Chapter 5: Critical Historical Thinking: Enacting the Voice of the Other in the Social Studies Curriculum and Classroom

The increasing racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of our nation compels us to ask new and complicated questions about preparing school children for the responsibilities of enlightened political engagement (Flores & Benmayor, 1997; Parker, 2003). As such, our nation’s schools are places of rich diversity and deep ethnic texture. We argue that the way teachers make sense of our ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity as it is reflected in the teaching and learning of history becomes important in our understanding of how we are engaging and preparing students for broader and much more sophisticated historical narratives (Banks, 2001, 2006; VanSledright, 2010). The purpose of this study is to investigate how young secondary social studies teachers use historical inquiry as a pedagogical tool to trouble issues of race, class, and gender within the dominant historical narrative. In employing particular primary sources as a way to address the pedagogy of silence (Epstein, 2009) and/or avoidance (Levstik, 2000), this qualitative case study utilizes Shulman’s notions of teacher cognition to examine how and why teachers might employ historical inquiry as a tool for social justice.