Teaching history on the border: teachers voice their views

Abstract

The overall objective of this investigation was to explore the views of border history teachers on a wide variety of issues that influence their instructional approaches, curricular content choices, and capacity to teach history more effectively. More specifically, the focus was on identifying factors that affect their ability to utilize culturally relevant pedagogy and to integrate into their classroom instruction elements of the local border community, and of the Latin American, Latino, and Mexican American experience. Findings confirmed that structural factors such as mandated curriculum standards, adopted textbooks, and high-stakes tests all serve to limit the teachers' ability to integrate the Latino and minority experience into their classroom narrative. Although most teachers expressed support for the inclusion of Latino history, in actual practice they reported having insufficient time, training, or resources to adequately do so. The implications that Latino curricular exclusion has for students on the border are also discussed.

Critical What What? A Theoretical Systematic Review of 15 Years of Critical Race Theory Research in Social Studies Education, 2004–2019

“…Of the 59 studies analyzed, 48 of them (81%) offered a perfunctory description of CRT’s tenets with either no consistency among the tenets from study to study or an erroneous positioning of CRT’s principles as tenets. For example, descriptions of CRT’s tenets included summations that (a) CRT challenges constructed ideologies of objectivity, racial sensitivity, and deals with stereotyping (Eargle, 2016; Lintner, 2004); (b) U.S. society is based on property rights in which the intersection of race and property serves as an analytic for the examination of social inequity (Martell, 2013, 2016; Martell & Stevens, 2017a, 2017b); and (c) CRT suggests that each race has its own evolving history (Noboa, 2013). Whereas CRT scholarship does address these issues, these are deviations from the core tenets and principles of CRT.…”

“…AsianCrit was the most commonly used CRT spinoff as a more recent body of literature produced over the last 5 years centered Asian American experiences with racism as produced in curriculum, picture books, and pedagogical practices (An, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Rodríguez, 2018, 2019; Rodríguez & Kim, 2018). Scholars also drew from LatCrit (Noboa, 2013; Salinas et al, 2016; Rodríguez & Salinas, 2019; Vasquez, 2018), TribalCrit (Masta, 2015; Padgett, 2015), and BlackCrit (Griffin & James, 2018; L. King, 2019) as CRT framing mechanisms in their research.…”

“…For example, eight studies employed CRT as a framework to contextualize how mainly White preservice teachers thought about race and then acted on these thoughts either through class discussion, curricular design, or field-based teaching experiences (An, 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Buchanan, 2016; Demoiny, 2017, 2018; Martell, 2017; Vasquez, 2018). Another nine studies illustrated how in-service teachers’ thinking about the relationship between race and citizenship impacted their pedagogical and curricular decision making (Chandler, 2009; Ender, 2018; Martell, 2013; Martell & Stevens, 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Noboa, 2013; Rodríguez, 2018, 2019). Hence, the so what of racism’s permanence is only situated within the ideological realm, which suggests that if the discipline could only change teachers’ minds about how they teach about racialized citizenship, then racism in its most benign form would be eradicated.…”

“…These studies included participants from various ethno-racial backgrounds (Demoiny, 2018; Howard, 2004; L. King, 2019; Martell, 2013, 2016a, 2016b; Martell & Stevens, 2017a, 2017b; Noboa, 2013; Smith, 2016), but several studies, namely those relevant to social studies teacher education, only included White voices as the central story on race, racism, and racialized citizenship (An, 2017b, 2018; Bery, 2014; Buchanan, 2016; Chandler, 2009; Demoiny, 2017; Masta, 2016; Vasquez, 2018).…”

“…Brown & Brown, 2010a, 2010bK. Brown & Brown, 2010;Demoiny, 2017Demoiny, , 2018Hawkman & Castro, 2017;Hornbeck, 2018;Howard, 2004;Martell, 2013Martell, , 2016Martell & Stevens, 2017aNoboa, 2013;Pinkney, 2016;Woodson, 2015Woodson, , 2016Woodson, , 2019. However, the degree to which racism was presented as inconvenience as opposed to a structuring mechanism with material implications that prevent humanity from progressing is debatable (Leonardo, 2014).…”