Reshaping the Long Arc of Civil Rights: A Study of Teacher Candidates and Crafting Teaching Narratives

Professor Richard Hughes will discuss his recent study of how undergraduate teacher candidates shape and reshape historical narratives of the African American civil rights movement.  This work stems from his course at Illinois State University entitled, “The United States in the Twentieth Century:  Thinking and Learning about the American Past,” which aims to bridge the existing gap between historical content and pedagogy in higher education and provide opportunities for future history teachers to explore provocative issues in U.S. history within the explicit context of the scholarship in history education. Originating from a grant for the scholarship of teaching and learning, the study examines the roles of primary sources and different types of historiography in influencing how history education students broaden their understanding of what Jacqueline Dowd Hall described as the “long civil rights movement.”  Using such sources as journal articles, survey textbooks, an array of primary sources, and a graphic novel, the investigation compared students as they encountered varied evidence of a lengthy struggle for racial justice that encompassed much of the twentieth century.  Examining the intellectual growth and decision making of college students according to their engagement with different forms of evidence offers historians an opportunity to explore how history departments can best prepare future teachers to understand and utilize the complexity of recent historiography in the classroom. In terms of the civil rights movement, this study and other similar efforts hold great potential for helping historians - as faculty, secondary teachers, students, and citizens - craft what Hall referred to as “novel forms of storytelling” capable of reflecting the broad yet unfinished social revolution that speak to a new generation of American students.