“We get to live as historians”: Analyzing housework’s past and present with upper elementary students

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

Abstract

Purpose
This paper reports findings from the second phase of a design-based study (DBR; Barab & Squire, 2004), which sought to understand the affordances and challenges of teaching inquiry-based history units on the continuities and changes in household labor and technologies over time. Although housework is excluded from curriculum (Noddings, 2001; Authors) and elementary social studies regularly idealizes household relations (Rodriguez & Swalwell, 2022), this study aimed to engage upper elementary students in the history of housework to allow them to investigate, and challenge, the assumptions undergirding, not only their social studies curriculum, but their present realities.

Theoretical Framework
The unit design, and theoretical foundation for this research, were anchored in the 1983 book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Cowan’s work, which is now foundational to the field of feminist science and technology studies, illuminates how the household technologies widely adopted during industrialization rearranged housework in ways that paradoxically created more work for many women. As such, Cowan’s work provides an analytical framework for rupturing dominant, progress narratives, and instead considering the complexity of sociotechnical arrangements.

Methods
As DBR, this study enjoined a team of researchers and teachers in creating and studying the implementation of an inquiry-based history unit that extended Cowan’s history into the present. After participating 4th and 5th graders (N=27) read and reflected on modified excerpts of Cowan’s book, and constituent primary source materials, they were invited to do research (i.e. time studies, interviews) on household labor and technologies in their own homes. Compiling their research with their classmates, students were able to examine the complex dynamics of housework, past and present. During the course of this unit, the research team collected data from a range of sources, including field notes, teacher reflections, student artifacts (e.g., drawings of housework, student reflections, projects), and semi-structured interviews.

Findings and Significance
Inductive data analysis revealed three salient tensions that arose from students’ engagement with this history. First, students encountered disciplinary tensions, which caused them to question the nature and content of “history” as a school discipline. Second, students struggled to embrace narrative complexity outside of the binary of ‘progress’ and ‘oppression’, as this history would require. And third, students grappled with their own implicitness in this history of the present. We discuss these tensions as arising from frictions created between the students’ assumptions about gender, labor, technology, history, and no less, their own positions in the historical and present relations we unearthed. However, we further note how these tensions gave way to ruptures, wherein students demonstrated the ability to articulate challenges to these normative and unequal relations, and imagine sociotechnical rearrangements that would result in greater equity in their present lives and futures. The implications of this work point to opportunities for engaging elementary students in critical historical inquiries that are grounded in their present lives, providing students with novel entry points for civic imagination and action.

Authors

• Alexandra Thrall, Baylor University

• Liz Harrelson Magill, Baylor University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University