Teachers don’t have to frame our nation’s history as either a celebration or a broken promise. What if we defined it as unfinished work? Doing so sets up all sorts of possibilities that put students in active roles. One is to invite students to construct family histories that add to our understanding of a narrative of our past and how it got us to the present.
On January 21, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the youngest presidential inaugural poet in American history. Standing before the Capitol building, Gorman asserted:
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply
unfinished.1
When looking at the state of history education in America, there seems to be much disagreement about what conclusions students should draw from our nation’s history. Is our nation delivering on the American dream, or is there something broken? Is there freedom and justice for all, or only for a few? In the past few years, states all across America have passed or have attempted to pass legislation that limits what kinds of narratives can be taught in a history classroom, politicizing not just the classroom but how students come to understand the nation’s past. Yet the stakes of a proper history education have never been higher: Gorman spoke in the very same location where just weeks earlier insurrectionists launched an unprecedented attack on our nation’s democratic system. In this context it can be tempting to see our understanding of American history, as well as our approach to teaching it, as fundamentally broken. Gorman’s observation is that this framing is part of the problem itself: the American story is not broken, it is unfinished. The problem of American history education is not what story our educators or textbooks tell, but what story our students still have to construct. If we view history education in America the same way Gorman views the story of our nation, as one that is unfinished, “far from polished, and far from pristine,” it can position us and our students as agents of change, rather than inheritors of a predetermined destiny. An “unfinished” history allows the hope that history educators can both engage and inspire students to build the nation in which they want to live.
There is a real danger in arguing over which understanding of American history is “correct.” Recent academic research on issues in history education finds that many students experience American history through a single dominant narrative that has remained largely unchanged for generations.2 I teach in Novi, Michigan, where 49% of the student body is Asian, about 8% is African American, around 4% is Hispanic or Latino, and approximately 38% is white. For many American students, this narrative is often distant and unrelatable, and certainly too Eurocentric for students in my school. But when I was growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the history I was taught felt distant and unrelatable for entirely separate reasons: it was about industry and agriculture, big cities and bigger personalities, all which seemed worlds away from our quaint U.P. towns and mining heritage. Furthermore, many classrooms have limited abilities for students to engage meaningfully in historical work, and often involve a large amount of memorization and recitation of seemingly preordained information that leaves little room for critical analysis.3 It is no surprise, then, that students disengage from history.
Clearly, there are problems with the stories we tell in the American history classroom, as well as how those stories are transmitted to and received by students. How do we tell more inclusive stories? Amanda Gorman reminds us that this is perhaps not entirely the job of the educator. Our curricula, as well as our national story, are not set in stone. They are incomplete, unfinished, and thus allow space for other narratives, including those that “collide with the traditional history curriculum.”4 Isn’t it the job of a historian to analyze competing narratives of historical events? In moving towards a more relatable, relevant, and engaging history class, history teachers and students must together engage in historical thinking skills and do the work of constructing historical narratives.
A realistic and tangible solution, therefore, is one that intertwines a variety of historical narratives while simultaneously recognizing and analyzing dominant narratives and their consequences, all while relating directly to students and their identities.5 What might this look like in the classroom? Dr. Christine Sleeter, a longtime educator and activist, may offer us a solution in the form of critical family histories. Critical family history, according to Sleeter, is an in-depth study of one’s family history that “interrogates the interaction between family and historical context” by “situat[ing] one’s family and its history within a wider analysis of social power relationships and culture.”6 Critical family histories go beyond reconstructing family trees and building personal timelines: it requires situating your history within the context of history at large while considering how the past informs the present. In other words, it requires students—with the assistance of their teachers—to both construct and analyze historical narratives that depart from the traditional stories we are told in American history.
When students engage in their own critical family histories, history education returns to the business of constructing America’s unfinished history. The process of conducting self-research shifts students from consumers of historical narratives to producers of their own histories, in turn enabling a culturally sustaining curriculum that fundamentally addresses the lives of each student and positions them within their understanding of our nation’s past.
Footnotes
- 1Gorman, The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country, 13.
- 2 King and Swartz, Re-Membering History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric Culturally Informed Praxis, 7, 157.
- 3 Monte-Sano and Quince, “Reflections on Designing Curriculum to Interrogate Social Studies,” 575.
- 4 Salinas et. al, “Critical Historical Thinking: When Official Narratives Collide With Other Narratives,” 18.
- 5 Ibid, 19.
- 6 Sleeter, “Critical Family History.”
Bibliography
- Gorman, Amanda. The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country. New York: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2021.
- King, Joyce E., Ellen E. Swartz. Re-Membering History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric Culturally Informed Praxis. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2014. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.4324/9781315882062
- Monte-Sano, Chauncey, Christine Quince. “Reflections on Designing Curriculum to Interrogate Social Studies.” J Adolesc Adult Liter, 64(5), (2021). 575–580. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1002/jaal.1137
- Salinas, Cinthia, Brooke Blevins, Caroline C. Sullivan. “Critical Historical Thinking: When Official Narratives Collide With Other Narratives.” Multicultural Perspectives, 14(1), (2012). 18-27. DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2012.646640 18.
- Sleeter, Christine. “Critical Family History.” n.d. https://www.christinesleeter.org/critical-family-history