DIGGING UP OLD WOUNDS OR FIXING FLAWS?WHITE RURAL US HISTORY TEACHER’S RESPONSIBILITIES AROUND RACE
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In today’s social political climate, teachers, and especially history teachers, are simultaneously being called on to implement anti-racist education and to avoid teaching critical race theory. However, while there is much debate about what teachers should be teaching students, and especially white students, about race, there is relatively little understanding of how these lessons actually unfold in classrooms. Using semi structured zoom interviews, I set out to answer the question: what are the perceived responsibilities of nine white, rural US history teachers in teaching about the history and legacy of racism in the United States? All the teachers interviewed expressed a strong sense of responsibility to help their students understand what it means to be American. Five main sub-responsibilities emerged: 1) Help students develop either a proud attitude or a critical towards their Americanness, 2) Prepare students for future civic engagement either through voting or through protest, 3) Use the past to contextualize current events and explain either the existence, or absence of, systems of racial oppression in the present. 4) Provide students with diverse materials and perspectives that either uphold or challenge dominant/hegemonic narratives of history. 5) Create a safe space for students to learn how to interact with racial others. Notably, these responsibilities had very little to do with the past; instead, what mattered most were students’ current identities, realities and possible futures. Where teachers varied most was not in their responsibilities themselves but in their sense of what kind of Americans they hoped to foster in their classroom. The pasts that teachers chose to teach were not as important as the reasons that teachers chose to teach them. This insight highlights the need to center and examine teacher motivation in teacher preparation programs and to focus on teacher intention over classroom content.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | September 1, 2021 - June 2, 2022 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 7, 2022; June 2, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Teitler, Octavia |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Race |
|---|---|
| Subject | Education |
| Subject | History |
| Subject | Civics |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Teitler, O. (2022). DIGGING UP OLD WOUNDS OR FIXING FLAWS?WHITE RURAL US HISTORY TEACHER’S RESPONSIBILITIES AROUND RACE. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/cz035gq8988
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- tteitler@stanford.edu
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