Critical History
I see a sense of urgency in instructing history. I believe there is an essential impact that history can create in the lives of students through transformative experiences that can challenge them to investigate, question, and hypothesize about their identity as individuals, their global citizenship and within their social constructs. My purpose is to equip students to make personal connections with history rather than to recite the events of the past.
Critical Pedagogy
The content of history will be meaningless if the content lacks an emphasis on the struggle found at the essence of humans. I see a sense of urgency in teaching my students about a history that is not left in the past, but one that continues to echo in the present through social events, policies, race, ethnicity, beliefs, and much more. The history of humans is too lengthy to memorize and too complex to grasp fully. It seems to me that there are more questions than answers, and these answers are only responses of those who dare to contests history. If I want to present history to be transformative to students, and more importantly, to create transformative experiences, I must emphasize the critical need for students to create their own responses, questions, hypotheses, and conclusions to the human experience. Critical Pedagogy challenges the notion of learning to be more than just the transferring of information, but rather to "situate students as agentic knowers who can investigate, question, and critique the construction of societal and educational norms concerning their own experiences" (Ravitch, 2020) Therefore, students transformation begins by helping them develop autonomy to discover history through activities skills that can support exploration and a personalized approach, which is what I have set out to do with a gamified design of our course. The hope is that students can experience a greater sense of freedom and cultivate a critical consciousness. Paulo Freire (1970) urged the sense of freedom that I hope students can engage in through the content and the skills they develop,
"Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man, nor is it an idea that becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion." (p. 47)
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More than just tracking students with autonomy and responsibility to earn a higher grade, I hope that my course, through my curriculum and instructional design, achieved the goal of teaching students about the urgency, complexity, and struggles of history through transformative experiences that question, contest, and demand responses from my student. I hope that all my students feel how my student expressed herself in our final survey of our Winter Term:
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"I enjoy that Mr. G preaches students to formulate their own views about history and is not just simply instructing us about what happened and how we should think. We are grappling with very difficult topics right about now, so I think this mindset of unique perspective is important."
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Reflective Practice
To engage students to actively respond to the content seen in class, I emphasize the importance of reflection not only for improvement but to make personal connections with the content. Reflection serves as an essential practice of cognitive skills that enhance learning through training the memory, connecting internal experiences to the content, retrieving knowledge, and visualizing ways for improvements. (Brown 2014) Through student writing, whether it is private or shared with the teacher or other classmates, students have the opportunity to explore connections that become more personal. In the example below, I ask students to look at a rubric that highlights standards and skills that encourage students to write reflective pieces that involve their connection, response, and the impact that they have experienced with particular topics or ideas. This lesson originated from reading student work that only summarized and recited the happenings of history, which is the safe thing to do out of fear of not being wrong instead of being novel, creative and analytical. I wanted students to see themselves as historians, and challenge themselves to find their voice within the curriculum. I wanted to highlight to students that the course they did not want was one that only went through the motions and summarized what happened in the past but rather a course that involves them as historians, being critical about the past to change the present and make their mark in the future.
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To me, having students reflect on history by making personal connections is to set out the goal of education that Joshua Block (2020) discusses in his book Teaching for a Living Democracy, "Seeing education as experiences of connection and expression allows us to understand the ways education can change students’ and teachers’ understandings of themselves and their roles in society. These new intelligence lead to transformation and different ways of living." (p. 3) Therefore, allowing students to critique history through their connections as students, citizens and historians is to create meaningful transformations for the pursuit to be the best self within the human story.