From crisis to civic engagement: the struggle over social studies standards in Minnesota
Paul Spies, Jennifer Bloom, Michael Boucher, Carrie Lucking, Lisa Norling and Rick Theisen
Social Education. 68.7 (November-December 2004): p457.
It's pretty crazy to realize what was happening in Minnesota when I wasn't paying any attention. In September 2003, just as I was graduating from college and moving to NYC, crazy people tried to create MN social studies standards that were openly racist, sexist, ahistorical, and just plain sloppy. I was just reading the current (updated in 2011) MN Social Studies Standards last night and thinking they were pretty bad. However, they were mostly just bad in a pedagogical sense. The standards proposed in 2003 were bad history.
This article explains what was wrong with the standards, why they were so bad, and how the community responded. It left me with a mix of horror and hopefulness to realize how bad it could have been and how people were able to unify and fight back.
Reading this puts the current standards in some context, although it leaves me wondering what the politics were behind the revisions in 2011. There doesn't seem to be much published about that, which seems impossible.
Paul Spies, Jennifer Bloom, Michael Boucher, Carrie Lucking, Lisa Norling and Rick Theisen
Social Education. 68.7 (November-December 2004): p457.
It's pretty crazy to realize what was happening in Minnesota when I wasn't paying any attention. In September 2003, just as I was graduating from college and moving to NYC, crazy people tried to create MN social studies standards that were openly racist, sexist, ahistorical, and just plain sloppy. I was just reading the current (updated in 2011) MN Social Studies Standards last night and thinking they were pretty bad. However, they were mostly just bad in a pedagogical sense. The standards proposed in 2003 were bad history.
This article explains what was wrong with the standards, why they were so bad, and how the community responded. It left me with a mix of horror and hopefulness to realize how bad it could have been and how people were able to unify and fight back.
Reading this puts the current standards in some context, although it leaves me wondering what the politics were behind the revisions in 2011. There doesn't seem to be much published about that, which seems impossible.