This is the second in my series on sources and the Building Blocks of Inquiry.
If you made a list of the top 10 challenges social studies teachers would say they face in the classroom, you may get the list of usual suspects: lack of time, political squabbles over standards, trying to cover all of human history in a semester. You may even get the odd structural issue like lack of funding, or even the more everyday complaint about student cell phone use. I could go on, but you get the picture. However, I hope that somewhere on the list is one challenge that I think never really goes away (and maybe never should): teaching controversial issues. And that is simply because social studies education necessarily touches on those messy areas of human existence. This post will not spend time arguing why controversy needs to be taught in the classroom. Plenty of great educators have done this already (Diana Hess and Walter Parker anyone!?!). The point is, controversial topics WILL make it into your classroom. If you can, embrace them!
Teaching controversial topics makes it on our top 10 list for a reason. It’s not easy. Issues like structural racism or gender discrimination are not only complicated to simply understand, but they also touch on open wounds, many of which may be present among your students. Controversial topics also reach into the dispositional level of learning, namely how students and teachers view the world. Immediately challenging student dispositions on tough subjects like race, for example, can be problematic and sometimes even achieve the opposite of what the teacher intended (for more on the strengths and weaknesses of racial education pedagogies see Ryan Crowley and William Smith’s excellent article on the topic*).
So where does inquiry come in? I have argued in past blogs that using the compelling question well represents one avenue a teacher can take in order to introduce and deliberate controversial questions in the classroom. Allowing the weight of the controversy to “sit” on the compelling question takes the heat off of the teacher. If the question is good, and the instruction is student-centered (i.e. the students are working their way to their own conclusions), students can navigate the tension of the issue by allowing the inquiry to play out, with help from a vigilant and compassionate teacher.
I would also like to suggest that sources are another place where teachers can lean on in order to navigate potentially difficult topics. Here, the architecture of IDM comes in handy. Teachers who curate their featured sources can allow for a progression of instruction and thinking that can allow students to unpack challenging topics. One way to do this is to set up sources in your instructional sequence so that the sources quite literally “talk to each other.” What does this look like?
To illustrate, let me share an example from my own classroom. For the past several years I have taught a sociology course to high schoolers in which we tackle some very controversial issues. I use inquiry as a way to teach basic sociological principles, but also to challenge the dispositions of my students. In my unit on race, I ask the students the compelling question, What Makes Race Real? In order to effectively teach students about a topic that has so many different and competing misconceptions, I realized early on that I would need to find sources that would be up to the task. Furthermore, I could not simply just provide students with sources without an intentional plan on how to systematically tackle the information presented in each one. One of the most difficult facts for students to wrap their minds around is that race is a social construct rather than a biological construct. Therefore, I knew this was a misconception that had to be addressed early on in the inquiry. But I had run into trouble in the past by simply trying to explain it directly. So, I decided to lean on the sources, curating them to speak to each other and the students.
If you take a look at Supporting Question 2 below, students are asked, “To what extent is race a biological reality?” In order to unpack this question, I use three sources. Source A is a clip from the documentary A Class Divided (PBS) in which educator Jane Eliot demonstrates an early version of her “Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes” simulation. This source introduces the idea that biological features (eye color, skin color, hair, height, etc.) can be used by those in power for social gain and justification for systems of oppression.
The next source (Source B) is an interview with a biological anthropologist. This source is content heavy, providing vocabulary to the processes witnessed in the documentary. Introducing new and valuable terms like biological determinism and phenotype, the source confirms that race is a social, not a genetic, category. Source A establishes a principle. Source B speaks to the earlier source by providing a deeper conceptual understanding for the principles introduced in Source A. So far so good?
Now to address the underlying dispositions. The final source (Source C) is an excerpt from a famous writing by the 18th century intellectual Johann Blumenbach. If you haven’t heard of him, you certainly have seen his work. He is one of the first writers to begin systematically categorizing and ranking “races.” Here is the source that students study. Now, I could simply say to students, “Here is someone else’s view of race,” presenting this source on equal footing with the others. Undoubtedly, many of the students would not buy Blumenbach’s view. But that’s not what we want, right? We would like to show how historical inquiry can move beyond spurious claims of racial hierarchy. Why then do I leave Blumenbach at the end? The simple answer is that I want my students to use Sources A and B to challenge Source C. And that is just what I tell them: “What is Blumenbach suggesting? Knowing what you know, where did he go wrong?” I would like students to use their gained knowledge, knowledge they have gleaned from the earlier sources, to challenge the notion that races can be biologically categorized and ranked. Why?
Curating sources to “speak” to each other show students three things: Firstly, that sources are not inert representations of information. They represent the time and social context in which they were created. Secondly, it shows that ideas can be challenged by other competing ideas. And finally, that sources can represent opinions that can be changed. The beauty of this whole process is that I do very little of the heavy lifting in the lesson. Instead, when the students write their own definition of race as their task, they write what the sources have spoken to them. Their conclusions are usually much more raw and sophisticated than what I could come up with. My favorite conclusion? One student suggested that (I’m paraphrasing), “Source C tells us a lot more about Blumenbach than the groups he was writing about.” Amazing.
Additionally, using sources in a strategic and intentional manner also allows me to present views of race that I certainly would not want teachers to present as their own. It also gives me space to allow students to challenge those views without challenging one another directly. I have met students (and at least one teacher) who still thought that there are five distinct races. While troubling, this is the reality that we are presented with as teachers. However, using sources to do the “talking” allows students (not me) to debunk this pernicious myth. I repeat this use of strategically curated sources throughout the inquiry in order to intentionally tackle other controversial discussions around affirmative action, redlining, and “model minorities.” It is not easy, but it’s necessary and worth it. Use your sources wisely and reap the rewards.
*”A Divergence of Interests: Critical Race Theory and White Privilege Pedagogy,” 2020.
Read all the posts in this series.
- Post #1 The Building Blocks of Inquiry
- Post #2 Sources Talking to Other Sources
- Post #3 Going to the Source
