Essential Question For Travel
Before setting out on our international field experience trips, TGC Fellows were asked to develop an essential question that would provide a lens through which to process our observations. Below is a blog post explaining my essential question just before I arrived in India. My question changed slightly but the overall desire to examine and understand the construction of historical narratives in schools remained the driving force behind my thought process throughout the trip.
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July 16, 2014
My approach to teaching US and Global History is typically through a lens that questions power structures and the historical narratives that support them. In the US History curriculum I have designed and taught over the past six years, the first semester is primarily focused on exposing the injustice and inequity embedded in the founding of the US Government and the development of dominant US culture, and on uncovering typically silenced narratives of resistance and challenges to the colonial project that resulted in the racial, economic and gender-based hierarchies upon which dominant US society was built. When I teach about the resistance movements to such structures of power, I continue to work to include lesser heard narratives and complexity, but the stories are told with a degree of reverence and are framed as models that students could use as references for whatever the future might call for.
This is certainly true for the way that I have approached teaching about the Indian Independence Movement in my Global History curriculum on Revolutions. The narratives of this movement that students investigate in my class serve to provide a model for resistance to structural oppression that can be compared and applied to other contexts. Part of my interest in traveling to India to observe in schools and work with teachers and students, albeit briefly, is to investigate what narratives I am unintentionally neglecting in my approach to developing curriculum about the Independence Movement in India.
I already realize that my curriculum centers around a central figure, Mohandas Gandhi, too heavily. While, of course, Gandhi was a remarkable man and a historical figure deserving of deep respect and honor, I mention this as a flaw in the curriculum because a narrative that focuses too heavily on the role of a single leader inevitably results in constructing the story around a hero. I have noticed this in my students’ understanding of the Movement, regardless of how much emphasis may be placed on the necessity of the 1000s of Indians who participated in Civil Disobedience, Non Violence and Non Cooperation while resisting British Imperialism. Constructing a “hero” narrative can result in a message that implies great things happen because of exceptional people, rather than that great things happen because of ordinary people who do exceptional things, which, of course, is a much more collective viewpoint, and is one that invites students to see themselves as potential actors and agents for positive social change.
In my desire to both refine and complicate my curriculum and approach to teaching this history, my questions are not specifically defined quite yet, as they are really about finding out what I don’t know. I am interested in learning about how the narrative of the Independence Movement is typically or often constructed in Social Studies classrooms (though of course, this question inevitably leads to gross generalizations since I will be working with a limited number of teachers), and I am interested in learning about the critiques to the dominant narrative. What are the counter-narratives to which I have not yet been exposed? What are the seldom told stories and who are the silenced voices in the typical construction of this narrative? In what ways does the way that I have been teaching about the British Imperialism and the Indian Independence Movement align or diverge from how the Social Studies teacher I will be observing frames these stories? In what ways does the curriculum I have designed fail to provide the kind of critique and multiplicity of voices that I strive to build into my US History curricula?
Overall, I hope to come away with a sense of where to start pushing my own research in order to complicate the narrative without compromising the power of the story of India’s Independence Movement as a model of resistance.
