and situate future civic action, I propose that social studies education must also move beyond the limitations of the empiricist approach to historiography. As Eley (2005) suggests, “All of the ways in which the past gets fashioned into histories, consciously and unconsciously, remain crucial for how the present can be grasped,” and “have tremendous consequences for how the future might be shaped” (p. ix). Understanding this “fashioning”—the process of historical production and historiography—along with its multivariate epistemological, ideological, and axiological underpinnings, is crucial for understanding how narratives function as a form of power shaping our understandings and interactions in the contemporary world.

Methods and Perspective
This paper offers a conceptual ‘history of the present’ framework, which intersects critical historiographic approaches and their theoretical underpinnings to guide social studies curriculum. The framework includes considerations of the role of temporal frameworks and scale (Green & Troup, 2016; Blommeart, 2015), historical naming (Eagleton, 2016; Trouillot, 1990), and authorship (Foucault, 1997; Maza, 2017) and how they function within historical production and the shaping of historical narratives. Although this paper is largely theoretical, the ‘history of the present’ framework was produced in collaboration with practicing social studies teachers in a larger design-based study (McKinney & Reeves, 2019). Thus, this paper further offers illustrative examples of how the critical historiographic approaches I suggest can take shape in practice.

Results and Significance
Overall, I suggest this framework can support teachers by emphasizing that history is much more complex than dominant narratives present, and allow for examinations of power that are necessary to understand this complexity historically and contemporarily. Each of these historiographic approaches asks us to challenge how knowledge is produced and how certain epistemologies are privileged. Collectively, they push back against history as something that is static and suspended in the past, to instead reveal history as dynamic and active in how it shapes our current realities and possible futures. Viewing history in this way has the potential to make it much more relevant to students' lives and offers avenues for transformation as they use these critiques and understandings to act on that social world.

Author

• Liz Harrelson Magill, Baylor University