Rethinking Social Studies: Expanding Students’ Worldview through the Integration of Ethnic Studies

• In Event: Freedom Dreaming Towards Ethnic Studies in Tumultuous Times: Teacher-and-Researcher Reflections on Race, Pedagogy, and Power

Abstract

Studying US history in modern Social Studies classrooms is rife with the conflicts, struggles, and injustices that mirror our lives in modern times. With battles raging far beyond our classrooms, our duty is first and foremost to our students. Yet, many educators struggle to address these problems of the social world in relation to race, class, and gender (Epstein, 2000; Jones, 2023). While deeply undervalued, Ethnic Studies concepts can help students engage with the past while also increasing teachers’ abilities to become more race-conscious through useful conceptual tools such as counternarrative, hegemony, power, privilege, identity, and so on (Banks, 1975; Martell and Stevens, 2017). As a middle school social studies teacher participating in this curricular intervention research project, I had the unique opportunity to experiment with how to rethink our approaches to social studies education with Ethnic Studies underpinnings. In this paper, I illustrate how historical content and ethnic studies concepts connect meaningfully, how theoretically grounded pedagogy facilitates critical thinking, and how students grew in their depth of historical sense-making due to these efforts.

The data in this paper is derived from the research design articulated in paper #1, and I am offering reflections from my experiences in the classroom. My primary mode of analysis is critical autoethnography (Hughes, Pennington, and Makris, 2012). Drawing upon observational data, student work, and teacher reflections, this paper is my attempt to rewrite “the self and the social” as I analyze the efficacy of my teaching and the process of integrating Ethnic Studies content, concepts, and pedagogies into my social studies classroom (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 4).

While teaching is often not a discipline of immediate results, this paper offers my learnings of the Ethnic Studies pedagogical standpoints that cultivated a sense for the students who participated in our curricular interventions. I observed a positive shift in their depth of historical context, confidence with assignments, and ability to draw transdisciplinary connections. As the curricular intervention progressed, student journal entries got longer, deeper, and more raw. This paper turns to students’ final speeches, in which the students explained to their peers their deep personal connections to the historical, political, and social issues talked about in this curriculum. Their connections were also transferrable to other disciplines. For example, the final paragraph of a student’s essay on the life of early California woman Josefa Segovia ended with, “The story of Josefa Segovia matters today because it shows patterns of violence towards the Mexicans during the gold rush and the sexism women were treated with back then in the US.” Facilitating the development of this type of critical thinking is some of the best armor we can give our students against the dehumanization, bigotry, and misinformation that they are faced with the moment they step into the world beyond our classrooms. Ultimately, I argue that there is no honest way to teach US history without integrating the concepts of ethnic studies.

Author

• Kathryn Marcouiller, San Francisco Unified School District