Sandra J. Schmidt

Am I a woman? The normalisation of woman in US History

The curriculum of US History has improved substantially in its presentation of women over the 40 years since Treckers 1971 study of US History textbooks. While studies show increased inclusions, they also suggest that women have not yet claimed their own place in the school curriculum. This paper seeks to better understand the woman who is presented to students and how she is normalised through a US History curriculum. Feminist analysis of the curriculum exposes a concept of woman attached to the domestic sphere and reified through her presentation in the political and economic realms. When considering the images of woman available to young people, it is important to examine the full context around these images that shape the deeper meaning students take from curricular encounters.

Claiming Our Turf: Students' Civic Negotiation of the Public Space of School

Abstract In the ongoing effort to conceptualize meaningful civics curriculum, the author looks beyond the intended curriculum to consider the civics lessons embedded in spatial interaction and engagement. She examines how young people negotiate school, a space she contends can be conceived of as a public space. Their negotiations rely upon tactics of avoidance, dissent, and incivility as civic actions that reshape space. These tactics—all forms of resistance—suggest that civic efficacy and possibility are bound in how young people create and then continuously respond to the spaces they re-create through civic processes.

Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text

commonly shared experiences involve the mass media. Engaging us at almost every turn, the media—film, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, music, advertising, and software industries—have become primary avenues through which most of us come to know about the world, both near and far. They help frame the world for us, elevating certain issues, and the ways in which to engage issues to the forefront, while designating others to the margins. As such, media texts act as social texts; they construct social reality and invite us to experience that reality from preferred social positions. Through their mediation—a process combining explicit, implicit, and null messages (that is, information and perspectives that are stated, implied, silenced, or ignored), the media create spaces that invite, and at times direct, us in specific ways to negotiate opinions, attitudes, and values about the world and its people. Whether one sees the role of mass media as positive or negative, or a combination of the two, the media are not merely neutral conveyors of a message but conveyors with a message. Indeed, the media are pedagogical environments that position us to know or not know about the world and its people and do that in some ways rather than others. Exploring the media in this light, we argue, should be the focus of analysis when media texts are used in the social studies classroom. Much of the discussion in education regarding the media, especially television, has focused on decrying the media’s prevalence in students’ lives. Postman (1985) determined that the media, not school, have become the students’ first curriculum and that, consequently, teachers need to counter those influences by teaching students how to resist the media’s messages. Newspapers, however, have been immune to much of this criticism, perhaps because newspapers use the more traditional medium of print, with which teachers are familiar. Also, newspapers deal with what teachers define as serious issues and do so in more in-depth ways than other mass media. Whatever the reason, newspapers have not only escaped such scrutiny but also, for some time, been welcome in the classroom, especially in the social studies classroom. In the literature, which is written by teachers or directed at kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers, authors discuss a variety of purposes for using the newspaper in the classroom. Many of those purposes involve issues of literacy, although some pertain specifically to content. Vockell and Cusick (1995) suggest that using newspapers in the classroom can make major contributions to growth in students’ ability and interest in reading. “Students who read and use newspapers,” the authors, using research by Stone and Grusin (1991), suggest, “have better comprehension and vocabularies than those who don’t” (2). Further, they propose that newspapers give students the opportunity “to be exposed to more up-to-date information than that found in textbooks” (2). Exploring the uses of a newspaper-ineducation program, Street (2002) writes, “The newspaper is a source of up-to-date and compelling information that teachers can use to teach current events” (131). Some emphasis in the literature is put on using the newspaper to teach current events, but there is also much discussion of newspapers as serving an already existing curriculum. After surveying teachers, Vockell and Cusick (1995) state that most teachers integrated their instruction on the newspaper with the regular curriculum, indicating that teachers believe that using Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text

Reconstituting Pessimistic Discourses

Abstract The story of South Africas struggles and present achievements is highlighted in its national museums. An examination of the discourses constructed by and the pedagogies utilised in these museums shares narratives of progress, memorial and optimism. On a continent whose stories are typically told as tales of pessimism and doom, these narratives produce a new and different discourse surrounding South Africa. Ultimately, this article finds that these ‘new’, optimistic discourses exist with a framework of global pessimism placed upon Africa by a neoliberal world dependent upon an underdeveloped Africa.

Within the Sound of Silence

The Simon and Garfunkel classic, “The Sound of Silence,” criticizes silence that perpetuates oppression. Living amid familiar darkness, people struggle to hear others screaming for recognition. Social movements, some of which have used this song, have slowly changed the faces of oppression.

Civil Rights Continued: How History Positions Young People to Contemplate Sexuality (In)Justice

Same-sex marriage is part of a global civil rights struggle for LGBQ rights. How this movement is framed, advanced, and critiqued across the globe can be linked to how young people in schools are prepared to deliberate social issues in the political sphere. This article examines national history books as cultural artifacts that present what is possible and reasonable in the struggle for LGBQ rights. It examines how LGBQ rights are defined, situated, and understood within past social justice movements included in the texts. Insight into the narrative for rights in the U.S. is provided through comparison to Canada where LGBQ persons have great political protection and visibility. The comparison illuminates that integrating historical thinking and inquiry into textbooks and placing the struggle for rights within the national narrative may help U.S. teachers give reason and a social justice focus to sexuality inequity.

Global Citizenship Education and Geography

This chapter explores the congruence of GCE and geography. We draw upon geography as a spatial understanding of people and discourse. The chapter describes how GCE is inherently spatial. The specific case is made and examined through the example of migration and movement. Three examples—coerced migration of women, the flows of power that produce refugees, and flow of texts—explore how GCE comes to fruition within geographic frames. The examples depicted here are all relevant to and might be taken up in K-12 classrooms. We propose that a Framework for Global Interpretation and supported spatial analysis programs can allow teachers to similarly take up a robust, multidimensional and interconnected examination of global issues.

Genderplay and Queer Mapping

Many will likely look back at June 2015 as a pivotal month for queer and trans activists. In June, Caitlyn Jenner debuted on the cover of Vanity Fair. This media-supported public coming out transition of the Olympic athlete and reality television star brought widespread attention to transgender issues, politics, and identities. Just weeks later, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

United in our Diversity

Twenty years ago, South Africa transitioned from a country shunned by the world community to one of hope and promise for a continent. As the country flipped the reigns of power from an apartheid government to an inclusive democracy, the labels that defined the country shifted - from an oppressive regime to a free and fair democratic state, from a nation of gross human injustices to a protector of human rights, from colonial rule to self-rule, from embattled to peaceful.

Fabricating a nation: the function of national museums in nonracial re-presentation and the national imagination

Abstract South Africa provides a contemporary example of a nation struggling to find and cohere a national imagination that is universally agreeable. In their effort to create a sense of self based on unity across difference, South African relies on museums to produce and spread this narrative. The success of the narrative and its adoption rely on decolonizing modern concepts of race, museum, and nation that perpetuated the apartheid agenda. This paper examines national museums in the country for their success in adopting pedagogy and curricula that break down racial structures and their location in the nation. The inquiry finds moments of promise – a coexistence of narratives and refusals to cohere – alongside moments of concern – struggles to remove the deeply rooted race-based structures from society and museums.