Disciplinary skills are not enough: Resituating historical thinking within students’ racialized and linguistic experiences

ABSTRACT

Background

Drawing from research with 11^th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students’ experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students’ experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with seeing language segregation as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination.

Methods

The first author collected three days of classroom field notes, conducted 15 student interviews, and collected 177 student work samples. The authors used a grounded theory approach to identify how students’ racialized experiences help or hinder their historical analysis.

Findings

The findings suggest that students’ racialized experiences interplay with the disciplinary concepts of contextualization and presentism. Our findings complicate how disciplinary concepts alone do not sufficiently help students analyze how systemic racism manifests differently across historical moments.

Contribution

This paper offers implications for how historical thinking skills can make space for students’ racialized and linguistic experiences. Incorporating raciolinguistic analysis in tandem with historical thinking skills can lead to more nuanced conversations in the classroom about race/ethnicity and language in the past and present.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We use the term “Mexican-origin” when referring to both United States and Mexican born people.

² The term “People of Color” does not acknowledge how distinct groups are racialized differently. However, we highlight those differences and refer to specific racialized groups when applicable.

³ Emergent Bilingual (EB) students refers to students learning a new language while retaining their home language (García & Kleifgen, 2018)

⁴ Some historical thinking skills include establishing historical significance, using primary source evidence, identifying continuity and change, analyzing cause and consequence, taking historical perspectives, and understanding the ethical dimension of historical interpretations (Seixas & Morton, 2012), sourcing, corroboration, and close reading (Wineburg, 2001).

⁵ Various terms are used to describe the act of understanding the perspective of people in the past and how it influenced their actions. The two most common terms are historical empathy and perspective taking. Some scholars see minimal differences between these two concepts (e.g. Ashby & Lee, 1987; Bartelds et al., 2020; P. Lee & Ashby, 2001), whereas others argue that they are distinct but interrelated concepts (e.g. J. Endacott & Brooks, 2013; Huijgen et al., 2018; Nilsen, 2016). Our research is not concerned with the debate about the differences between these concepts. On the contrary, we are concerned with the commonalities between these constructs to understand how students analyze the actions of people in the past.

⁶ We use the encompassing term “Latinx” as a nonbinary alternative to Latina/o.

⁷ Perhaps it is not that Korean American students do not experience oppression, as much as they have not learned about their history in school. As An has noted elsewhere (2016), Asian American history is sorely underrepresented in schools. An’s findings might differ today in the context of anti-Asian hate that heightened during the COVID pandemic.

⁸ Participants have pseudonyms that are consistent with the pronunciation of their name.