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Ten Years of Teaching U.S. History at UNICAMP, Brazil: A Memoir
Celia M. Azevedo
| I remember well the feeling I had on the first day teaching U.S. history at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, in August 1993. I faced a challenge as big as the one I had undergone when, as a graduate student at Columbia University, I transferred to the American history program. Back in 1989 I had been the only student from Latin America among my American colleagues and a couple of Europeans. I had had to prove to the professors who accepted me at Columbia, the sponsors of the Fulbright-Laspau program (a faculty development program involving U.S., Latin American, and Caribbean universities), as well as myself, that I could quickly overcome my ignorance in that field. |
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Now in 1993 I had to prove to Brazilian undergraduate students enrolled in a one-term (four hours per week for four months) required course that it was worthwhile to study the history of that big world power called the United States of America from the beginning and from inside. As I explained on the first day of class, they should open their minds to the full range of U.S. history and leave aside the more common approaches of diplomatic relations and comparative history, usually centered on "race relations" between the United States and Brazil, which they might have already experienced in other courses. (In Brazil, college education is organized according to fields of knowledge from the beginning. Thus, a high school student has already chosen a profession to pursue before applying for college. Students taking the history route go through history classes from their first year to their fourth. Graduation in history combined with a number of courses taken in UNICAMP's School of Education allows one to teach high school.) |
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As I suspected, I faced two problems from the start. First, I had to deal with students' varying expectations. For some, the United States was the land of affluence, movie stars, amazing inventions, and endless prosperity for its people. For others, it was the major global symbol of contemporary imperialism, racism, and the oppression of Third World countries. Most students harbored a mixture of those expectations: a complex intermingling of fascination and horror. In introducing my syllabus I reminded them that many years before the United States rose to be a great power, it was like many other countries in the world vis-à-vis other big powers of the day. To those inclined to the left, I suggested that Third World countries could never fight imperialism if their people, especially their enlightened youth, did not know the history of the dominant powers. |
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Second, I had to convince them that U.S. history was not the "bore" they knew from their high school studies. Anyone who had gone through the harsh written history exams, among those in many other disciplines, which have been generally required for entering public universities in Brazil—the so-called Vestibular—knew well what I meant. Basically, the Brazilian high school syllabus in U.S. history covers eight topics: the arrival of the English "pilgrims" in America and the founding of the thirteen colonies; the Declaration of Independence and the "War of Independence"; the Monroe doctrine, westward expansion, and the beginnings of American imperialism; the "secession war" and Abraham Lincoln's abolition of slavery; the 1929 crash and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal; World War II and the Marshall Plan; the Truman doctrine and the Cold War; and the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. against racial segregation. I remembered well those required topics, except the last one, from many years ago when I first applied for college, as well as the endless hours of memorizing cold facts without really understanding them to solve multiple-choice questions in a couple of hours. |
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