During a discussion with a colleague yesterday, I was asked what my goal was for a new elective that she and I will be proposing this fall for next year. I said, “to get students to see that race is not an issue that was “fixed” in the Civil Rights Movement, that the election of a black president does not show we live in a “post-racial society”–but that, on the contrary, race is an issue that informed most of the history of the United States before there was a United States and that it is still present, as an issue, in a huge part of every-day life today–in 2014.”
She liked the idea–the course, if approved, will be a joint history-English interdisciplinary elective. I went on to say that I would love to teach American history by getting students at the beginning of the year to brainstorm some “big issues” in current American politics and then use the rest of the course to show how those issues (or a couple of them, anyway) have been with us since the founding of the nation (or before) . Sort of a “looking backwards” approach. She pointed out to me that most history teachers love “the content” and would be leery of the kind of non-chronological approach I proposed. I dryly added, “Yeah, I’ve found that out.”