Focusing on Democracy: A Teacher Educator’s View

Demokratie im Fokus: Die Sicht einer LehrerInnenausbildenden

 

Abstract: Attacking the free press is the latest assault on fundamental principles of American democracy that President Trump has launched in 2017.[1] Democratic institutions and principles such as an independent judiciary, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the right to dissent no longer undergird the administration’s daily work and rhetoric. While these principles previously served as unifiers across political parties and divisions, public discussion and politics today are rife with the ignorance and distortion of foundational democratic principles and values.[2]
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-10414.
Languages: English, Deutsch


Attacking the free press is the latest assault on fundamental principles of American democracy that President Trump has launched in 2017.[1] Democratic institutions and principles such as an independent judiciary, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the right to dissent no longer undergird the administration’s daily work and rhetoric. While these principles previously served as unifiers across political parties and divisions, public discussion and politics today are rife with the ignorance and distortion of foundational democratic principles and values.[2]

History Teaching in the Age of Trump

As citizens, this is alarming; as educators, it is a clarion call. Many are talking about the implications for teaching in the age of Trump.[3] One thing seems certain from my perch: We must refocus and rethink if and how we are teaching fundamental democratic principles in our classes. And as teacher educators, we must be sure that our students value and deeply understand these ideas so they are prepared to integrate and teach them throughout the curriculum.

After the shocking and dangerous election of Trump to the Presidency, I had several days to struggle with what to do with my history teacher candidates in our next class session. I knew the election of President Trump would impact my students and that they would be anxious to discuss it. I needed to respond appropriately. How to respond, however, was not obvious to me.

Ultimately, I started our next class asking candidates what they had seen in their field placements regarding the election. Some had seen nothing specific—master teachers had continued with their units on Ancient Greece or economic markets. Others had seen teachers provide space for distraught students in immigrant communities to process their fears with trusted adults, or lessons where students discussed voting patterns or the electoral college.

I talked of how this was a choice — if and when to talk about current events in the classroom. I recalled when, in 1989, I was student teaching in an urban high school that served a Chinese-American community, and the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre occurred. Veteran teachers at the school responded quite differently to those events: One insisted that ignoring it in the world history classroom was tantamount to malpractice and another asserted that responding to relevant world events would leave no space for the standard curriculum. I talked to my teacher candidates about how these were decisions that they would face.

I then launched into the next part of my deliberate response, a lesson on democratic principles and the U.S. Constitution. After teaching prior cohorts, I knew that some of these candidates did not have a firm grasp on fundamental democratic principles (for example: rule of law) and their worth, or on aspects of the Constitution that are critical to understanding the American past and present (for example: the Fourteenth Amendment).[4] I followed my usual pedagogical approach where teacher candidates experience a learning activity or resource as learners before putting on their teacher hats to debrief the research and theory undergirding the activity. This approach means, in part, that candidates learn content while also considering the teaching of that content. Importantly, in this instance, I chose democratic ideas and institutions as essential content that these future teachers needed to deeply understand. I was not willing for any of them to leave my class without being ready to teach and use these principles in their own classrooms.

We Don’t Teach in a Vacuum

When 9/11 happened in 2001, I had a vigorous debate with my co-teachers about addressing it in our methods for teaching history course. I lost. My colleagues’ certainty about excluding unexpected world events seemed to assume the classroom as teacher-controlled and vacuum-sealed, a place where students neither knew nor cared what happened outside it. It created an impenetrable wall between classroom and community, where these events did not, and would not, impact student learning. I did not understand this stance. How could we be teaching civics and history without bringing the world outside our classroom into it? How could this be preparing students to participate in civic life and discourse?

So it is good to see that the age of Trump has prompted educators and scholars to consider what it means to teach in these times. For example, Peter Seixas advises us to revisit our general approach to modern liberal traditions and how we address them in our work as teachers.[5] More specifically, scholars have called for the teaching of historical thinking, and web literacy and how to discern fake news.[6] Thinkers agree that this is an unprecedented and dangerous time for democratic institutions and values in the U.S., and that history educators and researchers have a moral, if not professional, obligation to consider what we teach in light of this challenge.[7]

Teaching Democracy

So what, of the many and myriad things that we teach and value, should we emphasize and focus on in classrooms today? In other words, what deserves more curricular time? More student work and investigation?

Democratic ideas, values, and knowledge are all paramount at this moment. Of course, historical thinking and web literacy are also important, but these have been emphasized (to different degrees) for some years in our professional discourse. Conversely, teaching democracy may be “so fundamental that history educators barely gave [it] a passing thought” in the recent past.[8] It is time to pull these principles out and to give them a place of privilege in the crowded history and civics curriculum. It is time to be sure to integrate them into multiple lessons so that students apply them in a variety of ways over a course of study.

Let us also take this moment to acknowledge that the recent past and present should always matter to history educators. As teacher educators, we need to teach that a history and civics teacher’s lens must include contemporary events and the zeitgeist of public worlds outside the classroom. When candidates enter their own classrooms, this message will be muted if not absent. These future teachers not only need to know democracy; they also need to know ways to think about how to bring the world into their own classrooms.

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Further Reading

Web Resources

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[1] Donald J. Trump, “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!,” Twitter post, October 11, 2017, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump (last accessed on 18 October 2017).
[2] Find a recent example in Josh Delk, “Roy Moore: Kneeling during National Anthem Disrespects Rule of Law,” The Hill, October 11, 2017, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/354918-roy-moore-kneeling-during-national-anthem-disrespects-rule-of-law (last accessed on 30 October 2017).
[3] E.g. John Fea, “The Discipline of the History Professor in the Age of Trump,” The Panorama, September 13, 2017, http://thepanorama.shear.org/2017/09/13/the-discipline-of-the-history-professor-in-the-age-of-trump/ (last accessed on 30 October 2017); David Pace, “The History Classroom in an Era of Crisis: A Change of Course Is Needed,” Perspectives on History, May 2017, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2017/the-history-classroom-in-an-era-of-crisis-a-change-of-course-is-needed (last accessed on 30 October 2017); Gautham Rao, “Roundtable: Teaching History in the Trump Era,” The Junto, August 8, 2017, https://earlyamericanists.com/2017/08/08/roundtable-teaching-history-in-the-trump-era/ (last accessed on 30 October 2017); Clint Smith, “James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/james-baldwins-lesson-for-teachers-in-a-time-of-turmoil (last accessed on 30 October 2017).
[4] These teacher candidates are all graduate students who have chosen a career in teaching history and social science. One might therefore assume that they understand these principles, but I have not found this to be true. This is consistent with what recent surveys and tests have indicated about the general public in the U.S. See “Americans Are Poorly Informed About Basic Constitutional Provisions,” The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, September 12, 2017, https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-are-poorly-informed-about-basic-constitutional-provisions/ (last accessed on 30 October 2017); “2014 Overall Civics Scores,” NAEP, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/hgc_2014/#civics/scores (last accessed on 30 October 2017).
[5] Peter Seixas, “History Educators in a New Era.” Public History Weekly 2017, May 25, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-9343 (last accessed on 30 October 2017).
[6] David Pace, “The History Classroom in an Era of Crisis.”; Sarah McGrew, Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, and Sam Wineburg, “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News,” American Educator, Fall 2017, https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2017/mcgrew_ortega_breakstone_wineburg (last accessed on 30 October 2017).
[7] Pace, “The History Classroom in an Era of Crisis”; Seixas, “History Educators in a New Era”; Fea, “The Discipline of the History Professor in the Age of Trump.”
[8] Seixas, “History Educators in a New Era.”

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Image Credits

US Constitution © Jonathan Thorne via Flickr (last accessed on 9 November 2017).

Recommended Citation

Martin, Daisy: Focusing on Democracy: A Teacher Educator’s. In: Public History Weekly 5 (2017) 38, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-10414.

Copyright (c) 2017 by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and the author, all rights reserved. This work may be copied and redistributed for non-commercial, educational purposes, if permission is granted by the author and usage right holders. For permission please contact the editor-in-chief (see here). All articles are reliably referenced via a DOI, which includes all comments that are considered an integral part of the publication.

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DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-10414

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