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"It Depends on the Kind of History That You Learn": Teacher Practices and Students' Understanding of History and Race
| Title: | "It Depends on the Kind of History That You Learn": Teacher Practices and Students' Understanding of History and Race |
| Author: | RAUPACH, MARY PAT |
| Description: | This qualitative research investigated secondary students' ideas about history and race in relation to teachers' classroom practices. Situated within the context of an African American history course at a large, diverse public high school, this research adopted a case study design to examine two teachers' practices with 79 students enrolled in African American Cultures. The majority of these students identified themselves as African Americans; seven students were European Americans. Data were collected through 96 hours of classroom observations, semi-structured individual interviews with two teachers, semi-structured individual or focus group interviews with 14 students, and student artifacts. Student interviews included an elicitation task with 12 historical pictures that featured people, events, or circumstances from the eighteenth century through the present day. Students were asked to organize these pictures into groups that made sense to them and then explain their choices. Student data were organized into individual case studies, with the 13 student cases from one classroom forming a collective case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Patton, 2002). Similarly, each teacher represented one individual case study. Field note data from each classroom supplemented these case studies during comparisons between student understanding and teacher practices. Whereas data on teacher practices collected from teacher interviews and field notes served to triangulate student data, this information independently underwent analysis to assess how effectively classroom instruction prepared students for democratic citizenship, as described by Barton and Levstik (2004) in their discussion of the three characteristics of a humanistic study of history. The findings indicate that, regardless of background, students represented history as struggle interwoven with progress. Moreover, students claimed this history course filled in gaps in their knowledge and they represented race mostly in relation to personal racialized experiences. Whereas the first and second themes correspond with teacher goals and practices, students' understanding of race mostly does not correspond with instruction. These findings illustrate the influence of social context upon student understanding and suggest that teacher practices, guided by each teacher's sense of purpose, shaped student learning in distinctive ways. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1217880750
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/105375 |
| Date: | 2008 |
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