Schaun Wheeler | History is Written by the Learners: How Student Views Trump United States History Curricula | The History Teacher, 41.1

History is Written by the Learners: How Student Views Trump United States History Curricula

Schaun Wheeler
University of Connecticut

I WAS SURPRISED when my students told me they hated my class. I was especially surprised since it was the first day of class and I had yet to teach a lesson. This was my third year teaching with Upward Bound. Upward Bound is a holdover from LBJ's Great Society programs that is designed to help underprivileged high school students get into, and through, college. Each summer, mostly because I believed in what the program was trying to accomplish, but also partly to fund my undergraduate education, I would teach various subjects during a five-week summer camp that kept the students in an academic frame of mind while school was officially out. I had taught Russian language and history the summer before. They had liked that. The previous summer, I had taught math, and they had even liked that. But as they sat in front of me this day, my students informed me that they would hate this class because I was about to teach United States history.

I had worked with these students for a couple years, teaching different subjects, and I knew them fairly well. This was not the normal I-dare-you-to-teach-me attitude. I was used to that. They really did not like United States history and they really did not want to like United States history. I was stuck. I gave them a homework assignment that would allow me to see just how bad the situation was. I asked them to write a page: "Do you like United States history? Why or why not?" They turned in their homework the next day. Positive responses (there were some) usually contained vague statements about learning from history "so we won't have to repeat it." Negative responses ranged from the opinion that United States history was just plain boring to the opinion that it was a horrible waste of time.

Based on this first assignment, I did an overnight course correction. I came back the next day with a stripped-down teaching agenda that focused on just a few key ideas that I hoped might catch my students' interest. Apparently, I did something right. I quickly noticed a change in my students' attitudes, and by the end of the summer, my employers and I were shocked to realize that United States history had been the most popular course in the program. And it had not just been popular. On their end-of-program evaluations, several students remarked that my class had actually changed the way they thought about America. I had not expected this.

In this article, I argue that my methods were successful because I taught the class (albeit unwittingly) in a way that agreed with the views my students had before they ever started learning about history. By better understanding the ways my students saw the world outside of class, I was able effectively to teach them when they were in my class. These views proved to be a more valuable tool for teaching history than the historical facts themselves. Apparently, the facts became relevant only in the contexts of these views.

The first section of this article outlines the changes I made to the history curriculum in my class; the second section outlines the effects of those changes; and the third section explains why my class worked, based on ethnographic research conducted with some of the students from my class about three months after they graduated from high school. I argue that I got my students to not hate history by throwing out two basic assumptions of history teaching: that history should be taught chronologically and that history should focus on particular groups and people. I offer an alternative method for teaching United States history that does not make these assumptions.

Changes in Methods and Curriculum

My training is primarily in anthropology. It would be nice if I could say that I relied on my command of the ethnographic literature to inform the decisions I made about the history curriculum in my class, but in reality I just panicked at my students' opposition and fell back on that which was most familiar to me. I pulled examples from my studies to point out phenomena that my students could readily see in their own lives. I then connected these phenomena to things my students could not see—social institutions that influenced their lives on a large scale. I then connected these large-scale forces to events in United States history. I focused on these issues in no particular chronological order. I moved through the class by topic rather than by date.

First Step: Point out Patterns. I needed to begin with something that my students could easily relate to—something they already knew or could easily see. Language turned out to be both convenient and effective. Any introductory text in sociolinguistics is full of examples that apply directly to students, so I started out one series of lessons by talking about Black English Vernacular (BEV).¹ My students were all familiar with some form of BEV, because most of them used it (even though only two of my students were black). Hip-Hop and Rap music is replete with BEV usages. I asked my students why people speak this way. Their answers ranged from "People want to be cool" to "They hear it in music a lot" to "They learn it from their friends." I asked them why it sounds cool, why it is in music, and why people would start to speak that way in the first place. Their inability to answer those questions gave me a starting point. They saw that people spoke and acted a certain way, but they did not know why.

Second Step: Connect Patterns to Social Institutions. We talked about controversies concerning BEV, such as the school board decision in Oakland, California to ban BEV in the schools and resulting backlash from the American Linguistic Association and other organizations.² We talked about why people thought BEV was a "lazy" form of English. It made sense to my students that you would not use BEV when interviewing for a job, when giving a lecture in a university, or when talking to the President of the United States; it would be considered impolite and people might not understand you in those settings. This led to another question: if there is nothing technically wrong with BEV, if it is not lazy or corrupted or in any other way worse than Standard American English, then why can it not be used in certain situations? I then gave them some information about racial differences, such as differential pay, differential access to health care, and other documentation of racial prejudice and inequality.³ It was easy for the students to connect inequality in language to inequality in other areas of life. They saw that people who spoke and acted a certain way were also treated a certain way, not only on the individual level, but in access to resources. Still, they did not know why these differences existed.

Step Three: Connect Institutions to History. Black English Vernacular has largely non-English roots. Many of the grammatical structures in BEV come from Maninka and other West African languages that were carried to America on ships to become slave languages. In other words, the inequalities in language and social institutions that exist today existed in similar forms in the past. Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Indian policy, immigration, the civil rights movement, and several other issues took on new vitality as students were able to talk about these subjects in terms of the social institutions that affected them. Stories about individuals during these events became more important as they were seen in the context of larger societal forces.

This gave them the tools for understanding and explaining what people do. They were able to see how people chose to engage in (or, often, were forced to participate in) specific situations that entailed inequalities between them and other people. They were able to see that it made sense for people to behave a certain way (and to speak a certain way) in these contexts. They were able to see that people continued to behave in these ways, even though some of the institutions might have changed over the years. In short, they could see the origins of aspects of the world that they could actually observe today. It was this connection between individuals and society in the present that helped students to understand the relationships between individuals and society in the past.

I taught my students about social and cultural factors that influenced interpersonal relationships in their own lives:

Gender. I drew on the vast sociolinguistics literature on gender relations to talk about ways gender differences are embedded in the way we speak. I could often point out gender differences in students' in-class speech. This opened up the discussion to gender differences in power and wealth in contemporary America. It was an easy step to talk about women's suffrage and women's rights.

Class. Many of my students came from underprivileged backgrounds. We explored ways that socioeconomic status is reflected in the way we speak and act, discussed causes and effects of differences in income and education, and learned to think about the difference between status that you achieve and status you are born into. Discussions of segregation, immigration, and civil rights in United States history followed close behind.

Ideology. Perhaps my most ambitious experiment was to discuss excerpts from various political documents (those by Jefferson, Marx, and Hitler received the most attention). We talked about what the purpose of government should be, and how people should go about fulfilling those purposes. Seeing that ideology could lead to different outcomes allowed us to investigate many of the contradictory aspects of United States history, such as times when Americans tried to separate from what they saw as an unjust government (an idea that my students tended to see as good in the case of the Revolutionary War, but bad in the case of the Civil War) and times when the United States inserted itself into the affairs of other nations (they saw the Wilson administration's intervention in World War I as good, but the same administration's interventions in South America as bad.)

In each instance, I showed students how their speech, and often other aspects of their behavior, was patterned in a way that showed that individual people did not just behave randomly. I then showed them differences at the societal level that corresponded with differences at the individual level, and this showed them that their individual experiences are connected to institutions that they often do not see. Finally, I showed how these institutional differences played out in United States history, and how people's actions in the past could be connected to these institutions in the same way my students' behavior could be connected to institutions in the present.

Changes and Consequences

At the time, I did not realize why my methods were working. All I saw was that the students were changing the opinions they had expressed on the first day of class. Class participation steadily increased. Students who had slept during the two previous summers of classes suddenly became model students. I had my students write every day, which in high school is often a certain way to get your students to hate you; after the first week, not only did my students not complain about writing, but many arrived early to class and asked me to give the assignment early so they could work longer on it. Students proved capable of not only understanding complex texts, but became increasingly capable of critically evaluating their readings. By the end of the summer, students were able to write about sections of Mein Kampf that they felt they had to agree with, even though they did not want to, and give well thought-out reasons for problems they had with United States policies. Outside-of-class learning increased. I had students come up to me after class and ask me where they could find a good book on the subject we had discussed. If I brought a book into class for use in my lecture, at least one student would invariably approach me after class about borrowing it (I lost several books this way).

One additional outcome deserves special consideration. Students became ever less sure of whom to trust and what to believe. For example, one student always sat at the front of the class, raised her hand for every question I asked, and took pride in always knowing the answers. She always took great care in her essays to word everything just right. She was a good student and she knew it. In response to the question, "Is it ever right for the United States to intervene in the affairs of another country? Is it ever wrong? Justify your answer" she wrote:

When you have countries that are severely not respecting human rights, you have to step in. In Iraq, maybe we went for the wrong reasons, but to my knowledge, Saddam was horribly hurting people. It would have been wrong to sit back and watch. If you're not stopping it, you're part of it. It gets a lot trickier when you intervene with people's belief or religious practices. We know it's wrong, but what steps do you take? Do you stop it by force or try to reason that it's wrong? Is it really our place? It's very hard to put a line on when we can or can't intervene. Even when it's right to intervene, other countries might not understand or they might think it's wrong, but who's to say what's right and what's wrong and who are we to judge and say what we do is right and what other people do is wrong? And communism is wrong so that's why we stepped in in Vietnam, but people didn't know any better, or is it us that didn't know any better? What makes something right or wrong? Is it just our present beliefs? Is it what the government tells us or what the church tells us? Right or wrong changes every day, so are we getting closer to more right or closer to more wrong? Is there really a right or wrong? Maybe everything is just gray. It's very hard to put yourself in a position where you choose what's right and wrong, to me anyway. It is what feels right? But that can't be true because what you were taught is what influences feelings and stuff. I don't know.

She and others in the class would frequently ask questions like, "Well, who was right?" or "What really happened?" They would often get frustrated when I told them quite honestly that I did not know the answers to those questions. However, many students also said they felt good that they were learning about controversial subjects.

Much of my students' frustration translated into action. Most of my students had shown apathy at the beginning of the class for any kind of participation in the American political process, claiming that their vote would make no difference. Three months after the class had ended, I surveyed twenty-nine of my former students about their opinions of America. Eighteen said they planned to vote when they were old enough. Four said they would not vote and seven were unsure. These intentions displayed a higher desire to participate in the life of the country than at the beginning of the class. It is also more than is normal among the eighteen to twenty-four year old voting demographic.⁴

Another insight comes from students' responses to the question "Fill in the blank: I am a(n)..." on both a pre-test and a post-test. The table below compares the pre-test answers with the post-test answers.


Identifier	Pre-Test	Post-Test	% difference

American	4	11	175
Hyphenated-American	3	7	133
Student	3	5	66
Person/human	10	16	60
Other	5	4	–20
Individual	9	3	–33
Ethnicity	6	3	–50
Other country	5	2	–60
Gender	8	3	–63
(Missing)	(4)	(3)	(-25)

Total	57	57	--

Students' self-identification as Americans or hyphenated-Americans increased substantially. It could be because they had spent five weeks in a United States history class, or because they thought I wanted that answer. However, during the summer program, our staff had encouraged students to think about going to college, and to identify themselves as students (particularly as members of Upward Bound). The number of students who self-identified only as students, including those who identified as Upward Bounders, rose only by half as much as did hyphenated-American identifiers, and by a third as much as American identifiers. If my class had just made my students feel more American, it seems they would not only have been more willing to participate in America through voting, and more willing to identify themselves as Americans, but might also have felt more trust in America rather than less. The fact that identification and desire to participate went up while trust went down suggests a desire to be more a part of America.

My course obviously did not turn all of my students into perfect receptacles of knowledge. Some students, despite all my efforts, fell asleep in class every day. Many never got it into their heads that "because I feel that way" is not a good enough reason for accepting an argument. Many have probably still never read an entire book. However, the changes were widespread enough for my employers and co-workers to notice the difference just from talking with the students.

What Does My Success Say About Current History Teaching?

I was left with a surprisingly successful class, and sought to understand why. I cannot discount teaching style, prior student interest in the subject, or student aptitude for learning. All of these things, of course, affect the degree to which a student will successfully learn history.⁵ However, none of these things changed during the course of my class. But my students' responsiveness did. Something I did had changed my students from hating United States history to being excited about it. Why had I been able to do this accidentally while so many other history teachers had apparently failed?

Different races, regions, factions, and other types of groups are usually depicted as what matters historically, and most students to some extent identify themselves with various groups that appear in their history texts and class discussions. I suspected that my students' views concerning these kinds of groups might explain why my methods had succeeded while other methods had not. So I set out to find if there was anything to this suspicion. I conducted an ethnographic study of nineteen of the students of my original class in 2005 with the aim of understanding how they viewed their social groups. I distilled the information I had gleaned from the assignments and discussions in class into a survey that measured different aspects of group belonging and asked my students to answer the survey questions in regard to their race, gender, and country.⁶

Using a variation of an ethnographic technique called consensus analysis,⁷ I analyzed my students' responses to the surveys to see if they shared a view of the world (what is often called "cultural model") that could help me understand how they reacted to my history class.⁸ Consensus analysis measures the degree to which students answer a set of questions in a similar way. The analysis provided me with information about topics on which students largely agreed (shared items), topics that caused substantial differences in opinion (contested items), and topics that simply did not seem to matter much (random items).

The analysis produced several interesting findings. Students felt they could tell, without asking, if someone was the same race or gender as they, and most were glad to be members of their gender or country or origin. However students explicitly rejected the idea that people would exclude them or treat them poorly because of their gender or country of origin. Students were able to provide examples of times when people had treated them poorly, but did not see those instances as connected to these large-scale groups. The contested items in all three cases focused on the degree to which students actually saw real-world consequences of their belonging to a particular race, gender, or country. Whether or not students felt they got advantages from being a member of their country, the degree to which they felt safer knowing that they belonged to their gender, and the issue of whether or not people judged them based on their race, were all up for debate.

My students had fairly clear ideas about how to recognize who belonged to what group, and what the costs and benefits of group membership were. Those costs and benefits, however, were not specific. The degree to which students saw group membership as having real-world consequences in their interactions with other people was the main cause of differences in how they viewed these groups. This held true across all racial groups, both genders, and all of the countries represented by my students. There was no way to predict, just from knowing what race, gender, or country my students belonged to, whether or not they would see the consequences of belonging to their groups.

Groups Are Not Like People and People Are Not Like Groups

Groups do not work the way my students' minds did. Societies function in terms of institutions. To my knowledge, John Searle has most explicitly defined what an institution is and how institutions differ from other aspects of the world.⁹ Institutions are collective, meaning any given set will apply to a specific group of people who react to them in similar ways. Institutions are inside our heads, but they are treated as if they were outside our heads. For instance, even though the military would not exist without the rules, roles, and symbols that people have created to go with it, we do not think of the military as simply an idea. The fact that we turn mental rules, roles, and symbols into physical salutes, ranks, uniforms, academies, office buildings, and recruitment posters lends to our ability to treat the idea as if it were a thing.

In order for something to be called an institution, it must be assigned a status. A piece of paper can count as a medium of exchange in cases where the paper or coin fits a certain pattern. We assign this paper a new status, called money, and give it status markers, such as statements that the paper is legal tender for all debts public and private, to show that it has that status.

Searle's idea of institutions is useful because it allows us to understand how individual people conform to society's rules without knowing what they are.¹⁰ When I buy groceries, I do not give money to the cashier because the cashier and I collectively agree that those bills have the status function of legal tender in the context of economic exchanges in the United States. I give money to the cashier because I want potatoes. I am able to get my potatoes in this way because the exchange conforms to the institutional rules. I buy potatoes because I am hungry, but I use money to buy potatoes, not because I recognize money as a socially-sanctioned basis of exchange, but because I have learned that the exchange works. The distinction may seem obvious but it is important. We engage in certain behavior, anything from buying groceries to voting, because institutional rules are structured in a way that the behavior gets us something we want or allows us to avoid something we do not want.

Students Should Be Taught to Think in Terms of Both

My students had such vague notions of race, gender, and country because that was all they needed. The ability to recognize whether or not a person belongs to a specific group, coupled with a notion of costs and benefits that motivates one to either affiliate with or avoid that person, is all one needs to recognize context. Specific contexts determine which institutional rules apply. It seems my students had built their views of large-scale groups on this kind of intuitive reasoning.

For instance, many of my Hispanic students realized they could act a certain way around other Hispanics. Acting this way allowed them to make friends, to acquire things they needed, to feel secure, and to gain access to all those other benefits that come as part of interacting successfully with other people. These students were aware that talking a certain way served them well in their current friendships. Having graduated from high school, they were quickly becoming aware that talking that same way would not get them a good job. The way they were accustomed to acting and talking did not count as "professional" in the context of the upwardly-mobile jobs they were pursuing. Talking and acting a certain way carried costs or benefits depending on the degree to which it conformed to institutional rules—either for casual friendships, or for professional employment.

Knowing the signs, costs, and benefits of group membership does not perfectly predict the contexts for specific institutions. Knowing these things does predict those contexts more accurately than if a person had no assumptions about the world at all. My students' simple models of the world allowed them to predict how that world would work some of the time, and it did so in a way that they did not even have to be aware of why their predictions were successful. My United States history course took those simple cultural models and connected them to the institutions that caused them to work the way they did. My students' models were already important to them. Institutions like class stratification, racism, and the Declaration of Independence became important by association. The history of these things became important because I connected it to current institutions. My course explicitly showed students how they could learn from history. They responded to that and my course was a success because of it. In training teachers, universities should teach students to use this tool.

Larger Question: Why Do We Teach History in High Schools?

An obvious criticism of my method of teaching United States history is that I spent a large amount of class time teaching about things other than United States history. It takes time to teach students about linguistics and institutions and ideology—time that could have been spent on covering actual historical events. What does it say about United States history curriculum that I needed such a round-about method, especially when most of my students were near the end of the public schooling? I believe the issue here is our goals--our reasons for teaching United States history in the first place. Moreau has given an excellent history of United States history teaching.¹¹ A cursory look at his survey of education debates reveals two opposing agendas that have, though alternating from time to time in popularity, shaped the way textbooks portray the United States. One agenda espoused consolidation: fostering union and the nation with a less controversial treatment of racial and class differences, and minimal treatment of immigrant histories in the texts. The other agenda pushed diversification: that the history of the United States should be explicitly tied to the history of immigrants, minorities, and powerless majorities who participated in the history of the country, but not in as prolific a manner on the generals, explorers, and statesmen.

Historians of the diversification camp argue that today's students have inherited a national history that avoids all controversial subjects and ignores significant groups.¹² Griffen and Marciano, in an analysis of the treatment of the Vietnam war in textbooks, sum up diversificationist concerns:

Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education. By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War.... Within history texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limit profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities.¹³

Diversificationists view multicultural teaching—where each group gets to have its story told—as the answer to textbooks that have for too long told a version of America that is too simplistic, too irrelevant, and too boring.

The consolidationist trend in American history teaching grows out of ideas presented in the Report of the Committee on the Social Sciences, published in 1916 by the United States Board of Education. This report presented several recommendations for social science teaching (into which history was lumped), most of which stressed teaching students how to be good citizens.¹⁴ Adherents to this school of thought view diversificationist history as a threat to American national identity. Arthur Schlessinger, perhaps the most vehement in his objections to multicultural history teaching, summarizes consolidationist concerns:

Instead of a transformative nature all its own, America in this new light is seen as a preservation of diverse alien identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character. The multiethnic dogma abandons historic purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism. It belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.¹⁵

While many of this camp concede that United States history as it is currently taught in the schools is a little simplistic, they contend that it gives students the conceptual tools with which they can engage in a common discourse about their country.¹⁶

The commonality between the diversificationist and consolidationist agendas is that teaching students to be Americans is a major goal. Consolidationists often cite the need for a common national identity.¹⁷ Diversificationists are not so explicit about this goal, but many of the studies about what students know (or, rather, what they do not know) about America contain the implicit idea that student apathy is a national concern.¹⁸ Many of the proposed reforms are attempts to make history more relevant so more is learned, with the idea that students who know American history will be more American.

The National Standards for History, which have served as the basis for history curricula in over 30 states, are based on similar assumptions. The fifteen criteria used for developing the Standards actually contain a mix of consolidationist and diversificationist ideas; they emphasize, for example, students' notion of "historical time" (criteria 3 and 4); balancing differing interpretations (criteria 1 and 6); fusing American history with American government, and making students into citizens (criteria 9 and 10); using multiple sources (criteria 5 and 7); and treating diversity in America (criteria 8 and 13).¹⁹

Criterion 9 explicitly states the American-making agenda of United States history courses: "Standards in United States History should contribute to citizenship education through developing understanding of our common civic identity and shared civic values within the polity. This is just not happening. My nineteen students unanimously reported that my 2003 class was the only history class they had ever taken that changed the way they thought about America. I cannot take credit for this; I stumbled upon my admittedly successful approach by accident. I also can make no claims about the durability of those changed views of the world. However, the fact that my students made that statement three months after graduating from high school and two years after my class, says something about our failure to teach our students to be Americans.

If the goal of teaching United States history really is to help our students understand America so they can be a part of it, then we should be up front about that goal and start our course planning from that assumption, rather than assumptions about what makes good history.

"History was Totally Not Made for Me"

History teaching often involves telling a story, a story that explains how things came to be as they are. In my view this leads to two problems, an overemphasis on chronology and a treatment of groups as actors in and of themselves. Criterion four of the Standards states it explicitly: "Standards should be founded in chronology, an organizing approach that fosters appreciation of pattern and causation in history." Chronology in itself is a bad notion of causation. Though nothing that occurred later can be the cause of what occurred earlier, the fact that one thing came before another does not necessarily mean the first thing caused the other to happen. Students need to understand this. I saw this problem in my class: students felt they could explain something simply by stating what happened before. By giving the chronology of the issue, they felt the issue had been laid to rest. Until I was able to get past this kind of reasoning, my high school students simply were not interested in the subject matter.

The Standards emphasize "broad themes" (criterion 5) in history and the "meanings of history and methods of historians" (criterion 3). This leads teachers to overemphasize chronology—creating a narrative—leaving inadequate time and energy to promote "active questioning and learning rather than passive absorption of facts, date, and names" (criterion 1). This is in spite of the call for teaching "sound historical reasoning—careful evaluation of evidence, construction of causal relationships, balanced interpretation and comparative analysis" (criterion 6). Students are apparently often left with the idea that chronology is causation.

Another problematic assumption is the one most explicitly addressed by my research. Criterion 8 states: "Standards for United States History should reflect both the nation's diversity exemplified by race, ethnicity, social and economic status, gender, region, politics, and religion, and the nation's commonalities. The contributions and struggles of specific groups and individuals should be included." Much of the high school history curriculum rests on the assumption that groups are more-or-less homogenous things that act and can be acted upon. This assumption can be seen in criterion 10 for world history, which calls for illustration of "different patterns of political institutions, ranging from varieties of democracy to varieties of authoritarianism, and ideas and aspirations developed by civilizations in all parts of the world."²⁰ This treats "civilizations in all parts of the world" as things that have ideas and aspirations in and of themselves. Statements about "global context" (criterion 11) also assume that this means "countries," among which the United States can be situated as one of its "integral parts." Criterion 13 does the same thing with regions within the United States.

My students were able to tell the signals that alerted them to the fact that someone was of their same race, gender, or country, but there was a tremendous amount of variation in the content of those groups—in terms of people as well as ideas and beliefs. Because groups are not homogenous, however, they cannot act for themselves; they cannot cause things to happen.²¹ History written and taught without understanding this is unattractive and at worst strips students of the ability to understand their world. At best, they recognize it as something that does not match their worldview, so they simply ignore the information presented to them.

Overemphasis on the chronology assumption and the group assumption create one more problem with the Standards and with contemporary United States history teaching in general: there is simply no way to cover all of the groups and all of the time periods that should or could be covered. Criterion 12 calls for "appropriate coverage of recent events in United States and World History" (NCHS). Loewen has shown that what happens in classrooms rarely achieves these goals.²² Criterion 2 states that "all students should be provided equal access to the curricular opportunities necessary to achieving [the] standards." The vast amount of what there is to learn, especially since the introduction of the diversificationist history emphasis on groups, violates the spirit of the injunction that students should be able to learn what there is to learn.

One of my students said it best: "History was totally not made for me." She was right. United States history as it is currently presented was not made for someone who sees the world the way she sees it. Because the United States history textbooks talk about an entity that bears little resemblance to anything that is important to them, students feel no need to learn about it. The consolidationist history agenda assumes that once students see the big picture of America, the grand narrative that shows how a small, struggling nation rose to superpower status, they will then see how they fit into it and want to be a part of it. The diversificationist history agenda assumes that once students see groups that they belong to—groups that matter to them—fighting and struggling and living in America, then students will understand that it is important for them to fight and struggle and live in America as well. If my experience is at all indicative of United States history education in general, most students have never been taught those connections because they are taught very little that they could connect to.

It is often said that history is written by the winners. In my classroom, at least, history was written by the learners: my students heard the stories, but interpreted only those parts that already conformed to their worldview. When history did not conform to these views it was often forgotten or simply ignored. By presenting historical information in a format that more closely resembled the way students already viewed their world, I was able to motivate my students to learn some history. My study suggests that we can better accomplish our goals as history teachers by better understanding the knowledge students bring with them on the very first day of class. In this sense, understanding those who learn history may be just as important as the history itself.

Notes

¹� I used Nancy Bonvillain's Language, Culture, and Communication, (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall: 2000).

²� The Center for Applied Linguistics has put together an informational website on the subject. It can be found at <http://www.cal.org/Ebonics/>.

³� Such statistics can easily be found on the websites of any number of advocacy groups, such as <http://www.ywca.org/site/pp.asp?c=djISI6PIKpG&b=295684>.

⁴� National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), "New Millennium Survey: American Youth Attitudes on Politics, Citizenship, Government & Voting," Accessed 23 January 2005 at <http://www.stateofthevote.org/survey/>.

⁵� See Russell F. Farnen, "Nationalism, Democracy, and Authority in North America and Europe since 1989: Lessons for Political Socialization and Civic Education," in Democracy, Socialization, and Conflicting Loyalties in East and West: Cross-National and Comparative Perspectives, Russell F. Farnen, Henk Dekker, Rüdiger Meyenberg, and Daniel B. German, eds. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 39–105.

⁶� For country, I measured students' views about their "country of origin," which I defined as "the country which you feel you came from—your home country."

⁷� See A. Kimball Romney, Susan C. Weller, and William H. Batchelder, "Culture as Consensus: A Theory of Culture and Informant Accuracy," in American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 313–38 and W. Penn Handwerker, Quick Ethnography (Walnut Creek:AltaMira Press, 2002).

⁸� See Roy G. D'Andrade, "Schemas and Motivation," in Human Motives and Cultural Models, Roy D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995).

⁹� Most of my discussion of institutions comes from John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Pres, 1995).

¹⁰� Anna Wierzbicka has done an excellent job of showing how social norms can be formulated into explicit rules. See, for instance, Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (New York: Oxford, 1992) and "Japanese Cultural Scripts: Cultural Psychology and 'Cultural Grammar.'" in Ethos 24, 3 (1996), 527–555.

¹¹� Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over the American History Textbook from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

¹²� See Mary Beth Norton, "Rethinking American History Textbooks" in Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics, Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 25–33; James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995); Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1999); Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); James D. Anderson, "How We Learn about Race Through History," in Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics, Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 87–106; Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High School History Texts, (Westport: Praeger, 1995); Leonard Lieberman and Rodney C. Kirk, "What Should We Teach about the Concept of Race?" in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 35, 1 (2004), 137–145; Lynn Hunt, "Reports of Its Death Were Premature: Why 'Western Civ' Endures," in Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics, Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 34–43; and Sandra Stotsky, "Multiculturalism in the Public Schools: The Deconstruction of an American Curriculum," in Educational Excellence Network 10, 10 (1991), 29–34.

¹³� James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

¹⁴� David F. Kellum, American History Through Conflicting Interpretations (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969).

¹⁵� Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1993).

¹⁶� See Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1980).

¹⁷� See. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

¹⁸� See Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, What Do Our 17-year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Gale M. Sinatra, Isabel L. Beck, and Margaret G. McKeown, "A Longitudinal Characterization of Young Students' Knowledge of their Country's Government," American Educational Research Journal 9, 3 (Fall 1992), 633–661; and Dale Whittington "What Have 17-Year-Olds Known in the Past?" in American Educational Research Journal 28,4 (1991), 759–780.

¹⁹� The full text of the standards and the criteria for their development can be found at <http://nchs.ucla.edu/standards/>.

²⁰� See also criterion 15 of the standards for world history.

²¹� For a historical illustration of this fact, see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, (Berkeley: University of California, 1980); for a more general social science treatment, see Anthony P. Cohen, Self-Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1994).

²²� Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me.

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