Abstract
Today, millions of teachers search online to locate ideas and activities for classroom use. While some may visit established curricular sites with vetted classroom materials, many others turn to online educational marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers. However, issues of quality on these sites remain in question — particularly when it comes to the extent to which diverse perspectives are included or excluded. Leanna Archambault, Catharyn Shelton, and Lauren McArthur Harris highlight concerns surrounding the limited perspectives present in online educational marketplaces and provide research-driven guidelines for educators evaluating resources from such sites.
Keywords
Websites for buying and selling lessons and resources can expand the voices heard in classrooms, but not all resources are worth the cost.
According to the professional associations representing teachers of English, history, civics, and other subject areas, K-12 educators have a duty to teach their students about diverse intellectual traditions and perspectives. For example, the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies note that “in a multicultural, democratic society and globally connected world, students need to understand the multiple perspectives that derive from different cultural vantage points,” rather than be taught to accept a single, dominant narrative about human history and experience (National Council for the Social Studies, n.d).
In recent years, countless educators have taken this duty to heart, striving to make their teaching more culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining (Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2014), as well as to confront their own biases and the biases often reflected in the curriculum (Kohli, Pizarro, & Nevárez, 2017). But where can teachers turn to find lesson plans and activities that can help them introduce their students to a variety of perspectives on history, politics, and culture?
They can browse publishers’ websites to see if some newly published textbook might fit the bill. However, textbooks tend to be expensive, and it can be difficult to find ones that present a truly diverse range of viewpoints. So, to find free or low-cost classroom lessons, activities, and other resources, millions of educators search the web.
In some cases, teachers choose to visit established sites offering free classroom materials that have been vetted by experts — such as Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance, www.learning forjustice.org); Facing History and Ourselves (www.facinghistory.org); the Smithsonian’s Native Knowledge 360 (https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360), or The New York Times Learning Network (www.nytimes.com/section/learning). But many other teachers have come to rely on for-profit, and largely unvetted, online educational marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT), TES, and Amazon Ignite. Indeed, TPT — one of the largest sites of this kind — says that as of 2021, fully two-thirds of U.S. teachers have downloaded at least one resource from its website. In the past year, TPT reports, it had 5 million users and a billion downloads (TPT, n.d., a).
Online marketplaces: The potential and the problems
In theory, these marketplaces can be excellent places to look for teaching resources that elevate diverse voices, including materials that discuss political events, cultural trends, legal issues, and other topics from the perspectives of people who’ve long been marginalized on the basis of culture, class, race, ethnicity, and/or language and gender identity. Anyone, from any background, can upload lessons to TPT and similar sites. Some sellers may present resources that aim to correct the inaccuracies and omissions commonly found in the K-12 curriculum (Goldstein, 2020; Keenan, 2019); however, others may still offer materials that present one-sided narratives that privilege the viewpoints of dominant social groups.
In reality, very little diversity can be found on these sites, either among the people who upload classroom materials or within the materials themselves. For instance, it appears that an overwhelming majority of content creators are white and female, which mirrors the general teaching population (Sawyer et al., 2019; Shelton & Archambault, 2019). According to our research, many of the best-selling U.S. history resources provided a one-dimensional perspective of topics such as historical events, political movements, and societal trends.
To assess the variety of viewpoints presented within lessons on online marketplaces, we downloaded and examined the 100 best-selling 11th-grade U.S. history activities offered on TPT in August 2019 (Harris, Archambault, & Shelton, 2021) — and while we chose to focus on history content for this study, our experience reviewing materials on TPT and past research on this and other platforms suggest that the findings would be similar in other content areas. We rated each U.S. history resource on a scale of 1-4 (poor to excellent), according to three criteria (adapted from Gallagher, Swalwell, & Bellows, 2019): Does the activity give students windows into underrepresented cultures or contexts? Does the activity help students question dominant narratives in history? Are the representations of people and communities authentic/nuanced?
According to our analysis rating each resource on these questions and then giving an overall rating, 75 of the top 100 history resources were poor (50) or moderate (25) in their overall effectiveness at including diverse perspectives — in other words, students were not exposed to underrepresented cultures or contexts, encouraged to question dominant narratives in history, or provided with nuanced or authentic representations of diverse people and communities (Harris, Archambault, & Shelton, 2021). Only one-fourth of the resources were rated good (15) or excellent (10) (see Figure 1).
Effectiveness of Teachers Pay Teachers history resources at addressing multiple perspectives.
Notably, the poor and moderate resources tended to assume a default focus on the white experience of the given historical period or event, while missing opportunities to focus on the experiences of communities of color. Specifically, 55 of the 100 activities were rated poor in terms of providing students a window into underrepresented cultures or contexts. As an illustrative example, one lecture-based activity about the Great Depression included a lot of statistics about the overall U.S. population (e.g., “The wealthiest 1% saw their income rise by 75% and the rest of the population saw an increase of only 9%”) and highlighted the stories of specific white women and men (e.g., Bonnie and Clyde and John Steinbeck), but it included no stories about individuals of color, said nothing about the disproportionate suffering among Black Americans during that period, and neglected to mention how those experiences influenced subsequent civil rights movements (Klein, 2018).
Overall, our findings were consistent with Noreen Rodríguez and colleagues’ (2020) recent study of lessons on Pinterest and TPT, as well as the numerous studies of social studies textbooks, curricular materials, and state standards that have found these resources to focus mainly on white, European narratives, while marginalizing and even sometimes dangerously misrepresenting other groups (Busey, 2019; Patterson & Shuttleworth, 2019; Shear et al., 2015). Our findings also echo the general quality concerns raised by Morgan Polikoff and Jennifer Dean (2019). In their analysis of 300 of the most downloaded high school English/language arts materials found on TPT, ReadWriteThink, and Share My Lesson, raters deemed 64% of materials “mediocre” or “probably not worth using” (p. 5). In addition, the researchers noted similar problems with diversity, reporting that 68% of materials did not include diverse authors or address culturally diverse topics.
The managers of TPT have indicated that they’ve taken some actions to address this lack of attention to diversity, such as holding a speakers’ series to promote conversations about racism and social justice and producing a toolkit to help teachers create quality materials (TPT, n.d., b). They have also removed some resources that have been reported to be harmful. However, they have done little, as yet, to proactively find and remove harmful or poor-quality resources (Shelton, Archambault, & Harris, 2020), and it remains to be seen if steps they have taken will have a positive effect on the diversity of the site’s content creators or the perspectives they feature in their resources.
Buyer beware
No doubt, some teachers will opt to avoid online educational marketplaces altogether, but many others will continue to visit TPT and other sites to look for classroom resources. To help them evaluate the materials they find there, we created the “Responsible Teachers-Buyer’s Guide” (available for free at https://bit.ly/TeacherBuyersGuide). Drawing on what we’ve learned from our research, the guide suggests five steps teachers can take when considering whether to purchase all kinds of classroom resources. And for teachers who hope to find high-quality materials that include diverse perspectives, two of those steps are particularly relevant: Vet the sellers and Critique the resources.
Vet the sellers
Typically, online educational marketplaces allow visitors to see only a limited preview of each classroom resource, which makes it difficult for teachers to vet materials thoroughly before purchasing them. However, teachers can, at least, vet the people who created and uploaded those materials, by examining their profiles on the marketplace website, reading reviews of them and their materials, researching their backgrounds and educational expertise, exploring any outside blogs and social media they’ve made available, and noting their number of followers. Our research suggests that high-quality resources are more likely (though not guaranteed) to be uploaded by teacher-sellers who have a proven track record, supported by positive reviews that include specific feedback about their materials and a relatively large number of teacher followers. We also suggest downloading any free resources the seller has made available, to evaluate the overall quality of their materials before purchasing anything.
We recommend that teachers proactively seek out materials that have been created by teachers of color who explicitly call attention to the diverse perspectives they’ve featured. For example, Lanesha Tabb’s (https://laneshatabb.com) social studies resources on TPT offer culturally responsive approaches, designed for the primary grades, to teaching about topics such as the Underground Railroad and the Thanksgiving holiday. Similarly, Tanya Marshall (www.thebutterflyteacher.com) offers language arts resources that focus on building a culturally responsive classroom at the elementary level. And Lyle from Real Native Learning Resources (www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Real-Native-Learning-Resources) offers resources focused on modern Native American life, Native American leaders, and traditional Lakota stories for the elementary grades. Searching for diverse sellers may take a little more time, because teachers of color are underrepresented in the TPT marketplace (Sawyer et al., 2019; Shelton & Archambault, 2019), but teachers can support the work of the teachers of color who are on the site by making an extra effort to find, download, and review their resources. These efforts may serve to help promote diverse voices and could assist in making culturally relevant and sustaining resources easier to find on the site.
Critique the resources
After vetting the seller, but before making a purchase, teachers should turn a critical eye on whatever sample of the given resource has been provided. And if no preview has been made available, then they should reach out to the seller to ask for an evaluation copy or ask clarifying questions. (It may not occur to teachers to do this because textbook publishers and other content creators were not easily accessible in the past. However, online marketplaces make it easy to identify the people who’ve designed and uploaded materials, and teachers shouldn’t hesitate to contact them.).
When evaluating materials, teachers can also consult existing checklists such as “Pinning with Pause” (Gallagher, Swalwell, & Bellows, 2019) or our own “Curating and Creating with Care: Social Studies” guidelines (https://bit.ly/CuratingCreatingWithCare). These and similar frameworks provide questions that teachers should consider before downloading any resources. For example, teachers looking for resources that feature underrepresented cultures might ask: Does the content reflect my students’ cultures or contexts? Does the content give my students windows into new cultures or contexts? Does this resource help my students question dominant assumptions about what is “normal” or “good”? Does this resource offer authentic/nuanced representations of people and communities? Is this activity or resource potentially harmful to students, especially those from underrepresented or marginalized communities?
This kind of careful analysis can take a significant amount of time, but we would argue that finding high-quality classroom resources is far more important than finding resources quickly.
Additionally, teachers should take an especially careful look at activities that involve simulations, dramatic reenactments, and other kinds of role-playing. Such “dramatic” activities may seem intrinsically engaging, but there are serious risks involved in forcing students to act out (and perhaps try to relive) traumatic events or historical episodes, such as when they are told to pretend to be victims or perpetrators of racial violence (Drake, 2008). In our study, for example, we found one lesson that put students in the role of colonial merchants who were asked to set the cost for, buy, and sell enslaved people. Not only did the simulation treat enslaved people as mere objects, but it asked children to focus their attention exclusively on the experiences of the white males who trafficked and profited from the sale of human beings. This activity has since been removed from TPT (see Shelton, Archambault, & Harris, 2020), but the fact that it was present on the site (and, perhaps more troubling, had high ratings from a majority of reviewers) underscores the need for educators to exercise extreme caution.
Unrealized potential
With the growing popularity of online marketplaces, teachers have an unprecedented array of resources available at their fingertips. And because all teachers are welcome to share their resources on these sites, online marketplaces have the capacity to be a source of diverse teacher perspectives, helping educators bring a variety of voices and ideas into their classrooms. However, this potential has yet to be widely realized. At the same time, the fact that these sites are open to everyone means that the quality of the resources can vary widely.
Teachers, then, should be extremely cautious if and when they consider downloading such classroom materials. These sites can be sources of high-quality materials, created by educators from a variety of backgrounds, who’ve made an effort to include perspectives and experiences that have often been left out of the K-12 curriculum, but only if teachers approach them thoughtfully and with care.