National, Ethnic, and Indigenous Identities and Perspectives in History Education

Examining Three Narratives of U.S. History in the Historical Perspectives of Middle School (Emergent) Bilingual Students

“…In addition, the present study responds to Barton and Avery's (2016) call for empirical study of student perspectives on history across sociocultural differences. In particular, the findings contribute to the literature on students' historical perspectives (Epstein, 2000(Epstein, , 2009Peck, 2010Peck, , 2018aPeck, , 2018bSantiago, 2017;Woodson, 2016Woodson, , 2017. As noted in previous research, the participants in the present study reflected "traditional" Terzian & Yeager, 2007) or "Eurocentric" (Choi et al, 2011;Epstein, 2000) narratives of U.S. history.…”

“…While the narratives used by the participants cannot be generalized to other middle school students or (emergent) bilingual students, the findings suggest that students with varying levels of English language proficiency can and do employ multiple narratives of U.S. history. As such, the findings from the present study add to the research on schematic narrative templates in the historical perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse students (Epstein, 2000(Epstein, , 2009Peck, 2010Peck, , 2018aPeck, , 2018bSantiago, 2017;Woodson, 2016. In addition, the findings contribute to notions of culturally and linguistically responsive social studies instruction (e.g., Choi, 2013;Dong, 2017;Jaffee, 2016b;Salinas, Rodríguez, & Blevins, 2017;Yoder, Kibler, & van Hover, 2016).…”

“…In addition, a few of Peck's seven immigrant participants and some of the White Canadian students described a "Diverse and Harmonious Canada" narrative focused on the importance of a multicultural society in Canada. The findings from Peck (2010) and Martell's (2013) studies align with Peck's (2018aPeck's ( , 2018b more recent literature reviews and her conclusion that "youth negotiate multiple identities and historical narratives, and many do so in sophisticated ways" (Peck, 2018b, p. 328). In sum, the research examined in this section aligns with recent research among British students (R. Harris & Reynolds, 2014) and students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds in U.S. schools (Levy, 2017) for whom personal connections or the ability to "see themselves in the history they are taught" (R. Harris & Reynolds, 2014, p. 464) leads to more favorable perspectives on national history while adding complexity to students' understanding of historical content (see also L. M. Harris, Halvorsen, & Aponte-Martínez, 2016).…”

Narrations of (in)significant pasts in young people’s identity construction

“…In order to gain knowledge of the participants' historical social narratives, places of residence and spatial socialisation, we asked them to fill in a questionnaire and to do a writing assignment (see Table 2). We designed the questionnaire taking into account previous studies and comments on their methodologies (Van Alphen and Van Nieuwenhuyse, 2019;Peck, 2018). We avoided categorising young people from top down, and instead asked them to define their nationality and sense of belonging in their own words, and to choose, from 13 options, 1 to 6 groups that they perceived as relevant to themselves.…”

Cultivating historical consciousness in the history classroom: Uncovering the subtleties of student meaning making with the help of found poetry

“…Making meaning about the past and history provides opportunities to make meaning about who we are as individuals, how we see the future, and how we choose to act as agents in ongoing historical developments. For this, students can develop their awareness of their 'historical positionality' (VanSledright, 1998), notably by scrutinising widely shared and culturally mediated memories of the past, as well as inherited popular historical beliefs, uses of history, family histories, and darker aspects and minority perspectives in their national history (Clark, 2014;Grever et al, 2008;Levy, 2017;Nordgren, 2016;Peck, 2018;Wineburg et al, 2007). In sum, building a sense of historical being is about making meaning of who the student is as a person belonging to living history.…”