Hope and History: What do future teachers need to know?

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2002 by Kathleen Weiler

Despite the hostile climate of punitive testing, budget cuts, and top-down control facing public education in this country, a number of programs and courses seeking to encourage progressive teaching practices have been developed and are continuing to be created at colleges and universities around the country, some of them described in this issue. In this article I describe a single course embedded within a teacher education program that I believe contributes to this broad political project. This course, which is (somewhat awkwardly) titled Class, Race, Gender in the History of U.S. Education, reflects my strong belief in the need for a historical perspective for prospective teachers. It introduces prospective teachers to the powerful history of students and teachers who have claimed a broad and challenging education as a right for all people. While this course is obviously not perfect and is not the only example of how such material can be introduced to prospective teachers, I believe it has many strengths an d suggests approaches that may be useful to others. I created this course more than a decade ago. A number of other instructors have taught it over the years, and it is now being taught by Linda Mizzell. (*) All of the instructors of this course have contributed to its development, and my description of the course includes resources and assignments used in different versions of the course.

It may be useflul at the outset to set out what this course is not. It is not intended to be simply a chronological survey of institutional changes in state policies and educational practice. Instead, it considers the history of education in the United States as a struggle over access and control, focusing on the ways different groups have defined and organized education, considering the different experiences of Native American Indians, African Americans, women from different classes and ethnicities, and immigrant groups of a variety of cultures. Policies and attitudes toward education are examined in relation to changes in the U.S. economy, the growth of organized state structures, and racial and gender ideologies. Throughout the course, the emphasis is on the struggles of subjugated groups to gain access to and define a meaningful education.

Central to the design of this course is a belief that one of the most disempowering aspects of teaching is the isolation of the individual classroom teacher. Of course, this sense that each teacher is a unique individual mirrors the individualism and weak historical memory of U.S. culture as a whole. The emphasis in many teacher education programs on preparing lesson plans or on relationships within isolated classrooms encourages (often unwittingly) this individualism. Focusing on what goes on behind the closed classroom door leaves teachers with no sense of belonging to a larger collectivity and little understanding that their work is part of a larger historical process. Throughout this course, then, we have not only emphasized the way schools are located within larger social, political, and economic structures, but we have also introduced individual teachers as members of larger groups who were engaged in collective struggles. The story of Septima Clark and the citizenship schools in the Civil Rights moveme nt, for example, is not just a narrative of a heroic woman, but is an example of a person who participated in a collective struggle. Clark was a teacher activist, but she did not work alone. This idea--that we all are shaped by our personal and collective social locations and histories and that our actions can make a difference-is fundamental to the course.

In many ways, the linchpin of this course is the assignment asking students to explore their own families' educational histories. This paper is assigned early in the course with the intent that students begin to see that their own educational location is not just the result of their own individual hard work, but is shaped by larger social forces. The educational history assignment has two parts. The first part is to produce a genealogy indicating the educational attainment of members of the student's family. Gathering this information often involves interviewing family members about their own education and the education of their parents and grandparents. Students also can use any written documents that are available. Families differ enormously in the kind of knowledge they have about the past, so the sources of information available to students vary. The genealogy is presented in graphic form--as a chart or diagram. Students frequently create large poster board diagrams of their families for this exercise, wh ich they then present to the class. The second part of the assignment is an analytic paper, addressing some pattern in their family's educational history. This can be focused on the effect of class location, the role of religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or another factor seen as significant. They then discuss their papers with others in small groups. A number of powerful themes emerge from this assignment. By sharing their family's stories in small groups, students hear from one another that different families have access to different kinds of resources; they hear stories of privilege and of oppression not from the instructor or from assigned readings, but from their peers. This can be a powerful learning experience. On the other hand, as Linda Mizzell has commented, white students very frequently tell stories of their families' "coming to this country with nothing." She asks these students to consider whether the privilege associated with whiteness in the United States is "nothing." Moreover, these immigran ts often had the support of other members of their families already in this country, of an expanding economy, and the benefits of US imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century.