Creating Citizens: History Education in America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is not for the faint of heart, but will explore the feint, adept, and deft use of Civics and History courses to try and create one ideal American narrative in K-12 classrooms. History in American K-12 classrooms and beyond is always political! Historical thinking is also supposed to be an active way of learning and establishing new ideas when there are new pieces of information or additional epistemologies not a passive regurgitation of facts. Join this class to struggle with how a more representative curriculum might help foster better-rounded citizens and broader critical thinking skills. Historical narratives created and true are installed in American curricula to create ‘good citizens,' but who determines what ‘good' is and who and what ‘citizens' are is an ever-changing pantheon of characters seeking god-like power over the nation's past, with aspirations of helping shape and control the nation's future. This course examines how historical events are molded and taught in curricula in different eras and shows the evolution of textbooks and curriculum firsthand. Students explore how early textbooks think of Native peoples as "Noble Savages" and how that ‘nobility' disappears in later texts. We'll have the opportunity to study the re-shaping of ethnic identities in the United States History curriculum and how the Cold War not only re-configures the size and orientation of the maps in our history books but also how the stories of other nations and their forms of government become commonplace slurs as a way to whip up righteousness for US policies in the Cold War and to quash rising ideologies connected to labor movements and those other nations simultaneously. We'll examine the rise and righteousness of both sides of the current debate over Critical Race Theory in the K-12 classroom and so much more. You will have the opportunity to explore additional historical narratives of Native peoples and many different groups who immigrants by choice, force, and forced annexations and their representations in curricula. This course recognizes the privileges that race, class, and gender has played in creating the historical narrative for K-12 classrooms through the study of the groups who make decisions about what civics and historical lessons are taught to students in American schools in different eras. This course will have writing and research elements go through multiple drafts and the final version of student works is not just academic in nature but is to demonstrate that you can utilize your knowledge and understanding for the good, to in essence show ‘what you are fighting for' in the parlance of all at Notre Dame working to bring academic thinking to the forefront for the common good. This course will require critical thinking, creative solutions and ideas on curricular philosophy, great classroom participation, a willingness to do original historical research, and a tremendous desire to share.