Jeremy Jimenez | SUNY Cortland (original) (raw)
Papers by Jeremy Jimenez
Teaching in Higher Education, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called ‘clean’ energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 2020
While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned ... more While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned throughout the past 150 years, racial biases concerning such writing have persisted through today. Adapting Mark Phillips' (2013) concept of historical distance coupled with a form of linguistic analysis known as stylistics, I examine 50 U.S. social studies textbooks from 1860 to 2016 chosen by variation sampling and analyze which individuals and groups are discussed as experiencing suffering and whether or not these hardship narratives are apt to elicit compassion from their readers. I find that textbooks published after the U.S. Civil War consistently contain discourses that at first encouraged readers to be primarily concerned with the welfare of white elites and, over time, extended their compassionate writing styles to eventually all white people. At the same time, these texts consistently neglected to acknowledge the hardship experiences of domestic marginalized groups and, when their hardships were discussed, their narrative styles were likely to limit readers' inclination to be concerned about their oppression. Specifically, I find that the most enduring writing characteristic for U.S. textbook authors from the mid-19 th century through today was to discuss acts of violence by non-white groups towards white people using the active voice while describing violence by white North Americans (first British and then U.S. nationals) towards non-whites in the passive voice, which previous studies had found differentially impacts readers' capacity not only to recall but also to empathize with such hardship narratives. Identifying how textbook authors may selectively use these stylistic discourses in biased ways has significant implications for understanding and addressing not only history instruction, but for contemporary civil rights struggles as well.
Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting, 2022
Teaching in Higher Education, Jul 4, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called 'clean' energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Comparative Education Review, May 1, 2019
In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases ... more In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases on the experiences and rights of diverse marginalized groups. Textbook discussions of diversity earlier in the century, however, have seldom been studied. We use descriptive statistics and regression to examine diversity foci in 978 textbooks from 93 countries published between 1900 and 2013. Unlike previous research, which emphasizes linear growth in diversity-oriented curricula since World War II, our findings reveal a wavelike pattern. We document an early expansionist wave beginning in the 1920s, which was followed by stagnation and decline midcentury before rising again in recent decades. We situate the early expansion within global activities dedicated to diversity in the interwar years and the midcentury contraction within the aftermath of World War II and the geopolitical climate of the Cold War. We contribute to the literature by illuminating the historical ebb and flow of inclusionary educational orientations.
The Journal of Social Studies Research
This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong co... more This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong course that combined a semester-long LGBTQ+ studies class with a semester-long ethnic studies class, taught by the same teacher and attended by the same cohort of 26 students. Through a combination of identity maps, student interviews, and a transfer task (i.e., a digital textbook project), we explored students’ experiences and efforts to discern how their awareness of LGBTQ+ and ethnic studies issues, particularly the intersectionality of those issues, may have influenced their own identities. This research offers a model for educators and policymakers, as well as lessons learned and inspiration, for incorporating intersectional LGBTQ+ content and curriculum into social studies classrooms. It presents ways, both big and small, for K-12 educators to connect LGBTQ+ issues and rights with those from communities of color. Findings illustrate that queer theory and historical thinking can indee...
European Journal of Education, 2017
This article reviews the state of research and data on relevant content, broadly understood as su... more This article reviews the state of research and data on relevant content, broadly understood as sustainable development, in social science textbooks worldwide. Specifically, it examines the extent to which these textbooks could help learners to acquire the knowledge, skills and values that are needed to meet goal 4.7 of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: ‘By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non‐violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development’. It reviews relevant literature and analyses three cross‐national, longitudinal databases containing information that is coded from textbook content to assess the current state of knowledge. In addition to anal...
The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement: JoSE, 2023
This article explores university students’ knowledge and concern level towards climate change, as... more This article explores university students’ knowledge and concern level towards climate change, as well as potential roles they see themselves playing as teachers in a world increasingly affected by its impacts. A survey of 135 university students was conducted at SUNY Cortland, a medium-size state university in Upstate New York. Results show that these university students (among them pre-service teachers) are highly concerned about the potential impacts of climate change, especially for future generations. While they demonstrate some accurate knowledge of climate change, many hold many misconceptions about its causes and consequences. In articulating how they can or do respond to lessening their own impacts, they mostly prioritize what many researchers consider low-impact mitigative actions. Concerning education, our sample of pre-service teachers think climate change education is important and they plan to address it in their classrooms by transferring information to students about climate change. However, their gaps in knowledge raise questions about how accurately they will be transferring this information to students, as well as what crucial pieces of climate change education they will not be able to provide students given their current understanding of the issue. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the current ways higher education institutions incorporate climate change and some suggestions to how they might approach teaching about climate change differently to have a longer lasting impact.
Education Sciences, Sep 29, 2021
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Teaching in Higher Education, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called 'clean' energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Comparative Perspectives on School Textbooks
Education Sciences
Many education professionals are looking to Environmental and Sustainability Education as a guide... more Many education professionals are looking to Environmental and Sustainability Education as a guide to incorporate curricular lessons and activities into school classrooms and other learning environments. Building upon the framework of Jickling and Wals (2008) of identifying how to teach about environmental education in transformative ways, this study examined how the experiences and perspectives of seven faculty and staff members at a K-12 International Baccalaureate school in Singapore impacted how they taught about sustainability issues. It also investigated how they work to empower students to become change agents by employing concepts and strategies such as hands-on learning, systems thinking, and service learning. Qualitative interview data revealed four overarching key themes: (1) importance of local context (both the school and the broader socio-political context), (2) pedagogy in relation to student psychology, (3) teacher and staff views on effective pedagogy for teaching ab...
International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2021
ABSTRACT This article analyzes students’ perspectives on sustainable development, environmental j... more ABSTRACT This article analyzes students’ perspectives on sustainable development, environmental justice, and concomitant environmental education programs at two international schools in Singapore. Data include surveys of over 250 students and 19 focus-group interviews with 300 students. In addition to having a detailed and nuanced understanding of the complexity of climate change and its impacts, most students acknowledged both the likely consequences of continuing resource-intensive industrialization and the growing and unjust disparity in carbon emissions between developed and developing countries. Many students also recognized that contemporary lifestyles rooted in overconsumption are not sustainable and proposed a variety of measures – both mainstream (i.e., discourage meat consumption and single-use plastic) and radical (population-control measures) – to curb consumption. While identifying some areas for improvement in their schools’ commitment to sustainability issues, students overall valued the ecological education that their schools provided them and to various extents recognized the privileges it has afforded them.
Films for the Feminist Classroom, 2021
Short essay on the benefits and costs of using digital technology in an ecologically precarious f... more Short essay on the benefits and costs of using digital technology in an ecologically precarious future.
Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 2020
While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned ... more While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned throughout the past 150 years, racial biases concerning such writing have persisted through today. Adapting Mark Phillips' (2013) concept of historical distance coupled with a form of linguistic analysis known as stylistics, I examine 50 U.S. social studies textbooks from 1860 to 2016 chosen by variation sampling and analyze which individuals and groups are discussed as experiencing suffering and whether or not these hardship narratives are apt to elicit compassion from their readers. I find that textbooks published after the U.S. Civil War consistently contain discourses that at first encouraged readers to be primarily concerned with the welfare of white elites and, over time, extended their compassionate writing styles to eventually all white people. At the same time, these texts consistently neglected to acknowledge the hardship experiences of domestic marginalized groups and, when their hardships were discussed, their narrative styles were likely to limit readers' inclination to be concerned about their oppression. Specifically, I find that the most enduring writing characteristic for U.S. textbook authors from the mid-19 th century through today was to discuss acts of violence by non-white groups towards white people using the active voice while describing violence by white North Americans (first British and then U.S. nationals) towards non-whites in the passive voice, which previous studies had found differentially impacts readers' capacity not only to recall but also to empathize with such hardship narratives. Identifying how textbook authors may selectively use these stylistic discourses in biased ways has significant implications for understanding and addressing not only history instruction, but for contemporary civil rights struggles as well.
‘This is me’: Expressions of intersecting identity in an LGBTQ+ ethnic studies course, 2020
This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong co... more This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong course that combined a semester-long LGBTQ+ studies class with a semester-long ethnic studies class, taught by the same teacher and attended by the same cohort of 26 students. Through a combination of identity maps, student interviews, and a transfer task (i.e., a digital textbook project), we explored students’ experiences and efforts to discern how their awareness of LGBTQ+ and ethnic studies issues, particularly the intersectionality of those issues, may have influenced their own identities. This research offers a model for educators and policymakers, as well as lessons learned and inspiration, for incorporating intersectional LGBTQ+ content and curriculum into social studies classrooms. It presents ways, both big and small, for K-12 educators to connect LGBTQ+ issues and rights with those from communities of color. Findings illustrate that queer theory and historical thinking can indeed offer a valuable guide for encouraging social studies educators and students to expand their understanding of the intersecting experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.
Comparative Education Review, 2019
In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases ... more In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases on the experiences and rights of diverse marginalized groups. Textbook discussions of diversity earlier in the century, however, have seldom been studied. We use descriptive statistics and regression to examine diversity foci in 978 textbooks from 93 countries published between 1900 and 2013. Unlike previous research, which emphasizes linear growth in diversity-oriented curricula since World War II, our findings reveal a wavelike pattern. We document an early expansionist wave beginning in the 1920s, which was followed by stagnation and decline midcentury before rising again in recent decades. We situate the early expansion within global activities dedicated to diversity in the interwar years and the midcentury contraction within the aftermath of World War II and the geopolitical climate of the Cold War. We contribute to the literature by illuminating the historical ebb and flow of inclusionary educational orientations.
History and Social Studies Education in a Context of Intolerance: Imagined Communities and Collective Memory, 2018
This chapter seeks to shed light on how some high school students in diverse U.S. settings discus... more This chapter seeks to shed light on how some high school students in diverse U.S. settings discuss accounts of historical violence. Thirty-three students are interviewed using semi-structured questions relating to themes of emotional expression, multiple perspectives, and moral judgments, and a post-theory framework is applied to make sense of their responses. Various research in the fields of history and psychology are drawn upon to help explain the key narrative devices that students were observed using to cope with historical violence. The first notable way that students make historical violence more palatable is to focus on the happy endings to violent historical events. Another way that students use to alleviate anxiety is to imbue historical events with an assumption of overall progress, in order to relegate such events to a distant past. A third method students demonstrate is to narrowly interpret multiple perspectives as being limited to two perspectives of equal merit, in order to avoid confrontational accusations of bias. Lastly, some students downplay moral judgments against in-group perpetrators of violence towards others by sharing accounts of when their in-group were also victims of oppression. This chapter concludes with a call for teachers to encourage students to reflect on their affective reactions to history in order to prepare them to forthrightly confront the continuing legacies of historical violence and oppression today.
Keyword: multiple perspectives, affective history, historical distance, progress, oppression
Teaching in Higher Education, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called ‘clean’ energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 2020
While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned ... more While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned throughout the past 150 years, racial biases concerning such writing have persisted through today. Adapting Mark Phillips' (2013) concept of historical distance coupled with a form of linguistic analysis known as stylistics, I examine 50 U.S. social studies textbooks from 1860 to 2016 chosen by variation sampling and analyze which individuals and groups are discussed as experiencing suffering and whether or not these hardship narratives are apt to elicit compassion from their readers. I find that textbooks published after the U.S. Civil War consistently contain discourses that at first encouraged readers to be primarily concerned with the welfare of white elites and, over time, extended their compassionate writing styles to eventually all white people. At the same time, these texts consistently neglected to acknowledge the hardship experiences of domestic marginalized groups and, when their hardships were discussed, their narrative styles were likely to limit readers' inclination to be concerned about their oppression. Specifically, I find that the most enduring writing characteristic for U.S. textbook authors from the mid-19 th century through today was to discuss acts of violence by non-white groups towards white people using the active voice while describing violence by white North Americans (first British and then U.S. nationals) towards non-whites in the passive voice, which previous studies had found differentially impacts readers' capacity not only to recall but also to empathize with such hardship narratives. Identifying how textbook authors may selectively use these stylistic discourses in biased ways has significant implications for understanding and addressing not only history instruction, but for contemporary civil rights struggles as well.
Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting, 2022
Teaching in Higher Education, Jul 4, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called 'clean' energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Comparative Education Review, May 1, 2019
In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases ... more In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases on the experiences and rights of diverse marginalized groups. Textbook discussions of diversity earlier in the century, however, have seldom been studied. We use descriptive statistics and regression to examine diversity foci in 978 textbooks from 93 countries published between 1900 and 2013. Unlike previous research, which emphasizes linear growth in diversity-oriented curricula since World War II, our findings reveal a wavelike pattern. We document an early expansionist wave beginning in the 1920s, which was followed by stagnation and decline midcentury before rising again in recent decades. We situate the early expansion within global activities dedicated to diversity in the interwar years and the midcentury contraction within the aftermath of World War II and the geopolitical climate of the Cold War. We contribute to the literature by illuminating the historical ebb and flow of inclusionary educational orientations.
The Journal of Social Studies Research
This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong co... more This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong course that combined a semester-long LGBTQ+ studies class with a semester-long ethnic studies class, taught by the same teacher and attended by the same cohort of 26 students. Through a combination of identity maps, student interviews, and a transfer task (i.e., a digital textbook project), we explored students’ experiences and efforts to discern how their awareness of LGBTQ+ and ethnic studies issues, particularly the intersectionality of those issues, may have influenced their own identities. This research offers a model for educators and policymakers, as well as lessons learned and inspiration, for incorporating intersectional LGBTQ+ content and curriculum into social studies classrooms. It presents ways, both big and small, for K-12 educators to connect LGBTQ+ issues and rights with those from communities of color. Findings illustrate that queer theory and historical thinking can indee...
European Journal of Education, 2017
This article reviews the state of research and data on relevant content, broadly understood as su... more This article reviews the state of research and data on relevant content, broadly understood as sustainable development, in social science textbooks worldwide. Specifically, it examines the extent to which these textbooks could help learners to acquire the knowledge, skills and values that are needed to meet goal 4.7 of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: ‘By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non‐violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development’. It reviews relevant literature and analyses three cross‐national, longitudinal databases containing information that is coded from textbook content to assess the current state of knowledge. In addition to anal...
The SUNY Journal of the Scholarship of Engagement: JoSE, 2023
This article explores university students’ knowledge and concern level towards climate change, as... more This article explores university students’ knowledge and concern level towards climate change, as well as potential roles they see themselves playing as teachers in a world increasingly affected by its impacts. A survey of 135 university students was conducted at SUNY Cortland, a medium-size state university in Upstate New York. Results show that these university students (among them pre-service teachers) are highly concerned about the potential impacts of climate change, especially for future generations. While they demonstrate some accurate knowledge of climate change, many hold many misconceptions about its causes and consequences. In articulating how they can or do respond to lessening their own impacts, they mostly prioritize what many researchers consider low-impact mitigative actions. Concerning education, our sample of pre-service teachers think climate change education is important and they plan to address it in their classrooms by transferring information to students about climate change. However, their gaps in knowledge raise questions about how accurately they will be transferring this information to students, as well as what crucial pieces of climate change education they will not be able to provide students given their current understanding of the issue. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the current ways higher education institutions incorporate climate change and some suggestions to how they might approach teaching about climate change differently to have a longer lasting impact.
Education Sciences, Sep 29, 2021
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Teaching in Higher Education, 2023
This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Ind... more This Point for Departure highlights why higher education institutions (HEIs) should integrate Indigenous perspectives in their course offerings, campus management, and scholarly production. Much of HEI's sustainability focus today disproportionately focuses on climate change, which we argue is because its purported solutions actually serve to reinforce, business-as-usual industrial growth. The alternative paradigm to long-term sustainability we propose that HEIs should work to implement is to restructure their curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate what we refer to as Indigenous sustainabilities. In short, we call for academics to integrate Indigenous perspectives and place-based knowledges into their courses, research agenda, and service work in lieu of, or at least in addition to, the current Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) paradigms that often narrowly focus on how HEI are reducing their carbon emissions via so-called 'clean' energy, at the expense of addressing other equally, if not more, concerning threats to a healthy biosphere.
Comparative Perspectives on School Textbooks
Education Sciences
Many education professionals are looking to Environmental and Sustainability Education as a guide... more Many education professionals are looking to Environmental and Sustainability Education as a guide to incorporate curricular lessons and activities into school classrooms and other learning environments. Building upon the framework of Jickling and Wals (2008) of identifying how to teach about environmental education in transformative ways, this study examined how the experiences and perspectives of seven faculty and staff members at a K-12 International Baccalaureate school in Singapore impacted how they taught about sustainability issues. It also investigated how they work to empower students to become change agents by employing concepts and strategies such as hands-on learning, systems thinking, and service learning. Qualitative interview data revealed four overarching key themes: (1) importance of local context (both the school and the broader socio-political context), (2) pedagogy in relation to student psychology, (3) teacher and staff views on effective pedagogy for teaching ab...
International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2021
ABSTRACT This article analyzes students’ perspectives on sustainable development, environmental j... more ABSTRACT This article analyzes students’ perspectives on sustainable development, environmental justice, and concomitant environmental education programs at two international schools in Singapore. Data include surveys of over 250 students and 19 focus-group interviews with 300 students. In addition to having a detailed and nuanced understanding of the complexity of climate change and its impacts, most students acknowledged both the likely consequences of continuing resource-intensive industrialization and the growing and unjust disparity in carbon emissions between developed and developing countries. Many students also recognized that contemporary lifestyles rooted in overconsumption are not sustainable and proposed a variety of measures – both mainstream (i.e., discourage meat consumption and single-use plastic) and radical (population-control measures) – to curb consumption. While identifying some areas for improvement in their schools’ commitment to sustainability issues, students overall valued the ecological education that their schools provided them and to various extents recognized the privileges it has afforded them.
Films for the Feminist Classroom, 2021
Short essay on the benefits and costs of using digital technology in an ecologically precarious f... more Short essay on the benefits and costs of using digital technology in an ecologically precarious future.
Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 2020
While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned ... more While United States historians' inclination to write in affect-inducing ways has waxed and waned throughout the past 150 years, racial biases concerning such writing have persisted through today. Adapting Mark Phillips' (2013) concept of historical distance coupled with a form of linguistic analysis known as stylistics, I examine 50 U.S. social studies textbooks from 1860 to 2016 chosen by variation sampling and analyze which individuals and groups are discussed as experiencing suffering and whether or not these hardship narratives are apt to elicit compassion from their readers. I find that textbooks published after the U.S. Civil War consistently contain discourses that at first encouraged readers to be primarily concerned with the welfare of white elites and, over time, extended their compassionate writing styles to eventually all white people. At the same time, these texts consistently neglected to acknowledge the hardship experiences of domestic marginalized groups and, when their hardships were discussed, their narrative styles were likely to limit readers' inclination to be concerned about their oppression. Specifically, I find that the most enduring writing characteristic for U.S. textbook authors from the mid-19 th century through today was to discuss acts of violence by non-white groups towards white people using the active voice while describing violence by white North Americans (first British and then U.S. nationals) towards non-whites in the passive voice, which previous studies had found differentially impacts readers' capacity not only to recall but also to empathize with such hardship narratives. Identifying how textbook authors may selectively use these stylistic discourses in biased ways has significant implications for understanding and addressing not only history instruction, but for contemporary civil rights struggles as well.
‘This is me’: Expressions of intersecting identity in an LGBTQ+ ethnic studies course, 2020
This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong co... more This case study considers how one public high school in Northern California offered a yearlong course that combined a semester-long LGBTQ+ studies class with a semester-long ethnic studies class, taught by the same teacher and attended by the same cohort of 26 students. Through a combination of identity maps, student interviews, and a transfer task (i.e., a digital textbook project), we explored students’ experiences and efforts to discern how their awareness of LGBTQ+ and ethnic studies issues, particularly the intersectionality of those issues, may have influenced their own identities. This research offers a model for educators and policymakers, as well as lessons learned and inspiration, for incorporating intersectional LGBTQ+ content and curriculum into social studies classrooms. It presents ways, both big and small, for K-12 educators to connect LGBTQ+ issues and rights with those from communities of color. Findings illustrate that queer theory and historical thinking can indeed offer a valuable guide for encouraging social studies educators and students to expand their understanding of the intersecting experiences of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.
Comparative Education Review, 2019
In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases ... more In the latter half of the twentieth century, school textbooks globally embraced growing emphases on the experiences and rights of diverse marginalized groups. Textbook discussions of diversity earlier in the century, however, have seldom been studied. We use descriptive statistics and regression to examine diversity foci in 978 textbooks from 93 countries published between 1900 and 2013. Unlike previous research, which emphasizes linear growth in diversity-oriented curricula since World War II, our findings reveal a wavelike pattern. We document an early expansionist wave beginning in the 1920s, which was followed by stagnation and decline midcentury before rising again in recent decades. We situate the early expansion within global activities dedicated to diversity in the interwar years and the midcentury contraction within the aftermath of World War II and the geopolitical climate of the Cold War. We contribute to the literature by illuminating the historical ebb and flow of inclusionary educational orientations.
History and Social Studies Education in a Context of Intolerance: Imagined Communities and Collective Memory, 2018
This chapter seeks to shed light on how some high school students in diverse U.S. settings discus... more This chapter seeks to shed light on how some high school students in diverse U.S. settings discuss accounts of historical violence. Thirty-three students are interviewed using semi-structured questions relating to themes of emotional expression, multiple perspectives, and moral judgments, and a post-theory framework is applied to make sense of their responses. Various research in the fields of history and psychology are drawn upon to help explain the key narrative devices that students were observed using to cope with historical violence. The first notable way that students make historical violence more palatable is to focus on the happy endings to violent historical events. Another way that students use to alleviate anxiety is to imbue historical events with an assumption of overall progress, in order to relegate such events to a distant past. A third method students demonstrate is to narrowly interpret multiple perspectives as being limited to two perspectives of equal merit, in order to avoid confrontational accusations of bias. Lastly, some students downplay moral judgments against in-group perpetrators of violence towards others by sharing accounts of when their in-group were also victims of oppression. This chapter concludes with a call for teachers to encourage students to reflect on their affective reactions to history in order to prepare them to forthrightly confront the continuing legacies of historical violence and oppression today.
Keyword: multiple perspectives, affective history, historical distance, progress, oppression
Resilience.org, 2022
Over 100 scholars from around the world have co-signed a letter imploring the United Nations to a... more Over 100 scholars from around the world have co-signed a letter imploring the United Nations to abandon its rhetoric of pursuing the 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs), given the lack of meaningful progress towards meeting them. The letter coincides with the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) professionals meeting this week in Bali, Indonesia to discuss a new UN Global Assessment Report on disaster risk that was quite forthright in raising the existential threat of crossing multiple 'planetary boundaries' (Steffen et al., 2015) that can contribute to a "global collapse risk" (UNDRR, 2022, p52). At the same time, in recent years some UN agencies themselves have begun to emphasize the value of indigenous knowledge to address these systemic issues. This essay argues that if most complex life on Earth is to stand any chance of weathering the myriad storms that the 21 st century will unleash upon us, it is imperative that the United Nations rapidly shifts from its current focus on top-down interventions and more fully integrates local indigenous wisdom into every facet of its Disaster Risk Reduction plans. Such a shift would necessitate centering the following over and above the SDGs (some of which are guided by deleterious industrial development euphemistically marketed as 'green growth'): unsustainable resource use, and indigenous communities' proven capacity in ensuring long-term sustainability.
Comparative Perspectives on School Textbooks: Analyzing Shifting Discourses on Nationhood, Citizenship, Gender, and Religion, 2021
How is Christianity discussed in textbooks as societies entered the modern era? To what extent do... more How is Christianity discussed in textbooks as societies entered the modern era? To what extent do textbooks reflect the changes and continuities in societal worldviews and values? This chapter examines discussion of religion, science, and notions of progress in secondary school social science textbooks in the US and Canada from 1850 to 2010, using data coded from 527 textbooks. Consistent with expectations for secularizing societies, we find that discussion of religion declines over time. However, we find the extent to which Christianity is discussed and portrayed differs in the US and Canadian textbooks. Our findings suggest that discussion of Christianity in Canadian textbooks is higher than that in the US textbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but that discussion of religious topics decline rapidly in Canadian textbooks compared to those in the United States. Simultaneously, we observe a rise of secular morality reflecting values of progressivism in textbooks although Christian principles and values appear to be associated with notions of progress, especially in the United States. What this suggests is a shift from Christian to secular morality but with persistent links to religious values rather than values-neutral scientific emphases.