From: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/24/10/history-curriculum-making?blm_aid=234263333
History in the (Curriculum) Making
Just before COVID hit, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) put out a bid for organizations to write a new history and social studies curriculum for grades 5, 6, and 7. Until then, it had been difficult for teachers to access comprehensive curriculum for those grades that aligned with the state’s 2018 history and social studies guidelines. Teachers often had to pull together lessons themselves, piecemeal. They wanted more support.
Watertown-based Primary Source put in a bid and won the contract. Led by alums Deborah Cunningham, M.A.T.’95, and Jill Stevens, M.A.T.’94, with colleague Susan Zeiger, the small nonprofit spent the next three and a half years researching and writing before launching Investigating History. The culturally responsive, inquiry-based curriculum includes 350 original lessons, plus slide decks and handouts supporting each lesson. Grade 5 focuses on U.S. history, and grades 6 and 7 are a world geography/ancient history curriculum that addresses each world region. The content is free and includes professional development training. In October, Cunningham and Stevens sat down to talk about the process, why there was a need, and how teaching tough subjects is doable.
Teachers really pushed for these curriculum resources.
Cunningham: Yes, for teachers, there had been a lot of time going into curricular preparation. In a professional development session last year in the Boston Public Schools, a teacher came up to me afterward and said, thanks for this curriculum. For the first time I feel like the teacher I want to be because I don't have to spend every night gathering things. I have time to focus on other critical issues. I think it really saved them a lot of time and gave them some support and guidance.
Stevens: I would also add that what contributed to teachers wanting the resource is that most of the resources and textbooks they previously had available to them didn't cover many of the topics that are in the 2018 framework, at least in any sort of depth. The resources that their school districts provided weren't able to meet the need. That was an important part of it.
As you worked on the new curriculum, did you run ideas by teachers for feedback?
Cunningham: Teachers around the state were critical advisers. One of the ways they were really helpful was helping us to understand that this is the first time in sixth grade that students engage in a sustained study of a distant time and place and really encounter a culture that, in many cases, is not known to them. You do have immigrant students who come in and bring knowledge with them, but in many cases, this was the first deep dive in ancient history. There was a lot of advice that teachers gave us around teaching about culture for the first time. How do you talk about this? How do you help students empathize with people far away and long ago? The work of developing a mindset of openness and appreciation was important.
You also reached out to scholars?
Stevens: We worked really closely with scholars. Some of the content was content that, on its surface, might look simple or that we had a fundamental rudimentary understanding of, but we worked with scholars to make sure that it was historically accurate. Having a history of the entire ancient world in sixth and seventh grade is really important for learners because as they move through their education, they encounter topics like colonialism and imperialism. To have a foundation of societies throughout the world that was culturally responsive, that was important to us.
Cunningham: Some of the topics were not extremely familiar to Massachusetts teachers and fairly new to us as well. When we wrote the unit on Southeast Asia and Oceania, for example, there weren't a lot of teachers around the state that we could consult with despite the fact it had been in the framework for a little while. We found consultants at the University of Hawaii Manoa and in Sydney, Australia. We really had to dig a little and find people who knew the region well, who could support the work there. We also had a wonderful adviser here at Harvard, Ingrid Ahlgren, who is at the Peabody Museum and is an expert on Oceania.
What makes the curriculum different from other resources?
Cunningham: First, it's an open-source curriculum that is completely free to educators throughout the state and completely endorsed by DESE so educators can trust it and feel supported in teaching it. That means that every resource in the curriculum either is an open source resource or it was something we gained permission to use. Also, until recent years, there wasn't necessarily enough material out there about various cultures and, to some extent, fifth grade-appropriate U.S. history material. It is only in recent years that so many organizations have put material online and digitized. We're in a moment where this is newly possible. For example, the fact that we could incorporate virtual tours of places like the ancient palace of Persepolis or Angkor Wat in the heyday of the Khmer Empire. These options were not out there before.
How else is it unique?
Cunningham: It's a student-centered curriculum. Students are the ones delving in. Students are the ones having discussions, and in some cases teaching one another. Students are the ones doing the research. And teachers have all the tools they need to introduce context and keep things accurate. They have a slide deck that goes with every lesson and every handout that they need, plus additional teacher guidance handouts. They have a list of resources, background articles, and videos so they feel ready and confident to teach the lessons, but ultimately, they are supporting the kids in doing the work of learning.
Stevens: I remember when my daughters, who are now in their 20s, took fifth-grade history. They had wonderful teachers, but they spent a lot of time taking notes on who won what battle and who flanked left and who flanked right. They didn't really learn a lot about the everyday people who participated in the revolution or about how the accomplishments of America may not have benefited everyone who was living in the United States at the time. I think that's another thing that's unique about Investigating History in terms of historical empathy and perspective, for the fifth-grade unit in particular.
We're hit constantly by misinformation and disinformation, so any skills they can have about how we know things, how we know things to be true, whose things we know, whose perspectives we have access to, these are all just building blocks for a participatory democracy.
Deborah Cunningham, M.A.T.'95
Your U.S. history curriculum includes diverse perspectives and content. Has there been any pushback?
Cunningham: When the curriculum was released officially last school year, it dropped without controversy, which, given the partisan state of U.S. history in the nation, was a minor miracle. I think that because it had been so thoroughly vetted both by scholars and by teachers and so carefully thought out by us, it really has been successful and made teachers feel safe in bringing in a lot of perspectives in a way that are responsible and accurate.
Stevens: There's a unit on the Ku Klux Klan in the fifth-grade frameworks. There was a lot of thinking about how to have students study that part of U.S. history in a way that was age appropriate, but also help them understand what happened in the United States after the Civil War. One of the nicest compliments I think we got was from a professor at Clark University who reviewed the curriculum for us, and he said, if everybody who came into my classroom in college knew what these fifth graders are supposed to know from doing this curriculum, I would be very pleased.
How do you teach something like the KKK to fifth graders?
Stevens: I ended up building that lesson around a quote online from a gentleman [Yemi Toure] on memories of living through Jim Crow. He said something like, “I used to say I grew up in the Jim Crow South, and I don't say that anymore. Now I say I grew up in the loving arms of the Black community.” What I developed was this interplay between what was happening in society, in fifth-grade appropriate terms — having students understand what the Ku Klux Klan was, why it was started, and what its goals were. And then counterbalance that with how the Black community was responding to that kind of violence in supporting each other — looking at the Black church, looking at the Black press.
Why is it important for students to fully investigate history?
Cunningham: It's so critical for them to know how to think deeply about what they're reading and consider the source of the information in a sophisticated way. We're hit constantly by misinformation and disinformation, so any skills they can have about how we know things, how we know things to be true, whose things we know, whose perspectives we have access to, these are all just building blocks for a participatory democracy.
Stevens: I would add it’s a good building block for living in a diverse and pluralistic society, particularly with the type of rhetoric we're hearing today about different groups who are coming into the country. For example, there's a whole lesson on the Haitian Revolution in the fifth-grade curriculum so that students know something about Haiti and its history when they hear these sorts of ideas in the press. The inquiry-based model is really helpful as a civic tool to understand that you need to ask questions to truly understand something instead of just accepting things on face value.
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