History in the Heartland: Teaching and Learning African American History Through Inquiry in Third Grade

Abstract

History education researchers in the U.S. have largely focused on students’ capacities to improve their literacy practices as they read and write from historical evidence. Yet, a second—and closely related—goal of history education is the development of students’ historical consciousness; that is, how they use the past to orient themselves in the present and construct expectations for the future. In this dissertation, I present three manuscripts that explore aspects of teaching and learning about African American history (enslavement, the Civil War and emancipation, the civil rights era) in a third-grade classroom using historical inquiry methods. I collected data for these papers during the enactment of the same inquiry during two separate school years in the classroom of a teacher known for her expertise in teaching historical inquiry methods to younger students. In the first paper (Chapter II), I draw on classroom observation data, interviews with the teacher, and classroom artifacts collected during the 2015-2016 school year to explore how the teacher apprenticed students into disciplinary ways of reading, analyzing, and employing historical evidence. Findings from that study highlight how the teacher used historical fiction picture books to teach about the constructed nature of historical accounts and provided opportunities for students to analyze visual primary sources and to employ evidence when making claims. The findings show possibilities for apprenticing elementary students into disciplinary source analysis without exposing them to the challenges of written primary sources and suggest further investigation into how school inquiries might balance an analytic stance to historical analysis and the ethical and emotional dimensions of difficult history topics (e.g., enslavement). In the second paper (Chapter III), I use a framework for historical consciousness to investigate how 19 students developed their understandings of enslavement before, during, and after they participated in an inquiry on the topic over six weeks and how they connected their conceptualizations of enslavement to the present. Data sources include pre- and post-concept maps, student interviews, and students’ classwork. The findings show that the students made growth in their overall concept knowledge about enslavement. However, the students provided nascent understandings that focused on enslavement as interactions between individuals rather than as systemic forms of power and economic gain, and they demonstrated limiting understandings of White supremacy. Furthermore, students’ sensemaking about enslavement did not promote critical thinking about the construction of racialized identities. Thereby the data suggest that the curriculum may limit how many connections students make between the past and the present. In the final paper (Chapter IV), I use a framework for historical consciousness to investigate how eight White focal students interpreted African American history using their written historical narratives and interviews. Findings show that students interpreted African American history through a framework of national progress, but did not acknowledge the limitations of past efforts, which are visible today in forms of ongoing systemic racial inequality. Furthermore, students used assimilated, raceless, nameless, and nonhuman language (e.g., “Jim Crow laws separated African Americans”) to describe the White oppressors. These findings suggest students’ misconceptions that racism has been “solved” may lead them to produce a colorblind ideology, which will limit their historical consciousness.