Historical Identity Groups: Representation in a Survey Course
Integrating full and authentic representation into a survey US History course has been an ongoing challenge. All the various textbooks tend to give lip-service at best to communities of color and other marginalized groups, generally focusing solely on trauma and oppression. To counter the oversight and negativity, I began looking for ways to center joy, celebration, resistance, and success alongside an authentic examination of the oppression many groups face in the United States. My first steps were to pepper my course with primary source readings, short documentaries, and inclusion within lectures. Then I redesigned the final unit and exam to become a cultural activism research project and presentation, with groups of students studying 7 major civil rights and activist movements from their inception in the 1950s and 60s to their current state—see “Cultural Activism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries” at the bottom of this post for that project. My most recent addition, coming into place this academic year (2020-2021), is a set of year-long specialization groups I call Historical Identity (HI) Groups.
The groups are Asian Pacific Islander Americas, Black Americans, Indigenous Americas, Labor and Workers, Latinx Americans, LGBTQ+, Scientists and Environmentalists, and Women.
Each group does in-depth specialty work alongside our full class work throughout the year, becoming subject matter experts in the history of their assigned HI Group in the United States. The general curriculum still includes many of the most significant historical moments involving all the HI Groups—for example, the whole class will complete a primary source activity about WWII Japanese Internment Camps—but for each unit there are special days set aside for the groups to learn more deeply about the life and experiences for people of the identity they are studying. Throughout the year, each group is creating a database of resources centering their HI Group. These resources range from primary sources and historical video footage to current social media accounts to follow and organizations to support.
One of the most significant aspects of this year-long study is the HI Group Teach-in, when each group takes over the class for an entire block. This post is dedicated to this project.
After students have been sorted into groups based on affinity, interest, and collaboration style (see interest survey above), they complete some basic analysis of their textbook and the school library. This will serve as a base for knowing what is immediately available, and then, to a degree, what is not. Their next step is to complete some wide ranging initial research, focusing on the broad timeline of the 1900s, leaving the 2000s for a reduced version of the Cultural Activism project, mentioned above and included in its full prior form below. Following the exploration, each group is tasked with proposing two possible teach-in topics they would be interesting in researching further and think would be important for their classmates to learn about.
HI Group Teach-in topics for the 2020-2021 school year, with associated essential question and general submission timeframe.
After some initial dedicated class time, groups are responsible for balancing their workload in order to meet their staggered deadlines. Groups are given leeway with due dates on regularly work in the weeks preceding their teach-in submission. The two groups who have already presented met regularly in a breakout room during my Zoom office hours, about 1-2 times a week. The following materials outline the teach-in requirements and give a full grading breakdown on both a group and individual level. There is also a post-presentation reflection sheet for student to reflect on the process and collaboration. This gives each student a chance to share with me if they felt the work was unbalanced.
Here are the materials for the Cultural Activism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries final project which preceded the creation of the HI Groups and the HI Group Teach-in. This year, this project will be modified to an infographic highlighting the past 20 years. The timeframe of the 1950s to 60s being integrated into in-class HI Group work.