When I teach global education, I often turn to the work of David Selby and Graham Pike. They have a beautiful, holistic framework for understanding what global education is. But one line they use I come back to again and again: the journey outwards supports the journey inwards.
To paraphrase these authors: There is a paradoxical tension between honoring the student as an individual while taking into account the global context in which the individual finds her or himself. This tension encloses two parallel journeys taken simultaneously by the learner, whether teacher or student: the journey outwards to discover the world at large and the journey inwards to understand and tap into one’s potential as a human being.
Education is a journey. Not a race. Nor a commute. Nor a sight-seeing tour. As we go further and further out, into unchartered and strange territories (for us, as individuals), we are provoked to uncover deeper and more hidden aspects of ourselves. As we uncover the wounds of the world, we discover with some horror our own wounds. But we also learn to rejoice with others as we learn to rejoice in ourselves.
This is exactly where James Baldwin seems to land in his essay that we read for this unit. His notion that our racial nightmares stem from, at bottom, the inability of white people to love themselves (and each other), is so insightful and scary and hopeful that I can spend a lot of time with it. But it does show how it's all connected, that dialectic between inner and outer experience, self and society. The work of history education seems very much to me to be ideally centered in that play. If we are not uncovered something about ourselves when we study others, we maybe aren't doing that much—not putting enough on the line.
In my experience, if we are authentically and lovingly connecting students with aspects of their own deep selves—individual and cultural, wounds and joys—then concerns over parent or student or community backlash won't exist. It's only when we put people on the defensive that this happens. I feel like Baldwin models a way to tell a tragic truth while still aiming to work and act "like lovers.” It’s something that all social educators can learn from.
Keith Barton reminds us that the key to history education is the willingness to start with social history—that is, the history of everyday life and everyday people solving the problems they come up against in their everyday lives. Some of those problems are universal—how to feed, house, and dress ourselves. Some of those problems are more unique to time and place—how to end school segregation or voter suppression.
Either way, what I feel like the Barton article suggests is that all kids would benefit, whether in first grade or sixth grade or even the upper grades, from a study of history that is more grounded in recognizable everyday lives and issues. Such a study allows us to work from artifacts towards written texts that students can still understand as part of our shared everyday lives. The Constitution and Declaration are great documents, but if we start with them too early or without the social context that gives them meaning, we risk making them into documents that bare no relationship to real life. The Founders, too, had real lives, shot through with public and personal contradictions, that they were trying to solve (something Lin Manuel Miranda captures so well). This has to be part of history instruction in our public schools.
History education has to be about “us” as well as “them.” It also has to be about the process of untying the divide between any solid notions of an “us” and a “them.” We have to show the links between the present and future as well as the past. Put simply, it is the question of transfer. Students need to have a sense of why any of this matters. It is my hope that you all gained some insights into how this can happen.
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