“When human history fell short”: Art museums, counter-storytelling, and preservice history teacher identities

• In Event: Examining How Teacher Thinking and Knowledge Impact History Classrooms: Studies with Preservice Teachers

Abstract

This study examines how educators and students have the power to interact with museums as places of racial pedagogy. After researching how a group of preservice history teachers were pedagogically affected by a museum’s exhibit featuring Black artists, we found that a combination of museums’ collective history as spaces of whiteness, and the social identities of teachers themselves, both greatly influenced if and how educators ‘read race’ in the museum and then later utilized art critically in their own teaching goals. These themes call for the necessity of preservice history teacher programs that challenge dominant cultural memory in historically white museums, and empower young people to ‘read museums’ with more inclusive, agentic perspectives when facing art and archive.

Authors

• Michael Joseph, Texas Tech University

• Joanna Batt, University of Cincinnati