Truth-Telling and Transformation: Critical, Reparative, and Community-Engaged Historical Methods Across Educational Contexts

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium convenes historians, researchers, educators, artists, and organizers who employ critical, reparative, and community-engaged historical methods. Presenters showcase historical projects and interventions, such as countermapping, decolonizing archives, and mobile museums, that challenge hegemonic narratives and disrupt oppressive practices. Panelists discuss the pedagogical implications of histories centering community expertise and elevating intersectional perspectives, especially those erased or marginalized in mainstream historical teaching and learning. Taken collectively, the presentations attend to history as a social process and illuminate approaches through which historical inquiry and knowledge can transform educational contexts, enable relational awareness, and cultivate care and stewardship. The session culminates with dialogue to collectively imagine history as a tool for educational and social change, justice, and shared liberatory futures.

Sub Unit

• Division F - Historical Inquiry in Education

Chair

• Kimberly C. Ransom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Campus Disorientation Tours as Critical Historical Practice - Tonya Kneff-Chang, University of Michigan

• Roots of Resistance: Land, Memory, and Emotional Geographies in Ethnic Studies Pedagogy - Mariana E. Ramirez, University of California - Irvine; Roxana Daylen Dueñas, Los Angeles Unified School District

• “This Work is Care Work”: Filipina/x/o American Community Museums and Historical Reparative Work - Paulina Fraser, University of Michigan

• RHI - Reparative Historical Inquiry - Aimee Medeiros, University of California - San Francisco; Jason Glenn, University of Kansas Medical Center; Norlissa Cooper, University of California - San Francisco

• Detroit Public School History Museum: Participatory Archiving, Design-Infused History Practices, Cross-Cultural History - Dannah Elise Wilson, Detroit Public School History Museum; Mehzabin Kaboo, Wayne State University

Session Organizer

• Tonya Kneff-Chang, University of Michigan

Discussant

• David G. García, University of California - Los Angeles