Critical History Education: A Case-study of Design, Learning, and Identity in a High School History Class

Jackson, Ava

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-wkzc-j448

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Critical History Education: A Case-study of Design, Learning, and Identity in a High School History Class

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Critical pedagogies offer a particular orientation towards education that understands the process of learning as inherently political. These frameworks demand explicit political attention by teachers to support student development of practices needed to create a liberatory world. Recent work evidences the positive impact critical pedagogies have on students academically, civically, and developmentally. Many educators are interested in implementing critical pedagogy; however, the recent public backlash against enacting critical pedagogies, particularly in History classes, raises questions around if and how these frameworks impact students’ disciplinary learning specifically, and what generative teaching and learning processes look like at the intersections of critical pedagogies and disciplinary education. We need more research analyzing the design of critical history classrooms to understand how these approaches to teaching impact history learning and identity development over time. My dissertation is a year-long ethnography of a high school U.S. history class in which a teacher implemented a critical pedagogy. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theoretical (CHAT) frameworks, I ask 1) what kinds of practices and ways of being were designed for and encouraged in this setting? 2) what did these practices and ways of being open up or mean for students’ learning and thinking as a collective? 3) what did they open up or mean for individual student learning and thinking over time, within and beyond the setting? Through close analysis of jottings, fieldnotes, video recordings, and interviews, I argue that the teacher’s pedagogy, characterized by a commitment to co-thinking, created the conditions for students’ development of relational, critical social analytic, and history knowledge-building practices. When students engaged in these practices, they experienced participatory shifts towards collective relationality and complex & imaginative historical thinking. Students also developed new racial/ethnic identity conceptions and what I conceptualize as an agency of legitimacy that extended beyond the classroom context. This dissertation offers essential insights on the pedagogical dispositions and relational attunement necessary for implementing critical pedagogies that support expansive forms of disciplinary learning. Furthermore, I contribute to theorizing the role of knowledge-building practices in mediating subject-object and subject-subject relations in the context of history learning.

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