We Americans are alternately bored and outraged by social studies education.
In my years conducting research in social studies classrooms, I’ve listened to many students describe the subject as uninteresting. “I forgot all the stuff we did last year,” an 11th grader told me. “I’m not interested in the whole, you know, George Washington thing, because I feel like you go over that so often. It’s just like, I’m sick of it.” Another quipped that in his history class “we talked about things that happened like 13,000 years ago, that don’t got nothing to do with today.” School-based history, for these and many other students, is repetitive, irrelevant, and less than memorable.
For parents and politicians, on the other hand, debates about the social studies curriculum have become increasingly urgent and heated. After a groundswell of attention to questions of race and justice following George Floyd’s murder in 2019, a backlash has arrived, with over half of U.S. states considering legislative bans on anti-racist teaching and trainings. The Saving American History Act of 2020 proposed the federal defunding of schools using curricular materials that emphasize the role of slavery in U.S. history. Distorted representations of “critical race theory” are being weaponized as cultural flashpoints in local and state elections.
However, boredom and politicized contention should not be our only options. Carol Lee, in her thought-provoking meditation on possible futures in education, challenges us to think hard about what exactly it is we need from schools, asking, “What sort of curriculum would best serve the public good? And, perhaps even more important, who do we imagine that public to include? Who is the ‘we’ that our schools should aim to serve?” These are deeply intertwined questions. The “we” our schools aim to serve are the very same “we” who need a curriculum that is up to the challenge of nurturing young people who can approach our complex national past with honesty, compassion, and curiosity. As philosopher Kwame Appiah points out, “The unities we create fare better when we face the convoluted reality of our differences” (2018, p. 104).
When we teach versions of our national history that downplay difficult truths, not only do we alienate many of our students, but we leave all of them ill-equipped to understand contemporary struggles over justice and injustice. To help young people become truly enfranchised, our schools must engage them in grappling honestly with our complex past, including attention to the persistent inequalities that have long marked our society. That’s why it’s so important for educators to be able to draw upon resources such as Teaching Hard History, with its framework for teaching about American slavery; Facing History and Ourselves, with its classroom materials addressing racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudice at key moments in our past, and the 1619 Project Curriculum, which reframes the stories we usually tell about race and slavery in U.S. history. Such resources embrace what Lee terms “complex content.” They allow for the kind of “ambitious teaching and learning” called for by Nasir, Bang, and Yoshikawa in the opening essay of this series.
But in addition to insisting on thoughtful, truthful, and complex approaches to learning about the past, Lee rightfully points to the need for an educational vision that is larger and more “ecological” in nature. In my own research, too, I’ve found that powerful civic learning goes well beyond the acquisition of content knowledge. Civic engagement isn’t something that students receive from their teachers, no matter how powerful those teachers’ pedagogical efforts in the classroom. Rather, such engagement is mutually constructed by young people as they work together. It develops within an ecosystem of collective practices, in which they connect with others, learn across boundaries, and act with purpose and agency.
For example, consider a civic action research project in which high school students investigated the school experiences of their recent immigrant peers. Their original research, which they presented to school and district leaders, revealed that many of these students felt like outsiders at their urban high school; they did not participate in afterschool clubs and sports, lacked access to higher level courses, and experienced mistreatment from some of their peers. After seeing the group’s presentation, a principal reflected that “I thought [a small change] was the solution. I’m realizing it’s got to be much more than that.” One student remarked, “They were in there listening to us, every word.” “I think they were touched by it,” noted another. A third shared that, “I came to the realization that it was bigger than I thought it was. It’s becoming actual, like, activism in the community. Like we’re not stopping anytime soon.” This was “civic discourse” that had a meaningful impact across an entire district. As an assistant superintendent told me, “I think that every single person who heard them speak walked away with either being moved or with a new learning or a new feeling that they didn’t have before hearing our students talk.”
I stand in support of Carol Lee’s vision for a “curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs.” It will not be boring. It may change us all.
References
Appiah, K. (2018). The lies that bind: Rethinking identity. Liveright Publishing.
Lee, C. (2021). A curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs. Phi Delta Kappan, 103, 54-57.
Nasir, N, Bang, M., & Yoshikawa, H. (2021). Possible futures: What might we accomplish in 25 years? Phi Delta Kappan, 103.
This article is an invited response to “A curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs” by Carol Lee, part of Kappan‘s Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures series, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Rubin
BETH RUBIN is professor and chair of educational theory, policy, and administration at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education, New Brunswick, NJ.
