Toward a culturally responsive and place-conscious theory of history education by Michael Harcourt
I just had an email exchange with the author and he referred to me as his pedagogical doppelgänger. I'm going to take that as a compliment, because I enjoyed this article immensely, but I need to caveat that by saying he organized my thoughts into coherent paragraphs in a way that is much better than I could have done. You know how you sometimes look at abstract art and think "I could do that" but then realize you never would have come up with the idea in the first place? That's how I felt reading his article-- "Yes, duh, this is exactly what I think" and then, "wait, I've never said it in quite this way."
In short, Harcourt argues that culturally-responsive teaching is needed, and that in addition to the "generic" ways of doing this that cross disciplines, history requires a subject-specific set of ideas for culturally-responsive teaching--thus the title referring to his theory of history education. The five principles he lays out for culturally-responsive, place conscious history teaching are:
A video of a talk given by the author is here.
I just had an email exchange with the author and he referred to me as his pedagogical doppelgänger. I'm going to take that as a compliment, because I enjoyed this article immensely, but I need to caveat that by saying he organized my thoughts into coherent paragraphs in a way that is much better than I could have done. You know how you sometimes look at abstract art and think "I could do that" but then realize you never would have come up with the idea in the first place? That's how I felt reading his article-- "Yes, duh, this is exactly what I think" and then, "wait, I've never said it in quite this way."
In short, Harcourt argues that culturally-responsive teaching is needed, and that in addition to the "generic" ways of doing this that cross disciplines, history requires a subject-specific set of ideas for culturally-responsive teaching--thus the title referring to his theory of history education. The five principles he lays out for culturally-responsive, place conscious history teaching are:
- Recognise the identities and interpretive frameworks of students and teachers
- Actively confront controversial history
- Connect the past to students’ lived realities
- Analyse texts for historical agency
- Be responsive to place
A video of a talk given by the author is here.