Chapter 20: Notes on Understanding and Valuing the Anger of Students Marginalized by the Social Studies Curriculum

In this chapter, I intend to evoke the anger on the part of students from oppressed groups, especially students of color, who are faced with the attempted erasure, silencing, and flattening of their experiences and identities through the social studies curriculum.¹ This kind of anger, I submit, is beautiful, something which speaks to students’ humanity and intelligence, and which is often a part of a struggle to maintain an authentic voice.

To think—and teach—in this way is to go against the grain. American society has tended to see the anger of people of color as pathological (hooks, 1995; Kim, 2013), and the dominant discourse in K–12 education tends to view student anger primarily as a problem for classroom management (for an example, see Wilde, 2002). Yet there are substantial grounds for viewing anger as a lucid and healthy response to a variety of situations, and this view may have more positive associations than many may anticipate.