Abstract
In the editor's notes, King explains students of color desire for social studies education that speaks to their humanity. He introduces the articles in this special issue and defines unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces. He also argues for a more complete social studies education that helps the field understand other places where social studies is performed.
Faith Blackstone, a high school student at a Minnesota high school, was dismayed by the lack of Black history curriculum at her school during Black History Month. As a response, she convened some friends, after she asked permission from the principal, to create some Black history posters of famous Black Americans. Blackstone and her friends created posters of Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, Aretha Franklin, the Tuskegee Airmen, Malcolm X, Tamir Rice, and Emmett Till. The last three, Malcom X, Tamir Rice, and Emmett Till, were denied for display. The school noted that these images and people could be seen as negative. Distraught, Blackstone and her friends stage a walk-out and protest in the halls of the school, chanting, “Black History, Uncensored” (Perez, 2019).
In the spring of 2010, Arizona law makers passed a law banning Mexican American Studies in Arizona schools. Tuscan Unified School District in Arizona (TUSD), initially supported the need for the course, but when threaten with losing millions of dollars of funding if not responsive to the law, TUSD toned down the course's content and then eliminated Mexican American Studies. In response, at a TUSD board meeting, where discussions about removing the courses were to ensue, nine Mexican American students made there way in the meeting, chained themselves to the desk and chanted, “When education is under attack, what do you do? Fight back” (Phippen, 2015). During a series of court fights, students continued to protest like in 2012 when 175 students from Wakefield Middle School, Cholla, Pueblo and Tucson high schools marched to the TUSD. In 2017, a federal judge ruled that the law was motivated by racial animus, and parts of the law about creating Ethnic studies classes has been struck down.
Latifat Odetunde, a student from Classical High School in Providence Rhode Island, at a rally for Ethnic Studies, in front of the school administrators building, told the crowd, “I'm Nigerian. I'm Muslim. I'm also an American. My story is not in the history books. It's not about what the history books put in. It's what they leave out.” Latifat is part of the Providence Student Union (PSU). The group began a campaign, #ourhistorymatters where they advocate for more voices in the curriculum. To prove their point, PSU analyzed a district approved history textbook and out of 2000 pages found, the students found that less than 5% of the textbook held narratives about people of color. They held a rally where 75 students and adults (including the superintendent) signed the group's MoveOn petition, which demands a curriculum that includes more Black, Southeast Asian, Latinx, and Native American histories (Anderson, 2016).
I begin with these three vignettes to illustrate the vast advocacy of students of color in the United States about their education. Based on racialized ideologies and culturally bias testing culture, the axiom that students of color are not invested in their education is inaccurate and, in many ways, racist. A more truthful account may be that students of color are not invested in social studies curriculum that continually miseducates who they are both culturally and historically. Ethnic studies are courses that will aid in healing from miseducation but despite evidence that ethnic studies improve academic outcomes of students of color, controversy still arises when the course is implemented critically (Sleeter, 2011; Dee & Penner, 2017). The problem is the field of social studies is overwhelming White and has been since its inception. My use of the term White does not only pertain to who teaches in our field but is based on a holistic analysis of what the field considers official knowledge, for whom this knowledge is for, and the instructional practices that ignore culturally appropriate and sustaining approaches.
Social Studies scholarship has identified that students of different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and identities have divergent understandings of history (An, 2009; Barton, 2001; Epstein, 1998; Levy, 2016; Peck, 2010). Additionally, scholars have studied how students of color distrust social studies teachers and the curriculum, even going so far as to call the official history narratives lies (Busey & Russell, 2016; Santiago, 2017; Woodson, 2016, 2018). These contentious relationships (Woodson, 2015) between students of color and social studies is troubling and students are cognizant of how the official social studies curriculum and the subsequent teaching, disregards multiple identities and how students of color see themselves as citizens. Students of color yearn to learn about themselves in schools but continually get disappointed by a social studies field that repeatedly is non-committal to institutional socially equitable practices. It is not a surprise then that social studies, in many cases, is one of the most disliked subjects by students of color (Codjoe, 1997; Howard, 2004; Loewen, 2007). Largely, students of color recognize that the field of social studies does not speak to or for them.
It is important to note that contemporary student protests over curriculum are not a new phenomenon. The East Los Angeles walk-outs by Chicano students over the lack of Mexican American history and the Philadelphia Black student protests over Black history in the 1960s are examples of such a legacy of activism over student demands for culturally and inclusive curriculum and pedagogies (Bernal, 1998; Conner & Rosen, 2013). In many ways, school integration was detrimental to students of color, who were used to learning about their cultures and histories within segregated communities. The policy of integration in predominately White spaces introduced students to teachers, the majority of them White, who were not culturally synchronous or outright racist against students of color. The price of integration, in many ways, cost students of color official spaces to learn about their history, as a result student activism served as a correcting mechanism for exclusionary social studies curriculum and instruction.
Protest over social studies content has not fallen on deaf ears; the field is trying and has steadily improved in diverse course offerings. Several state laws have been passed that mandate Ethnic Studies and Black history in public schools (King, 2017). Currently, Colorado legislators are seeking to pass House Bill 119 that would require Asian American history and culture to be included in civic lessons, a law that already mandates Native Americans, Black Americans, and Hispanic-Americans histories and cultures within its curriculum (Fish, 2019). Additionally, the College Board along with Teachers College at Columbia University and the African Diaspora Consortium have teamed together and developed an Advance Placement African Diaspora Course. The curriculum is currently being piloted in different states.
Yet, with all issues of diversity in education, advancements are sometimes simply cosmetic and have limited holistic impact. Efforts to increase diverse perspectives in social studies are met with budget scarcity, leadership incompetency, and unknowledgeable teachers who need extensive professional development and teacher training. Additionally, the social studies curriculum gives an illusion of inclusion (Vasquez Heilig, Brown, & Brown, 2012), where quantitatively we see some form of diversity through the listing of names and event but qualitatively, critical counter narratives that challenge Eurocentricity and examine history from people of color and their perspectives are largely absent (An, 2016; Busey & Walker, 2017; Santiago, 2017; Sabzalian, 2019; Shear, Knowles, Soden, & Castro, 2015). Put together, students of color and their connection to history and culture is abandon and obtaining this knowledge of self happens mainly outside the school or what I call unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces.
Several studies in social studies have examined unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces and have noted the valuable learning opportunities that afforded students opportunity to engage with and learn through the archives, community centers, museums, and movies to name a few (Burgard & Boucher, 2016; Hartlep & Xiong, 2018; Dimitriadis, 2000). Therefore, I have defined unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces as places that are not associated with official schooling where students of color can go and learn about themselves as cultural beings in critical and engaging ways. Sometimes these spaces are within the official school structure but the knowledge obtained challenges official or state-based knowledge.
This special issue is important to the field because our research harps too much on official structures that have consistently failed to adhere to cultural diversity and our growing demographics. Do not get me wrong, cultural diversity within official social studies spaces are important because for some of us, our duty is to transform the system but our attention can only go so far. What happens then is we tend to ignore critical and engaging work being done outside of schools that speak to our desires for how social studies education should be.
These spaces are special and sacred for students of color. Sometimes, these spaces are the only bright spot in the students’ educational career. These spaces do not conform to Eurocentricity. These spaces are not worried about being politically correct especially to a culture that relies on the acceptance of Whiteness. These students do not occupy safe spaces. As Leonardo and Porter (2010) reminds us, safe spaces, sometimes, are not intended for historically marginalized groups. Instead, safe spaces many times morph into a sort of White savior olympics or opportunities where White people proclaim how non-racist they are. Safe space discourse can be dangerous and psychologically violent because notions of Whiteness are reified in spaces reserved for persons of color. Instead unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces are racialized spaces where the students are not worried about being too Black, Mexican, Asian, or Native. The whole purpose for these spaces is to present the full humanity of students who sometimes are told they are less than human in a field meant to teach us about humanity and responsible citizenship. The articles in this special issue does just that, help historically marginalized students of color solidify who they are, their humanity, outside the official social studies education trope.
Special issue
The first article, The Digital Storywork Partnership: Community-centered social studies to revitalize indigenous histories and cultural knowledges by the writing team of Christine Rogers Stanton, Brad Hal, and Jioanna Carjuzaa explore the utility of the Digital Story Work Partnership (DSP) as a way to advance the goals of Montana's Indian Educational for All Act. The case study examines one DSP, the Piikani Digital Histories, as a way to advance community centered education and social studies learning. The authors illustrate that the DSP has the power to advance culturally revitalizing education, community connectedness, and spur identity development between the tribal nation and the individual. The authors challenge readers to understand that DSPs are truly a community/school partnership where educators are collaborators as well as the extension of the community.
The second article, Narrating loss, anxiety and hope: Immigrant youth's narratives of belonging and citizenship by Binaya Subedi, examines the discourses of Bhutanese-Nepali youth's idea surrounding citizenship. Subedi embeds the cultural, historical, and political context of anti-immigration and anti-refugee discourses to understand how displaced communities contest those arguments and interpret and reclaim notions of cultural as well as transnational citizenship. The centering of the youth's counter narratives has implications to mainstream views about who is and who can be a citizen, teacher education, and inadequacies of social studies curricular and pedagogical approaches towards citizenship education.
The third article, Undocumented, unafraid, and precarious: Thinking through conceptions of civics by undocumented activists, Jesus A. Tirado focus is on two undocumented activists who challenged how racialized policies and institutions affect their communities. Using LaCrit principles as theoretical constructs, Tirado centers the two activists’ ideas as counter stories, as a way to expose the limits of civic education with the vision to build a more inclusive and equitable civics curriculum. Through the activists’ stories, they emphasize schools as political sites where student's full humanity is on display, that they are being nurtured instead of displaced and pushed aside.
Tommy Ender's article, Counter-narratives as resistance: Creating critical social studies spaces with communities, is the fourth article and builds on the concept of counter-narratives as a way to expand ideas related to social studies curriculum and pedagogy. Two teachers of color counter stories are central to the discussion of how communities serve as a viable, useful, and necessary component of social studies education. Ender notes that these teachers’ use of community helped established classroom discourses usually not afforded in classrooms. The term community-based pedagogy is used to describe how race and racism, critical reflection, current events, and hip hop are used to teach social studies concepts, especially relevant materials that affect the local community.
The fifth article includes the writing team of Ryan Oto and Anita Chikkatur. The paper, “We didn't have to go through those barriers”: Culturally affirming learning in a high school affinity group, discusses the implications of developing a History of Race course at a predominantly White private school. Based on White student resistance to the structure and content of the class, the teacher had to develop an affinity group outside the regular class time for students of color. Oto and Chikkatur do not position the affinity group as a setback, instead Black students held more critical conversations within a racialized space to discuss issues relevant for them. The paper, however, speaks to a larger concern of White resistance, whether student or parent, to diversifying narratives and challenging White supremacy in official classroom spaces. Limiting Black student voices in classrooms and White racial attitudes continue to hinder the possibilities of social studies education. Yet, the affinity group allowed for Black students to live and speak their truth in an unconventional school space.
The last article, Critically civic teacher perception, posture, and pedagogy: Negating civic archetypes by Kevin Russel Magill investigates three teachers who identify as critical pedagogues and how they situate concepts related to power in civic education. The teachers express critical civic education differently but adhere to curricular ideas and pedagogies that are meant as a transformation process for civic membership, identity, and agency. Magill theories of civic ontological posturing speaks to the importance of teachers and activists that educate within unofficial and unconventional spaces for students of color or historical marginalized students in education. That is, critical civic education is foundational to consciousness raising and democracy where the limitations of the mainstream social studies curriculum is expose and students lived experiences are valid and valued.
Conclusion
Many times, as a field, we do not hold these unofficial and unconventional spaces of education as important. To be honest, I do not know when I first learned Black culture and history in school. I do remember, however, the Black church's Black History Month programming, the Africana encyclopedia sets that just magically appeared at my home, Lerone Bennett's Black history articles in Ebony magazine, the Kings and Queens posters created by Budweiser, the wonderful programming by Black owned radio stations and articles written in Black owned newspapers. Even sitting down with my elders at my family reunion, I learned more Black history than I ever did in official school settings. These spaces reaffirmed my humanity. I surmise that many other people of color have the same experiences as I.
I also recognize my privilege and that many people of color may not have those learning opportunities. This is where, as a field, we continue to fight within official social studies spaces to include those missing voices and perspectives of people of color. The fact remains, however, that many of our teachers are not equip to do this in official compacities because they too were educated in a system that ignored or sanitized critical narratives that could be brought forth through ethnic specific social studies classes (King, 2014, 2016). That is the reason why learning about unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces are important. It allows social studies educators who are deficient in diverse histories and cultures a chance to learn from the community educators and those with cultural expertise.
We, as a field, need to learn to do diversity education right. Diversity educational policy such as multicultural education and ethnic studies movements have historically been co-opted where the original purpose succumbs in a way to make the curriculum and instruction digestible to White students. This means that a total overhaul of social studies is needed. History, for example, the answer is not inclusivity. We need to move past history into curriculum and pedagogies that advocate for histories. The y denotes a singular approach whereas ies considers the multiple narratives. The singular y denotes back to the default curriculum and promotes the progressive global history narrative. This means that as diverse perspectives begin to enter the narration, those stories have to fit the narrative, therefore sanitizing narratives meant to disrupt the official historical frameworks.
The ies reflects the multitude of people who have contributed to history and considers historical marginalized persons and groups as normal actors in global encounters. In terms of policy, the ies has to mean an expansion of ethnic studies, not inclusion, but separate courses that will engage students with critical knowledge about the world around them. I have argued elsewhere that subjects such as Black history is not American history (King, 2017). My point is two-fold. First, Black history is a Diasporic approach where the Blackness and all of its intersections are global. Second, Black history frameworks are simply different than what we have considered American history. For Black people, American history begins with slavery. Black history, however, slavery is simply a blurb on the radar of thousands of years of history that began on the continent of Africa. Black history has its own frameworks and timelines that are independent from American historical constructs. The same can be argued for other ethnic studies.
We also need to better equip our pre and inservice teachers with not only content knowledge but pedagogical content knowledge concerning ethnic studies. This problem is twofold. First, teacher education has been blamed for teachers lack of racial knowledge and while I agree much can change in teacher education in terms of diversity education but the problem is more of a systematic university issue. According to Espenshade and Radford (2009) less than 20% of White students on University campuses take Ethnic Studies classes. Based on the regiment manner in teacher education, it stands to reason that many preservice teachers, the majority of them White, have not taken any Ethnic studies course. Most teacher education programs have at least one class devoted to diversity issues (Brown & Kraehe, 2010) but that is not enough to provide for the necessary content and pedagogical knowledge. Rarely do we call for change in general education for university students to take courses that are geared towards critical civics education.
Second, who we are select to be in our social studies education programs needs to be addressed. This is complex within the neoliberal world of universities and the declining enrollment in colleges of education but social studies preservice teachers need to have certain critical dispositions. Do we expect them to be experts in cultural knowledge, maybe too ambitious, but having preservice teachers with critical dispositions is salient and shrinks the learning curve of sociocultural knowledge. Along those lines, teacher education programs need to find ways to increase diversity within its buildings. Scholars have noted that teachers of color, especially teachers of color who hold certain sociocultural and racial knowledge about the communities they serve, are essential to students of color academic growth, racial literacy, and ideas regarding critical and cultural citizenship (Duncan, 2018; Rodríguez, 2018; Salinas & Castro, 2010; Vickery, 2015).
As a collective field, we are a long way from those suggestions. As a sort of checks and balances, unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces help with the educative psychic violence students of color are confronted with on a daily basis (King & Woodson, 2017). It is clear that the students featured in the vignettes had some experiences within unofficial and unconventional social studies spaces. It was that knowledge that alerted them that there is a fight to be had for diversity education in schools. These students and their activism is what social studies education is all about, the ability to help students, future citizens, to take informed actions against injustices in their communities. Additionally, they are practicing what we attempt to preach, the ability to mold competent and responsible citizens who attempt to make change within our democratic world.
Of what we know, we have not reached that goal within our official approaches. Therefore, it is time to look elsewhere for suggestions, places that can nurture the type of social studies we envision. We have a lot to learn about these unofficial and unconventional spaces as mechanisms to aid us in social studies education. This issue provides us with a starting point.