IDENTITY MATTERS: EXPLORATIONS OF THE IMPLICATION OF TEACHERS’ SENSE 

OF SELF IN THE AMERICAN HISTORY CURRICULUM 

 

 

 

 
By 

Adam Joseph Schmitt 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to  

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education–Doctor of Philosophy 

 

2018 

 
 

 

 

 

 
IDENTITY MATTERS: EXPLORATIONS OF THE IMPLICATION OF TEACHERS’ SENSE 

OF SELF IN THE AMERICAN HISTORY CURRICULUM 

ABSTRACT 

 
By  
 

 

Adam Joseph Schmitt 

 

This study explored the relationship between a teacher’s sense of self and the curriculum 

they plan and enact. The purpose of the study was to understand the degree to which teachers’ 

identities, memories of learning history, and perceptions of their curriculum, academic 

discipline, and students allowed them to implicate themselves in or distance themselves from the 

process of curricular translation, wherein teachers make choices about what and how to teach. 

This study is interested in exploring the various discourses teachers use in that process and in the 

construction of their own identities, as well as complicating the understanding of the connection 

between self and curriculum.  

 

This qualitative study is focused on the curricular work of three high school American 

history teachers. Semi-structured, active interviews and classroom observations were used to 

collect data over the span of two instructional units during the 2017-2018 academic year. A 

poststructural lens was used to analyze data and explore the discourses that participants used in 

planning, enacting, and reflecting on their teaching.  

 

Whereas much of the research base is focused on teacher identity formation in preservice 

teachers or the impact of teachers’ conceptions of what they teach on their practice, the findings 

of this study suggest that teachers implicate their sense of self in the curriculum in multiple, 

nuanced ways. Findings indicate that practicing teachers’ identities both construct and are 

constructed by the curricular choices they make based on uncertainties they feel about elements 

of their own identities as well as the discourses they adopt to think about their curriculum and 

discipline. Findings also indicate that teachers use their own memories as learners to justify their 

present-day classroom practices.  

 

This study demonstrates that there is much to be gained in understanding how elements 

of a teacher’s identity, related to socio-cultural aspects such as race, gender, and social class, as 

well as the memories and perceptions they have about history education, are related to and are 

constructed by their curricular decision-making.  

 

 

 

 

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

	
	
	
Copyright by  
ADAM JOSEPH SCHMITT 
2018 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

	

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 

 

This study, and the last five years, would not have been possible without the support and 

advice of many people. I would first like to thank the members of my committee, Professors 

Avner Segall, Margaret Crocco, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, and Kyle Greenwalt. Each of you has 

played a significant role in my intellectual and professional development and I sincerely thank 

you for all that you have done to challenge my thinking over the course of this program. From 

inspiring me to pursue a Ph.D. to encouraging my development as an academic in courses and 

research projects, your guidance has been invaluable. I would like to especially thank my 

advisor, Avner Segall. Your ability to ask the hard questions combined with your generosity and 

compassion have made you an ideal advisor for me. I have learned so much from you and I truly 

can’t imagine having gone on this journey under anyone else’s guidance. I would also like to 

thank the College of Education for their generous financial support to aid in the completion of 

this dissertation.  

 

This study would not have been possible without Rob, Julie, and Paul who took time 

from their often hectic days to invite me into their classrooms and share who they are. The time 

spent in your classrooms was a reminder of the possibilities of history education and what can 

happen in the hands of people who are passionate about what they do.  I hope I conveyed the 

depth of who you are and what you bring to your students.  

 

I have also been fortunate to be a part of an outstanding community of scholars and 

friends who have helped me talk through ideas, challenged and supported my thinking, given 

much needed encouragement, watched my kids, and perhaps most importantly, indulged my 

penchant for silly office conversations. I want to give special thanks to Mike and Kati Macaluso, 

 

v 

Cori McKenzie, Matt Deroo, Hannah Grisham, Peter Nelson, Erin Bronstein, Scott Durham, and 

Scott Jarvie.   

 

This would have all been impossible were it not for the unwavering support of my 

family; the ways you supported me are too numerous to list. Mom, Dad, and Sarah, thank you for 

your countless trips to Michigan and for the ongoing guidance only one’s parents (and sister) can 

provide.  Bob and Whitney, thank you for your almost weekly trips to help watch our kids, the 

amount of housework and yard maintenance you’ve done, and for providing a place to stay 

during this study.  You all have my deepest love and gratitude.  

 

I would also like to thank Elliott, Reid and Simon for being a respite from the stresses 

that come with being a doctoral student. You probably won’t remember much of this time period 

but dance parties, train hunting, walks around the marsh, bedtime stories, and going on any 

number of other adventures will always be etched in my memory. Whether you were a part of 

this journey from the beginning or joined along the way, you have made this experience richer.  

 

Last but not least, thank you to Bethany. I couldn’t ask for a better partner. You, like no 

other, know when to be patient with me and when to push me. Thank you for the countless 

papers you’ve read, especially when you wondered if I actually wanted the feedback I was 

supposedly asking for, and for being a sounding board with whom to work through ideas. Most 

of all, thank you for all that you’ve done for our family to make this degree possible. Words 

can’t describe how deep my appreciation is for you, but thank you for your love and your ability 

to help me work through the challenges. I love you.  

 

 

 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

Identity in Teacher Education 
Teacher Beliefs 
Memory 

The Link Between Perspective and Practice 
The Purpose of History Education 
Critical Lenses About the Self and Curriculum 

Research Questions 

Overview of the Study 
 
Theoretical Overview 
Organization of the Dissertation 

Introduction 
Teacher Education Research 
 
 
 
Explorations of Self and Curriculum in History/Social Studies Education 
 
 
 
Contributions to the Field 
Theoretical Framework 
 
Self and Identity 
 
Curriculum 
Conclusion 

INTRODUCTION 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER ONE: SITUATING THE STUDY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER TWO: METHODOLOGY 
Methodological Considerations 
 
 
 
 
 
Methods 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER THREE: INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL IDENTITIES 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction 
Intellectual Identities 
The Mediator 
 
 
The Rabid Learner 
 
The Thinker 
Socio-cultural Identities 

Research Phases 
Research Context 
Research Sites and Participants 
 
 
 
Researcher Positionality 

Julie Matthews 
Rob Castillo 
Paul Kacprzak 

Data Collection 
Data Analysis 

 

 

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Why Intellectual Identities? 
Identities Implicated and Distanced 

 

History is the Most Human Thing 
I’m Not Going to Teach It the Same Way She Did 
The Slow Accumulated Progress of Learning 
Complicating the Narratives 

Introduction 
Teachers’ Remembrance of Their Own History Education 
 
 
 
 
Things Forgotten, Things Remembered 
 
 
Discussion 
Conclusion 

The Meaning of Forgetting 
What Gets Remembered? 

 
 

 
 
 
Discussion 
 
 
Conclusion 

The Thinker, Revisited 
It’s Obvious What Side I’m On 
The Blue Collar Perspective 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER FOUR: REMEMBRANCES OF LEARNING HISTORY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER FIVE: DISCOURSES OF EXTERNAL FACTORS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
APPENDICES  

Introduction 
The Curriculum Giveth and the Curriculum Taketh Away 
 
 
The Nature of the Discipline 
 
 
Discussion 
 
 
 
Conclusion 

Introduction 
Contributions to the Field of History/Social Studies Education 
 
 
Implications for Future Research and Teacher Education 
 
 
Conclusion 

Power and the Curriculum 
What is a Historian? 
Perceptions of Students 

The Top of the Ladder 
The Dog and Pony Show 

Teacher Perspectives 
Experience and Memory 

The Sage on the Stage 
I’m Not That Historian 

Research on Memory 
Teacher Education 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Appendix A: Interview Protocols 
Appendix B: Unit and Lesson Topics 

REFERENCES 

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INTRODUCTION 

 

Teaching is a complex process that involves multiple factors: the curriculum, state 

standards, district initiatives, the teacher, the students, and the context of the school, to name a 

few. While a curriculum may be settled upon before a teacher sets foot in the classroom, teachers 

do not solely serve as implementers, enacting a curriculum precisely as written. Rather, teachers 

act as translators, where the curriculum that is enacted is filtered through who the teacher is: their 

identity, history, experiences, memories, beliefs, desires, assumptions about students and 

learning, and what they consider the underlying purposes of education to be.   

This dissertation study explores a small piece of this complex, multifaceted process by 

focusing on the teacher and the way her/his self, via her/his identities, personal history, 

experiences, memories, understandings, and perspectives about the content and field of history 

education impact what and how they teach. I seek to investigate the degree to which teachers 

insert and implicate themselves in the process of curricular “translation,” and generation. 

Specifically, I explore how teachers understand the relationship between self and curriculum. 

The purpose of exploring that relationship is to consider the degree to which teachers see 

themselves impacting their curriculum, both in planning and implementation, and to explore the 

various discourses that teachers use in constructing their conception of history education and 

establishing their own implication in or distance from the curriculum.  

This interest stems from, in part, a desire to complicate how teaching is often thought 

about. As is evidenced by the name often given to departments tasked with the job of teacher 

education, curriculum and instruction are often considered separate fields of inquiry. Indeed, the 

name of my own doctoral program, Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education, indicates 

 

1 

	

some sort of distinction among those three concepts. Yet, curriculum and instruction, or 

pedagogy, are deeply intertwined. Shulman’s (1986) conception of pedagogical content 

knowledge, or “the ways of representing and formulating [a] subject that make it comprehensible 

to others,” recognizes that the boundaries between those two categories are blurred (p. 9). 

Shulman’s work has become foundational for a wide swath of the field of teacher education 

research, informing studies on classroom practices that will result in the most powerful forms of 

teaching. Such work still assumes some sort of division between content and pedagogy as the 

idea that they overlap assumes that there are areas where they do not. As Segall (2004) argues, 

“knowledge is always by someone and for someone, always positioned and positioning and, 

consequently, is always already pedagogical” (p. 491). Rather than being distinct entities, then, 

pedagogy and curriculum are inherently intertwined and imbued with one another.  

Through this study, I seek to bring another element into the relationship between 

curriculum and pedagogy: the self. Typically, when the self is taken into consideration in the 

literature on curriculum it is through the lens of who students are and what they bring to the 

classroom. Just as pedagogical content knowledge is a widely influential concept in thinking 

about the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum, culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-

Billings, 1995) is a widely used frame in thinking about the relationship between curriculum and 

those that interact with it. While it is certainly important to not view students as empty vessels 

waiting to be filled with information or as devoid of opinions, feelings and identities that may at 

turns embrace or resist the project of schooling, they are not the only people in the classroom 

who impact and are impacted by the curriculum. This study, then, seeks to explore the other 

main participant in that interaction: the teacher. 

 

2 

	

 As previously mentioned, teachers are more than just passive enactors of the curriculum. 

Rather, through their planning and teaching, teachers imbue a sense of who they are in what they 

choose to teach, how they choose to teach it, and how they interact with their students. Woods 

(1984) explored the relationship between the self and curriculum by conducting a life history 

with a retired art teacher reflecting back on his career and found that elements of the teacher’s 

identity were expressed in his teaching. In this study, I investigate the role of the teacher’s self 

with practicing teachers in order to consider how any exploration of teaching is not just about the 

relationship between curriculum and pedagogy, but rather the relationship among curriculum, 

pedagogy and self. If knowledge, as Segall (2004) maintains, is “always by someone and for 

someone” (p. 491) then it is the goal of this study to explore who that someone, in the act of 

curricular planning and enactment, is and how elements of their self play a role in the process of 

teaching.  

Overview of the Study 

During the spring of 2018, I worked with three American history teachers in order to 

explore how each conceives of their own identities, the relationship between self and curriculum, 

the degree to which their conceptualizations transfer to practice and the factors that play a role in 

that process. Our interactions consisted of in-depth interviews about their identities, their 

memories of learning history, their conceptions of history education, and how they thought about 

and engaged in planning two different units during our time together. I also observed their 

classes in order to see how their curricular choices translated into action and took form through 

interactions with their students.  

 

 

 

In order to think about these issues, I have drafted the following research questions: 

3 

	

Research Questions 

1.  How, if at all, do teachers think about the relationship between facets of their personal 

identity and the curriculum they develop and/or implement? 

2.  To what degree do these understandings impact their curricular decision-making? 

3.  What factors, such as memories, histories, experiences, and teaching practice, play a role 

in shaping how teachers think about self/curriculum? 

4.  What are the implications of the above for history teacher preparation? 

My purpose in exploring these research questions is to access the connection between the 

beliefs and values that teachers bring into the classroom, especially as outgrowths of their own 

personal identities, histories, memories, and experiences. Instead of looking for a direct 

correlation between what teachers think and do, my research questions acknowledge there are 

factors – e.g., school policies, reflection on their own practice, personal memories, and 

experiences with the discipline of history outside of the classroom - that may impact how 

teachers think about and enact curriculum in their classrooms.  

Theoretical Overview 

Poststructural theories of research and teaching play an important role in thinking through 

questions related to what teachers do in practice. Poststructuralism begins with the assumption 

that we can only express ourselves through language, yet language is always problematic and 

partial. Therefore, although there may be straightforward connections between what a teacher 

thinks and what they do, these theoretical lenses require an acknowledgment that meaning is not 

straightforward and that there are factors – both internal and external – that shape how a teacher 

constructs who they are and what s/he imagines being able to do. These factors may also include 

the very context of an interview and the power relations underlying it or elements of the broader 

 

4 

	

culture that subtly impact decision-making, or one’s perception of it. It may also include 

unconscious processes, which may result in a teacher avoiding topics they may find 

uncomfortable, that signal larger issues at play in how teachers make meaning of themselves and 

their practice. 

My hope is that this study highlights some of the complexities that go into teachers’ 

decision making and the way in which that process incorporates or eliminates the self as an agent 

of curriculum making and implementation. Teachers and teaching are constituted by a variety of 

discourses. These discourses are used to make sense of the world and one’s place within it 

(Foucault, 1972). Operating under the assumption that the self and curriculum are intertwined 

with one another, this study identifies discourses that teachers draw upon when thinking about 

their own relationship to the content and method of history education. Furthermore, this study 

explores which elements of a teacher’s self is/may be taken up in the classroom and which 

is/may be partially obscured or avoided. How, in other words, do teachers make decisions about 

how to construct a version of themselves in the context of the secondary social studies classroom 

and to what degree does that self reflect who they see themselves as being?  Lessons derived 

from this study can inform teacher preparation in history education by identifying ways in which 

factors like memory, articulated purposes of history education, and personal identity contribute 

to curriculum development and implementation, as well as further recognition that the act of 

teaching is more than just the development of a discrete set of skill-based teaching strategies. 

This study also contributes to understanding the complexity of teacher practice, both in terms of 

the relationship between self and curriculum, as well as the way in which practice is discursively 

constructed, allowing certain types of pedagogical enactment of content and inhibiting others.  

 

5 

	

The goal of this dissertation is not to make claims about a correct way to envision the 

relationship between self and curriculum or support the notion that there is a direct link between 

how that relationship is navigated and what happens in the classroom. Rather, I have two goals 

for this dissertation. First, I am interested in the degree to which teachers implicate elements of 

their self, such as race, gender, class, and religion, in the curriculum in order to explore how that 

implication functions for those teachers. Second, I examine how conceptualizations of factors 

such as the explicit curriculum, the nature of history, perceptions of students, and teachers’ own 

memories of learning both justify and construct certain understandings of who my participants 

are and the decisions they make as teachers.  

Organization of the Dissertation 

 

Chapter One: In the first chapter of the dissertation, I provide an overview of the relevant 

literature related to the themes of this dissertation, specifically considering the field of teacher 

identity research and how themes from that field have been taken up in social studies education 

research.  I also provide the theoretical framework for the dissertation focusing on the 

conceptualizations of discourse, self/identity, and curriculum I take up in this study. 

Chapter Two: In the second chapter, I discuss the methodology and methods of the 

dissertation, paying attention to the methodological considerations related to doing poststructural 

research and explaining the methods used to conduct this study. The chapter ends with an 

introduction to the study’s participants and an exploration of my own positionality as the 

researcher.  

Chapter Three: Chapter Three explores the ways in which teachers implicate elements of 

their sense of self in the curriculum through their identities. Using Jenkins’ (2014) concept of 

social identity, where identities are claimed and constructed through one’s actions and 

 

6 

	

interactions with others, I investigate how and why teachers claim and navigate various 

intellectual and socio-cultural identities through the curriculum.  

Chapter Four: In Chapter Four, I examine the connection between participants’ 

remembrance of their own history education and their curricular work in the present. Using 

Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert’s (2000) conception of remembrance, I explore how participants 

elicit memories of their experience as learners in order to narrate and justify elements of their 

identity as history teachers in the present. 

Chapter Five: Chapter Five explores how teachers construct particular images of their 

self related to the discourses of external factors that are connected to the work they do. These 

factors include the explicit curriculum that teachers are asked to work with, as well as their 

identification with the work of the academic field they are affiliated with, and the students they 

work with.  

Chapter Six: In Chapter Six, I summarize the main goals of the dissertation place my 

findings in conversation with other history/social studies literature that speaks to the same 

general topic. I then explore implications for future social studies research and teacher education. 

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

 

7 

	

	

CHAPTER ONE 

SITUATING THE STUDY 

 

Introduction 

In this chapter, I situate the current study both in terms of the broader field of teacher 

education research, as well as more specifically in the field of history/social studies education 

research. I then outline the conceptual framework I use to explore issues of self and curriculum, 

specifically focusing on how identity, curriculum, and discourse are defined and used. I argue 

that this study occupies a space in the field of history/social studies education that has not been 

deeply explored: the construction of identity by practicing teachers through their curriculum. 

Teacher Education Research 

Teacher education research has considered the relationship between the self and 

curriculum in multiple ways. Central to this work is Lortie’s (1975) conception of the 

“apprenticeship of observation,” wherein pre-service teachers often construct what it means to 

teach based on imitating practices they experienced as students, rather than recognizing and 

critiquing the underlying thought and knowledge that go into being a teacher. While Lortie was 

not specifically discussing issues of self and curriculum, his findings are foundational to the field 

of teacher identity. Lortie’s goal was the development of a “shared technical culture,” otherwise 

“the diverse histories of teachers will play a cardinal role in their day-to-day activity” (p. 67). He 

saw the propagation of the “apprenticeship of observation” as being an “ally to continuity rather 

than change,” (p. 67), a charge that reflected his desire to strengthen teachers’ ability to work as 

informed pedagogical agents as opposed to uncritical imitators. 

 

 

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Identity in Teacher Education 

Since Lortie’s study, there has been a large body of research dedicated to teacher identity 

development and its relationship to what teachers do in the classroom. Woods (1984) took a 

multi-faceted approach in thinking about the relationship between self and curriculum, 

specifically asking “to what extent does a teacher find self-expression within the curriculum? 

How far is a subject as practiced in the classroom a realization of an individual teacher’s self?” 

(p. 239). To answer these questions, Woods interviewed Tom, a retired art teacher who had been 

a classroom teacher for thirty years. Employing a life history approach, Woods focused on issues 

such as family background, religion, educational experiences, literary preferences, social class as 

well as factors related to the realities of schooling, such as teaching assignment and the 

relationship between Tom and his principal. Woods approached his data by looking at Tom’s 

actions and attitudes both professionally and personally and traced them back to element of his 

earlier life. Reflecting on his study, Woods noted that there was a connection between a teacher’s 

self and the realization of their curriculum area.  He goes on to claim that “a curriculum area is a 

vibrant, human process lived out in the rough and tumble, give and take, joys and despairs, plots 

and counter-plots of a teacher’s life” (Woods, 1984, p. 260). The self is deeply embedded in the 

curriculum and is engaged in a dialectical interplay, resulting in teachers not just enacting a 

curriculum that is provided to them, but rather actively involved in the constitution of the 

curriculum itself (Woods, 1984). 

While Woods (1984) examined the identity of a teacher at the end of his career, the 

majority of teacher identity research focuses on how a teacher’s identity is constructed in the first 

place, specifically through the process of teacher education and early classroom experiences. 

Foundational to this field is the work of Deborah Britzman. Britzman (2003) draws out the way 

 

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in which learning to teach is already a reaction to our preconceived notions of what teaching 

entails as “we enter teacher education with our school biography. Teaching is one of the few 

professions where newcomers feel the force of their own history of learning as if it telegraphs 

relevancy to their work” (p. 1). Teaching is one of the only professions where those who are 

learning to teach have constructed a vision of what the work of teaching entails before their 

teacher education begins. Therefore, the process of learning to teach is always one of resistance, 

as pre-service teachers’ conceptions of teaching are constantly butting up against the reality of 

their experiences and their preconceived notions of the teachers they want to be or avoid being.  

Drawing on Britzman, and also focusing on the development of preservice teachers’ 

sense of identity, Alsup (2006) calls for a holistic view of teacher identity as realized through a 

concept she calls “borderland discourse.” Alsup views teacher identity as “inclusive of the 

intellectual, the corporeal, and the affective aspects of human selfhood” (p. 6). Teachers, Alsup 

argues, have to navigate a variety of conflicting positions as they craft a professional identity, an 

identity often perceived as needing to meet cultural expectations of what it means to be a teacher 

(Alsup uses the example of the “prim, feminine young teacher”) (p. 6). In the same vein as 

Britzman, Alsup argues that teachers, while trying to enact the role they think they’re supposed 

to play, might end up feeling tensions with who they really are and might leave the profession. 

The means to navigating these tensions is for pre-service teachers to engage in borderland 

discourse, where the tensions between competing identities of one’s personal and professional 

self can be brought to light and navigated in order to form one’s own vision of teacher identity. 

Numerous other studies have also explored facets of teacher identity. These studies have 

further focused on teacher identity development at the pre-service teacher level (Danielewicz, 

2001; Olsen, 2008), the connection between teachers’ personal history and the contexts in which 

 

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they teach (Flores & Day, 2006), the place of emotion in teacher identity development 

(Zembylas, 2003), and how teacher identity is both impacted by and resistant to mandated 

education reform (Buchanan, 2015; Vulliamy, Kimonen, Nevalainen, & Webb, 1997). Common 

to these studies is a focus on the ways in which teacher identity is formed by knowledge of the 

profession and its dispositions. Beijaard, Verloop, and Vermunt (2000), for example, explored 

how experienced teachers view their teaching identity as seasoned professionals and at the 

beginning of their career. Defining teacher identity as “how they perceive themselves as teachers 

and what factors contribute to these perceptions” (p. 749), the authors primarily positioned 

identity as one’s self-perception of expertise in subject matter, pedagogy, and didactics. In 

general, teacher identity research considers the way in which teachers feel like teachers via their 

understanding of teacher dispositions, pedagogical approaches, and the wider professional 

discourse around what it means to teach. While there are often competing definitions of identity, 

Beauchamp and Thomas (2009) note that the literature “reveals a common notion that identity is 

dynamic and that a teacher’s identity shifts over time under the influence of a range of factors 

both internal to the individual… and external…” (p. 177). 

Teacher Beliefs 

 

Beyond solely looking at teacher identity development, the dialogic relationship between 

teacher beliefs and experiences is also an important means of understanding how the self enters 

into the curriculum. If, as Richardson (1996) contends, beliefs are the “psychologically-held 

understandings, premises, or propositions about the world that are felt to be true” (p. 104-105), 

and experiences uphold or challenge those beliefs, then it is important to understand how these 

concepts impact one another. Research stemming back to Lortie (1975) acknowledges that 

particularly influential educators, for example, may provide the model that a teacher wishes to 

 

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replicate through their own practice. Combined with identity markers such as race, gender, social 

class and religious background, these experiences are important for teasing out how beliefs take 

shape. Nespor (1987) argues that belief systems are persistent and that they are harder to shift 

than simply gaining new knowledge. Such arguments challenge the assumption that knowledge 

is the means of upending beliefs, particularly ones that are viewed to be problematic in some 

way. Garrett (2017), writing thirty years after Nespor, draws on political science research to 

demonstrate the way in which knowledge is taken up or rejected via its congruence to pre-

existing beliefs.   Beliefs are certainly capable of being changed, but the answer is not to simply 

learn the “correct” information. Rather, recent research has begun to focus on the role that 

interrogating memory can play on exposing and potentially challenging beliefs.  

Memory 

 

Memory, Rothenberg (1994) argues, goes hand in hand with experience, together 

constituting “a personal truth upon which belief systems are built” (p. 370). As a result, there has 

been increased interest in how memory structures teachers’ conceptualization of teaching and the 

students they interact with. Much of this research adopts a psychoanalytic approach in order to 

focus on how teachers’ views of childhood are reflections of their own memories of childhood 

and how such views impact how teachers interact with their current students. Chang-Kredl, 

Wilkie, and Ghaznov (2016) argue that teachers’ imagined students contain traces of the children 

they once were and that “the motivation to teach was related to a desire to care for one’s former 

child self” (p. 279). Surfacing memories of one’s own childhood holds potential to create a space 

where teachers can acknowledge and interrogate how their memories impact their beliefs and 

actions in the present. Chang-Kredl (2015) sees film and other fictional representations of 

children as a space to engage in this work, while Chang-Kredl and Wilkie (2016) propose 

 

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teacher-created narratives, or memory texts, as a space where “the teacher can look back in 

nostalgic identification with his/her remembered child self and forward to an anticipated 

identification” related to the adult the child will one day become (p. 317). Regardless of how 

memory is invoked, there is a belief that engagement with one’s memories will provide a space 

that can address “the need to disentangle our own subjective childhoods from the children we 

work with today” (Chang-Kredl & Wilkie, 2016, p. 317).  

 

There is also a body of research that more broadly examines the relationship between 

memory, experience and one’s development as a teacher. Ben-Peretz (1995, 2002), similar to 

Woods (1984), worked with retired teachers in order to explore how memory, as a means of 

thinking about how experiences are made sense of and transformed into professional knowledge. 

“From the point of view of teachers’ memories,” Ben-Peretz (2002) claims, “it is important to 

know which memories tend to survive, what forms they take, and how they shape professional 

actions” (p. 314). To Rothenberg (1994), summoning memories from the past to consider your 

own learning and schooling experiences is a fruitful way of combatting Lortie’s (1975) 

“apprenticeship of observation,” as it provides a means for questioning and more fully 

understanding what one personally experienced as a student and its continued impact on the act 

of teaching.  

 

Memory is viewed as an important avenue for theorizing the link between self and 

curriculum because “teacher education programs have erroneously assumed that coursework can 

fully shape the beliefs and actions of pre-service teachers” (Miller & Shifflet, 2016, p. 21). 

Experiences that teachers have had as students, as well as their own experiences as burgeoning 

teachers, play a role in how teachers come to conceptualize and enact teaching. Therefore, these 

memories and experiences have to be engaged and made sense of, otherwise “new information 

 

13 

	

may not become hard wired into [teachers’] schema but instead only retained short term” (Miller 

& Shifflet, 2016, p. 28). 

Explorations of Self and Curriculum in History/Social Studies Education 

The fields of history/social studies education have also taken up the relationship between 

self and curriculum. Not surprisingly, this body of research has followed the same general trends 

that the broader teacher education research above has taken. The relationship between self and 

curriculum was originally explored via the link between teachers’ conceptions about the field of 

history/social studies education and their practice, and has shifted towards conceptions of the self 

related to more critical engagements with the field.  

The Link Between Perspective and Practice 

 

Even though there have been recent studies about student implication in the curriculum, 

studies related to the relationship between teachers and curriculum is largely seen in a wave of 

research from the late 1980s focused on the relationship between teacher conceptions (abstract 

thinking about the nature of what they teach) and perspectives (concrete thinking related to what 

they do). This research has looked at student teachers (Adler, 1984; Goodman & Adler, 1985; 

Ross, 1987), and teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds (Wilson & Wineburg, 1988) 

and showed that there is not a direct connection between teacher’s conceptions and their actions. 

Adler (1984) argued “social studies teaching was shaped then, not only by beliefs about social 

studies but by such things as concern for developing an appropriate teacher role, ideas about 

what school is about, and what ought to be learned there, as well as past experience in social 

studies and in community experiences” (p. 27). Ross (1987) also found that student teachers 

largely developed their teaching perspectives through the process of professional socialization 

 

14 

	

and suggested that there should be more attention paid towards the development of reflective 

practitioners who can reflect on and take up what they learn in a variety of education settings. 

 

Evans (1989, 1990) explored teacher conceptions of the meaning of history, the factors 

that contributed to the development of those conceptions and their impact on the curriculum. He 

found that teachers could be divided into five different typologies of history approach and that 

these typologies were related to factors such as the teacher’s political orientation and religious 

background and had some degree of impact on teachers’ pedagogical choices.  

 

More recent studies have attended to the connection between identity and practice. In the 

field of civics education, Vickery (2017) explored the intersection of race and gender in five 

female African American social studies teachers’ conceptualizations of citizenship. She finds 

that her participants’ understanding of citizenship is based on their historical and experiential 

knowledge of race and gender in the U.S. As a result, participants held a more community-based 

understanding of citizenship that eschewed traditional forms and citizenship, allowed for a sense 

of belonging and empowerment and focused on civic education that promoted student belonging. 

In a quantitative study, Knowles (2018) studied the connection between civics teachers’ political 

ideology and preferred teaching practices. Knowles found that “teachers with particular views of 

social studies and citizenship education will likely implement instruction consistent with those 

beliefs” (p. 91). Working in a broader social studies context, Hung (2018) explored connections 

between Taiwanese social studies teachers’ life stories and teaching controversial public issues. 

The teachers in Hung’s study showed a “connection between the personal level and professional 

level” as teachers “attributed their views about controversial issues to their personal life 

experiences,” which themselves are an intersection of a variety of factors (p. 75). Although they 

did not delve into the underlying reason of why teachers held their beliefs, Martell and Stevens 

 

15 

	

(2017) explored the connection between the beliefs and practices of race-conscious teachers, 

finding that those who identify as race-conscious were likely to discuss issues of race in class.  

The Purpose of History Education 

Another factor at play is the relationship between how teachers define the purpose of 

history education and the impact that has on how they implicate themselves in the curriculum. 

There have been multiple studies, over the past forty years, that outline different approaches to 

history/social studies education that get enacted in the classroom. Regardless of time period, 

history education pedagogy is usually split into three categories that roughly align with one 

another regardless of when the classification was written. Barr, Barth, and Shermis (1977) for 

example, posit three different pedagogical approaches to social studies education: citizenship 

transmission, disciplinary social sciences, and reflective inquiry. These three typologies 

respectively represent uncritical engagement with accepted values and knowledge (citizenship 

transmission), a focus on disciplinary understanding to build decision-making capacity 

(disciplinary social sciences), and critical, student-interest-based inquiry to meet social needs 

(reflective inquiry). Writing over twenty years later, and specifically addressing history 

education, Seixas (2000) suggests three orientations that closely mirror those posited by Barr, 

Barth, and Shermis: the collective memory approach, the disciplinary approach, and the 

postmodern approach. VanSledright (2011) also puts forth a typology, this time dropping the 

postmodern approach and focusing solely on the collective memory and disciplinary approaches.  

Teacher reasoning related to the purposes of history education is an important mode for 

thinking about how teachers envision the relationship between self and curriculum. While Evans 

(1989, 1990) created typologies of teachers related to their personal conceptions and enactment 

of teaching, there is a need to explore what teachers’ conceptions of the past make possible in the 

 

16 

	

classroom and the degree to which any conception of the meaning of history is fluid. How are 

teachers influenced by research, resources, and experiences that espouse the development of 

historical disciplinary skills (Levesque, 2008; National Council for Social Studies, 2013; Seixas, 

2000; Stearns, Seixas, & Wineburg, 2000; VanSledright, 2011; Wineburg, 1991; 2001) or 

promote a more critical engagement with the power relations and structure of the discipline itself 

(Segall, 1999, 2006, 2013)?  In other words, what is the relationship between practice and 

teachers’ worldview about the meaning of the past and the study of history and how does their 

conception of that relationship function in connection to the kinds of learning experiences and 

questions posed and taken up in a classroom setting? 

Critical Lenses About the Self and Curriculum 

 

Unlike research on the connection between history teachers’ perspectives and their 

actions, or research focused on the disciplinary approach to history education, critical lenses, 

especially those drawing from psychoanalytic theory and poststructural approaches, have 

considered the internal, affective components that come into play when a teacher is or is not 

implicating her/himself in the curriculum. As Farley notes (2007), “from a psychoanalytic 

perspective, the meanings we make… will be driven by unconscious forces that are other to 

chronological time and that education can neither predict nor control” (p. 428). Garrett (2017) 

also emphasizes that “learning about the world does not occur in absence of our intimate 

relationship with the knowledge that we bring with us and have been accumulating from our very 

first days” (p. 50). Garrett (2011) specifically looked at how pre-service teachers contended with 

difficult knowledge related to race and the Spike Lee documentary about Hurricane Katrina, 

When the Levees Broke, and how they sought to route and re-route knowledge away from 

themselves to avoid personal implication or contention with the complex issues of race presented 

 

17 

	

in the film. Zembylas (2016) also explored teacher implication related to trauma, specifically 

Cypriot teachers’ resistance to historical representations that challenged their beliefs. Affect 

provides an avenue to understand the source of resistance as well as to imagine different ways of 

relating to otherness. Psychoanalytic frames related to history/social studies teachers, therefore, 

focus on the degree to which teachers implicate themselves in the complex and difficult contexts 

of teaching about the past, particularly those related to racism and other forms of social trauma.  

 

Poststructural lenses in history/social studies research also draw attention to factors that 

blur the distinction between self and curriculum. Segall’s (2003) examination of the discourses 

of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), for example, positions the MEAP as 

more than just a test that is distributed by teachers. Rather, Segall argues, the MEAP functions as 

a discursive practice that opens and forecloses particular views of teaching and is itself 

constituted by wider societal discourses that teachers may take up in their own attitudes toward 

the test and the resulting impact on their own practice.  

 

Thinking about history curriculum itself, Parkes (2011) considers how history is engaged 

within the “end of history” discourse that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s. Specifically, 

Parkes is interested in identifying the specific forms of reasoning that are valued in a curriculum 

and examining those forms in relation to the styles of reasoning that are neglected” in order to 

explore how curriculum and pedagogy act as s form of governance that impacts self-formation 

(p. 40). In other words, curriculum, shaped both by what is included and what is ignored, 

influences the discourses one comes in contact with and how construction of the self is related to 

the discourses one interacts with. The impact of curricular discourses is also seen related to 

representations of women and feminism in the field of social studies education (Schmeichel, 

 

18 

	

2011) and the marginality and lack of agency of women as represented in the history curriculum 

of South Carolina (Schmidt, 2012).  

Contributions to the Field 

 

While there have been studies that have looked at the link between self and curriculum, 

there are several holes in the literature base that this study can help address. First, education 

research on identity development primarily focuses on the identity formation of pre-service or 

new teachers. Studies that do not focus on the context of teacher education instead look at how 

teachers at or near the end of their careers reflect back on their teacher identity. Instead of 

positioning teacher identity as the identity one has as a member of the profession, I consider the 

various identities that make up who one is as a teacher. I also shift the focus to teachers who are 

out of their pre-service phase and working as full-time classroom teachers. I assume, in this 

study, that my participants already have an identity as a teacher, and explore how various factors, 

such as race, gender, social class, religious identity, and memory enter into their practice through 

the curriculum.  

I also bring a poststructural lens to this study. Such lenses are already at work in 

discussions about teacher identity in the broader teacher education literature (see Alsup, 2006; 

Britzman, 2003) but by and large have not been taken up within the field of history/social studies 

education. History education research on the link between perceptions and practice (e.g., Evans, 

1989, 1990) posits a somewhat straightforward connection between what one says they do and 

what they do. The nature of this connection can of course be complicated in the act of teaching 

itself, but there is a belief that the route from internal to external is relatively direct. This study 

provides an opportunity to apply poststructural theory to uncover the complexity at work in the 

relationship between the self and the curriculum.  

 

19 

	

 

Within the field of history education, this study takes up factors like memory in ways that 

have not yet been explored. Memory has played an increasing role in thinking about the 

relationship between self and curriculum, yet history and social studies education research 

related to memory has yet to seriously take up the relationship between a teacher’s personal and 

collective memories and curricular decision-making. Rather, this body of literature focuses on 

how group and/or national collective memories get taken up within school curriculum, 

particularly from a top-down approach. National and state governments might work to exert 

influence over history education curriculum to forward certain narratives about the past, 

especially traumatic and or contested pasts, in order to shore up present-day political interests 

(Papadakis, 2008; VanSledright, 2008; Wang, 2008)  These include studies about how 

representations of the history of specific groups reflect dominant cultural memories (Brown & 

Brown, 2010, Suh, An, & Forest, 2014), and how traces of collective memory can be found in 

state standardized tests (Reich, 2011). There is also a small body of work that considers how 

students interact with collective memory, such as the narratives college students take up related 

to competing memories of Southern secession (Reich, Buffington, & Muth, 2016), and the role 

that racial and ethnic identity play in how students interpret and assign value to historical actors 

and events (Epstein, 1998, 2010; Peck, 2010). This study will attend to memory in a new way 

and consider not only how teacher memories play a role in shaping practice but also how teacher 

memories of the content they teach serves as a means of understanding the relationship between 

self and curriculum.  

Theoretical Framework 

In this section I explain the theoretical constructs I draw on in order to address the gaps 

that are present in the literature. I begin by outlining the poststructural lens used in this study, 

 

20 

	

focusing on Foucault’s definition of discourse. I then discuss how I define two concepts 

important to this work: self/identity and curriculum.  

Overall, I draw upon poststructural theory in order to analyze the processes through 

which teachers construct and reconstruct elements of their identity in relation to the curriculum. 

Using this lens, history education, including how teachers think about issues related to the field 

and engage in classroom practice, can be viewed as a text, meaning that it can be analyzed 

discursively. Discourses, according to Foucault (1972), are systems of thought that 

simultaneously construct and give structure to the world and are the means through which people 

make sense of that world. Foucault no longer considers discourses “as groups of signs 

(signifying elements referring to contents or representations), but as practices that systematically 

form the objects of which they speak” (p. 49). There are two important points to take from this 

argument. First, language is not just a reflection of the world around us. It is imbued with values 

and gives structure to how the world is understood and experienced as well as how people 

construct understandings about themselves. In fact, we cannot conceive of the the world outside 

of discourse, as there is no way to express ideas outside of language. Second, the practices that 

construct our reality can be analyzed to uncover the underlying values that are present and the 

impact they have on those that operate within a particular set of discourses.  

Power, in poststructuralist theory, is not simply top-down, but is diffused, arranged like a 

network and able to act in multiple directions. Foucault (1980) claims that 

power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which 

only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in 

anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is 

employed through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between 

 

21 

	

its threads, they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising 

this power. (p. 98) 

As such, “the individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to 

which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation” (Foucault, 1980, p. 98). Individuals 

constitute themselves through the power relations they encounter and take part in. While power 

is not evenly distributed, a diffused conception of power recognizes the way that a multitude of 

discourses are constantly at work. For the purposes of this study, this means that as teachers 

constitute themselves, and consider their own relation to the curriculum, there are a number of 

factors that exert pressure. These may include discourses related to their memories and prior 

experiences, curriculum requirements, time, ideas about the contours and purposes of history 

education and who they construct their students to be. Power, in this conception, is not 

something that has a precise location and material nature, rather it is the process through which 

people make sense of the various discourses they encounter and inhabit, with the 

acknowledgement that these discourses do not all exert the same amount of power.  

Therefore, work that considers issues of power needs to shift away from “questions such 

as ‘Who has power?’ or ‘What intentions do power holders have?’ to the processes by which 

subjects are constituted as effects of power” (Sarup, 1993, p. 74). The importance then is not 

who has power and for what ends do they put it to use, but rather how one’s reality is produced 

through power and the resulting impact that has on who they are and what they do. 

 

I also draw upon elements of psychoanalytic theory in order to understand how teachers 

conceptualize elements of their self in relation to their teaching. The concept of difficult 

knowledge is particularly helpful in understanding how one conceives of their personal 

relationship to their curriculum. Difficult knowledge is most commonly construed as “a concept 

 

22 

	

meant to signify both representations of social trauma in curriculum and the individual’s 

encounter with them in pedagogy” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003, p. 755).  Positioning difficult 

knowledge as related to social trauma conjures images of war, genocide, violence, and racism, 

but the process of difficult knowledge is always present, as people seek to make sense of and 

respond to the world around them. What needs to be brought to the fore, then, is how difficult 

knowledge is a way to engage that which is difficult to make sense of and the affective 

dimensions that contribute to that difficulty. As Garrett (2017) argues, “making a relation to 

difficult knowledge means being able to recognize that there is knowledge we simultaneously do 

and do not want to have” (p. 24). In considering the work of this study, psychoanalytic theory 

allows for the recognition of how that desire to know/not know is always present in meaning 

making about oneself and the broader world. 

Whereas poststructuralism allows us to question taken-for-granted conceptions, expose 

the various discourses that teachers adopt and uncover the way they navigate power dynamics, 

psychoanalytic theory helps to illuminate the internal and unconscious processes at work as 

teachers encounter the curriculum. Due to the inherently interrelated nature of content and 

pedagogy (Segall, 2004), teacher’s implication in the curriculum can both emerge in how 

teachers engage in pedagogical enactment as well as in the choices they make regarding which 

content to cover and which to exclude. Inclusion/exclusion, though, are not just confined to the 

content a teacher decides to cover, rather it also emerges in the moment-to-moment decision-

making teachers engage in as they elicit student thinking through questioning. The content-

related choices that teachers make may be an outgrowth of the process of difficult knowledge as 

an avoidance of contending with issues that makes a teacher uncomfortable or that they worry 

will be resisted or problematically taken up by students. Following Britzman (1998), an example 

 

23 

	

of this process is the teacher who focuses on the Diary of Anne Frank as a means of teaching 

about the Holocaust. The collapsing of the study of the Holocaust into a narrative that is largely 

about adolescence set against the backdrop of going into hiding allows a teacher to claim they 

are covering the Holocaust while avoiding the extreme violence of the concentration camps.  

Therefore, psychoanalytic theory helps to understand how resistance and ignorance are a part of 

learning and an active engagement with knowledge, as opposed to the absence of it (Garrett & 

Segall, 2013) Psychoanalytic processes are therefore important for understanding how the 

teacher brings the unconscious self to bear on the curriculum. 

Self and Identity 

 

There are a multitude of competing conceptualizations of how to define self and identity 

across a great variety of fields, with some arguing that the two concepts are different and others 

suggesting they are the same. Due to the sheer volume of work committed to these ideas, it is not 

possible to give a full examination of the different iterations of the concepts. Rather, I will focus 

in specifically on the frames that I am using to think about self and identity and the, somewhat 

artificial, distinction I make between the two for clarity in this study.  

 

At its root, identity can be understood as “being recognized as a certain ‘kind of person’ 

in a given context” (Gee, 2000, p. 99). Gee argues that “all people have multiple identities 

connected not to their ‘internal states’ but to their performances in society” (p. 99). Identity, 

therefore is a social process, that “involves knowing who we are, knowing who others are, them 

knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we are and so on” (Jenkins, 2014, p. 6). These 

definitions draw out that identity is inherently social, as one’s identity can only take meaning via 

the perception of others.  

 

24 

	

 

Identities, then, are discursively constituted. Jenkins (2014) sees identity as a process 

(which he terms “identification”) and not as a thing that one can possess. Rather, “it is something 

one does” (p. 6).  When people claim an identity, they are speaking to a specific discursive 

understanding of what constitutes that identity and they make claims about their own 

identification via their actions and interactions with others. Identities, then, are fluid as we move 

across various discourses and manifest ourselves in ways that are fitting to the particular context 

we inhabit at any given moment.  

 

This formation of identity falls in line with Butler’s (1993) of performativity, which she 

defines “not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice 

by which discourse produces the effects it names” (p. 2). Writing specifically about gender, 

Butler discusses the ways in which an interior, and often viewed as coherent, image of outwardly 

expressed gender, via fashion choices, mannerisms, and the like, is anything but internal or 

coherent. Rather, gender is a result of public and social discourse that gets internalized while it is 

simultaneously socially regulated (Butler, 1990). Butler’s conception of performativity and 

identity reinforces the idea that our internal conception of self is shaped by social discourses, 

simultaneously constructs and is constructed by the relationship between the individual and these 

discourses and is apt to change based on discursive shifts related to the changing contexts one 

may find him/herself in.  

 

In this study, I define self as the narrative through-line that marks a person’s internal 

navigation of the world. In other words, how one views the totality of the multiple identities they 

inhabit across contexts. Identity, then, is the expression of and claims made about the self, 

meaning the various components that one may be recognized for. I, for example, have an 

understanding of who I am (self) that gets expressed through my various identities as researcher, 

 

25 

	

father, husband, white man, straight, and so on, identities that take on meaning via the social 

discourses we are embedded within.   

Curriculum 

 

Just as there are myriad ways of conceiving self, identity, and their interrelation, so too 

are there many different ways of conceiving the curriculum. Eisner (1985) defines the curriculum 

as “a series of planned events that are intended to have educational consequences for one or more 

students” (39). Further complicating his definition, Eisner contends that schools actually teach 

three different curricula to their students: the explicit, implicit, and null curriculum. Eisner 

defines explicit curriculum as the goals and objectives found in formal documents that the public 

is generally aware of. The implicit curriculum, or hidden curriculum, are the values and cultural 

norms, such as punctuality and deference to authority, that schools teach through school and 

classroom policies, interactions with students, and the like. Finally, the null curriculum is what 

does not get taught, a curriculum that Eisner sees as just as powerful as the explicit and implicit 

curricula as “ignorance is not simply a neutral void; it has important effects on the kinds of 

options one is able to consider, the alternatives that one can examine, and the perspectives from 

which one can view a situation or problem” (p. 83). The explicit and null curricula are especially 

germane to this study as teachers’ curricular decision-making inherently makes claims about 

what will and will not be taught. Those claims stand in relation to a number of contexts, 

including the teacher’s own positionality.  

 

The gap in Eisner’s (1985) understanding of curriculum is that while a curriculum may 

exist and convey values about what is explicitly and implicitly included as well as what is 

excluded, it is important to view how curriculum is taken up and enacted, in other words how it 

is translated from its stated goals to its implementation in the classroom. Therefore, I also draw 

 

26 

	

upon Marsh and Willis’s (1995) conception of the intended, enacted, and experienced 

curriculum. Under this framework, there is a difference between that curriculum that is designed 

and meant to be taught (intended), what actually gets taught (enacted) and how it is received by 

its intended audience (experienced). By bringing in these dimensions, what actually happens in 

the classroom through the teacher’s pedagogical approaches and in-the-moment decision making 

is also brought under the aegis of curriculum. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, I define 

curriculum as the intended goals, objectives, and learning activities of a course and the 

experiences that result in and through their enactment. There are instances, particularly in 

Chapter 5, where I specifically use the term “explicit curriculum” to denote the curriculum that 

exists prior to an individual teacher’s encounter with it, such as the official Advanced Placement 

or International Baccalaureate curricula.  

Conclusion 

 

In this chapter, I have worked to situate this study both in the context of broader teacher 

education research as well as within the specific field of social studies/history education 

research. I argue that much of the research on teacher identity focuses either on pre-service 

teachers or teachers who have retired, thus overlooking how experienced teachers navigate issues 

related to their identity, both as teachers and via the multiple identities they see comprising their 

sense of self. In addition, beyond examining the relationship between teacher beliefs, social 

studies/history education has not widely taken up research that looks at the racial, gender, 

socioeconomic, or religious identity of teachers and the influence that has on understanding their 

relation to the curriculum.  

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWO 

METHODOLOGY 

 

The following chapter is divided into two sections. The first deals with methodological 

considerations important to understanding how a poststructural theoretical framework plays a 

role in how the study was conducted. In this section, I will outline key ways in which 

poststructural considerations impacted the collection, interpretation, and reporting of data. In the 

second section, I will outline and justify the methods used in this study, as well as elaborate on 

the context of the research, including an introduction to each of the teachers involved.  

Methodological Considerations 

This qualitative study is informed by poststructural and psychoanalytic approaches to 

research. This means the theoretical framework not only speaks to the topic being explored in 

this dissertation but also to the methodology being employed. Therefore, the theoretical lenses 

and commitments that underlie the study are present throughout each stage of the research. 

Instead of collecting data and applying a theory at the analysis stage, poststructural and 

psychoanalytic approaches require the researcher to “think with theory” (Jackson and Mazzei, 

2012) and understand that theory is playing a role as data is collected, analyzed, and represented 

in writing. Participants and researcher are constantly interacting with and informing one another 

(and the data) and it is important for those relationships, and the theoretical lenses each brings to 

the interaction and production of knowledge, to be understood as part of the research process. 

The theoretical lenses being applied to the research inform how data is read, with different 

insights and conclusions being made possible when different lenses are applied to the data, thus 

avoiding the claim that there is a single way to read data or that truth is inherent in the text.   

 

28 

	

As outlined in the previous chapter, using a poststructural lens allows for a discursive 

analysis of the data generated from this study. Because of this, data analysis is more than 

establishing direct links between what a teacher says and what they do. Rather, there is a need to 

attend to the systems of knowledge that produce both teachers’ responses, as well as the 

teachers’ identities. These discourses are detectable via traces found within language, though the 

meaning of that language, and language itself, is always unstable and subject to change (Belsey, 

2006) and is not “inherent in the text, or given by the author (the teacher), but rather created by 

the meanings and assumptions brought to it by the reader” (the researcher) (Martusewicz, 2001, 

p. 12). As a result, there is no single, correct reading of a text, but multiple ways to engage in 

textual interpretation that will differ across readers and contexts.  

In addition, while I do not directly employ psychoanalytic theory in this dissertation (I 

position it more as a form of poststructural thinking), this study is informed by psychoanalytic 

frames of thought. These frames illuminate the internal and unconscious processes at work as 

teachers interact with the curriculum. These frames also assume that these processes influence 

the degree to which one takes up or resists particular understandings of the past, of themselves, 

of their students, and/or of the social contexts an individual inhabits. Garrett (2017) states that, as 

teachers, “what we think of as our own individual selves are always in relation to investments of 

who we think we are based on our personal histories” (p. 51). This conception of how the self is 

constructed is especially important when thinking about how memories are taken up by teachers 

and used to form justify particular ways of understanding oneself in the present. Psychoanalytic 

frames allow me, as the researcher, to pose questions that move away from more rational 

engagements with the past and instead focus on the internal and affective elements at play when 

one engages with history. 

 

29 

	

Data Collection 

 

Poststructural approaches to research assume that meaning is created in the interactions 

between and among discourses and individuals. Therefore, interviews were semi-structured in 

order to acknowledge these interactions and provide a degree of flexibility in each interview. 

While I developed a sequence of specific prompts to engage teachers’ thinking (Appendix A), I 

did not bound myself to that particular sequence as that would have prohibited me from 

following the natural flow of conversation and the different directions the interview might have 

taken. As I progressed through the study, I also added questions specifically targeted towards 

each of my participants in order to further explore issues that had come up in prior interviews or 

observations. While each interview during the course of the study covered similar ground, there 

were also prompts that more pointedly engaged the experiences of each individual.  

 

In addition to a semi-structured format, I also used active interviewing techniques. Active 

interviewing, as defined by Holstein and Gubrium (1995), seeks to engage both the interviewer 

and the respondent in the act of meaning-making as a means of bringing out the “subject behind 

the respondent” (p. 14). Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to how the interaction of 

interviewer and respondent shapes what is said and how it is said, necessitating that the 

interviewer be fully present in order to take cues from the respondent for how to further conduct 

the interview (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). Following the poststructural focus on how a person 

constructs meaning through discourse (and is simultaneously constructed through discourse), the 

respondent must be seen in light of how they are actively responding to the interviewer, so that 

they are viewed as more than just a keeper of knowledge that is waiting to be accessed correctly 

via the perfect question. Concurrently, the interviewer also needs to pay attention to the way in 

which they are implicated in the interview: how their body language, facial expressions, position 

 

30 

	

as a researcher, personal interests, and threads of conversation they take up play a role in the 

development of the interview’s content and the nature of the respondent’s answers.  

 

Throughout the data collection phase, I paid close attention to how each participant 

positioned themselves in response to my questions. Active interviewing also entails the use of 

“positional shifts” where respondents, either by their own choice or by request of the interviewer, 

take on the perspective of another person or identity (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). This 

technique was especially important in this study as identities are constituted both via the 

individual as well as outside contexts. All of my participants, for example, tied certain elements 

of how their sense of self entered into the classroom in terms of the specific context they taught 

in. In order to get a more nuanced view of how they were positioning and constructing 

themselves, I would, for example, ask them to explain what they would do if they taught at 

different schools with different demographics. In this specific example, the use of positional 

shifts allowed for more nuanced understandings of the connection between self, place, and 

conceptions of students.   

Data Analysis 

Data analysis was also driven by poststructural theory, which meant I always had to 

center the idea that truth is not found in the data, but rather through the work of interpreting and 

reading that data. As poststructuralism demands that we move beyond the words uttered in 

interviews as raw data waiting to be mined for the explicit meaning/truth of its speaker, my focus 

was not solely on what participants said or did, but also how and why they responded in the ways 

they did and what impact those choices had. I also paid attention to the pauses, silences, and 

omissions that could indicate a struggle to put ideas into language or an absence that could give 

further contour to understanding how a participant was thinking.  

 

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My analysis followed Miles and Huberman’s (1994) approach to qualitative data analysis 

where I read through transcripts and observation notes searching for patterns and themes both 

within and across participants. These themes were not just focused on what participants said but 

also the motivating processes and discourses at play in the data. St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) 

argue that in order “to code data… one must assume that words actualized in interview 

transcripts and field notes are not only data but brute data that can be broken apart and 

decontextualized by coding…” and that these words “can be sorted into categories that somehow 

naturally and miraculously ‘emerge’ as if anyone could see them” (p. 716). Therefore, while I 

coded, I worked to avoid decontextualizing the words of my participants as well as the idea that 

truth was inherent in what participants said. As a result, I situate my participants’ words in the 

context from which they came by providing detailed descriptions of their practice. I also 

recognize that the themes that I identified are reflective of the kinds of ideas that connect to my 

interests. For example, while I did not originally intend to write about memory (Chapter 4) in 

this study, it is unsurprising that those ideas would still emerge from my reading of the text due 

to my own background with that field. While I followed a more traditional form of qualitative 

analysis, I tried to at least partially address the concerns that St. Pierre and Jackson raise by 

working to keep data contextualized as well as by recognizing that the themes I identified are in 

no way natural or indicative of a universal truth. 

 I also worked to bring my own positionality to bear on my data analysis and 

interpretation. Throughout the study, I was implicated in constructing my own identities as 

researcher and former history teacher. Therefore, I tried to account for the ways I constructed 

meaning both about myself and my research participants, as well as ways in which I was 

complicit in the same processes that my participants were. I have worked to remain cognizant of 

 

32 

	

the threads that I took up as well as those that I ignored or did not explore. As I worked through 

data collection and analysis, I continually asked how I was implicated in the data, both in terms 

of how I positioned the teachers I worked with as well as how I interpreted what was said. For 

example, in Chapter 3 I discuss how teachers implicate their personal identities in the curriculum 

that they design and teach. One of the findings in that chapter relates to how the participants in 

this study did not fully implicate identities that they saw as having in common with their 

students. For example, two of my three participants did not consider ways in which their social 

class identity played a role in their curricular decision-making, perhaps in part because they saw 

their own social class reflected in their perceptions of and the lived experiences of their students. 

I was engaged in this same process in conducting this study. While I raised questions, for 

example, about social class, gender, and race, I never once asked my participants about their 

sexual orientation and the possible role that identity played in how they understood and 

navigated their curriculum. I believe the lack of attention to this identity stemmed from my own 

identity as a heterosexual, reflective of dominant societal discourse, and my knowledge of each 

participant’s relationship with their spouse or partner, thus leading me to simultaneously ignore 

sexual orientation as an identity of interest in this study and the potential complexity of my 

participants’ sexual orientation which could differ from my assumptions about what those 

identities were. 

I also had to account for the complex power relations that existed between me and my 

research participants. Following Foucault’s (1980) dispersed conception of power, both the 

context of the interviews and the hierarchical assumptions about the relationship between 

participant and researcher impacted how data was generated. On the one hand, as a researcher I 

exerted power through the very idea that the questions I asked and the topics I was exploring 

 

33 

	

were legitimate concerns that needed to be addressed. Combined with the hierarchical aspects of 

my relationship to my participants, especially to Rob and Julie who were both former students of 

mine, there were times that participants aimed to give me “good” answers that they hoped would 

please me or that would fit some conception of what a “right” answer to a research question 

should look like. At the same time, though, my research participants also exerted power in the 

research process. Interviews were conducted in their classrooms where they held more authority, 

they played a role in determining what lessons and units and I observed, and they chose what 

information to share and what to keep to themselves. Paying attention to the way in which their 

responses were produced and justified and the role that different forms of power relations played 

in the genesis of those responses was an important component of the process of data analysis.  

 

While the methods outlined below could have resulted in a study that solely looked at 

what teachers say they think and how that relates to what they actually do, I am searching for a 

more complex engagement that considers the discourses that elicit particular responses and forms 

of engagement. As a result, I focused my attention on the complex ways the teachers I worked 

with narrated themselves and acknowledge that any narration or meaning-making is in a constant 

state of flux, dependent upon the contexts in which they are being enacted. I thus view the 

identities captured in this study as snapshots of my participants at a given time, place, and 

context. It is not my intention to present these identities as static in any way.  

Research Phases 

Methods 

This study was conducted in three phases during the 2017-2018 school year, with data 

collection occurring between December 2017 and May 2018. The first phase consisted of a semi-

structured (and audio-taped) interview with each of the teachers involved in the study. On 

 

34 

	

average, these interviews lasted between one and two hours and focused on building an 

understanding of how each participant constituted their self in relation to being a history teacher. 

Topics included background information about each teacher, specifically focused on important 

elements of their identity, how and why they entered into teaching, their own experiences as 

history students and how they conceptualize their vision for history education and their 

perceptions of the allowances and limitations that allow enactment of that vision. This interview 

was meant to prompt and engage the teachers’ thinking about the multiple identities they inhabit 

and how those may or may not connect to their current practice.  

All interviews, in this and subsequent phases, were conducted at each participant’s 

school, with the majority of interviews taking place in each participant’s classroom or, if 

unavailable, another space in the school, like the library. Interviews were held in participants’ 

schools for convenience. Due to teachers’ schedules and my need to often visit multiple school 

sites in a day, it was easier to conduct interviews immediately before or after school or during 

teachers’ prep periods. The advantage in conducting interviews in participants’ classrooms was 

that materials were on hand to discuss, teachers could make reference to where interactions with 

students had taken place and I was able to develop an understanding of who each participant was 

in the context of their classroom space when students were not present. Drawbacks to the use of 

classrooms as interview sites were interruptions from students, colleagues, or whole school 

announcements, as well as the potential that teachers would not divulge more sensitive 

information for fear of being overheard. Overall, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages as 

teachers typically seemed at ease and were forthcoming with information that was critical of 

themselves, their schools, and their students.  

 

35 

	

The second phase consisted of a series of audio-taped interviews and field observations 

that focused on the teachers’ perceived connection between her/his self and the curriculum, 

specifically considering how each teacher plans, implements and enacts two units of study. Each 

unit included an interview conducted prior to teaching in order to make connections from the 

first phase of data collection and delve into teachers’ curriculum planning and development as 

well as their own experiences with the content they were going to teach.  

I then observed the teacher during the implementation of the unit, taking notes on their 

interactions with students as well as how they presented and justified the information and how 

the teacher inserted or distanced themselves from the information at hand. I looked for places 

where teachers made decisions about what to stress about a topic or the information they would 

include and exclude from their coverage as a means to generate follow-up questions regarding 

why they made the choices they did. As each unit was relatively short (most were between five 

and eight days long), I attended the majority of lessons.  

Based on the events of a class, I, at times, conducted follow-up interviews with the 

teachers or, if they were unavailable to speak, I would email them any questions I had. At the 

end of each unit, I conducted another interview for the teacher to reflect on how the unit went, 

what they would change and why and how/where they saw themselves in each unit. This process 

was repeated for each unit I observed. The final interview not only recapped the second unit, but 

also included questions to help bring data collection to a close and reflect back on the larger 

themes of the dissertation. Data collection for the second phase also included field observation 

notes, researcher memos and the collection of documents related to teaching each unit, such as 

curricular materials. Including phase one, each teacher was interviewed at least five times. 

Interviews were transcribed shortly after being conducted in order to revisit any salient points 

 

36 

	

with participants in the next interview. This also allowed for data collection to be informed by 

ongoing data analysis.  

 

The third and final phase of data collection was my own reflection on who I am and how 

elements of my self were present as I interacted with my participants, observed their teaching, 

and made decisions about what elements of the data to draw out and what to ignore. For this 

phase I drafted my own reflections on the process as a whole as a means to think about the 

development of my own identity and the identity that was in part co-constructed with the 

individuals I worked with.  

Research Context 

 

This research study is rooted in the work of three high school American history teachers. 

I decided to focus on American history because I assumed that the topics found in that course 

would be more likely to connect to my participants’ own identities as Americans, or at least to 

their own experience growing up surrounded by cultural narratives about that subject. The 

participants of this study have been purposefully invited to participate due to previous 

interactions with them in classroom or research settings. Julie and Rob were both former students 

who were members of an advanced social studies methods course that was largely focused on 

theorizing from their experiences and practice as student-teaching interns. Though they both took 

the same course from me, I did not have them during the same year and, to my knowledge, they 

did not know one another. Paul was a participant in a large research study that I was involved in, 

and our time together resulted in several conversations focused on research and theoretical 

considerations of the field.  

All three of these teachers enjoy engaging in critical and theoretical conversations and 

think about the field of history education in very thoughtful ways. Therefore, their inclusion is 

 

37 

	

not meant to create a representation of teachers at different points in their careers or who speak 

to a specific demographic. Rather they were invited to participate because of their thoughtfulness 

and willingness to engage in the issues this study seeks to explore. While I chose each of these 

participants because I knew they would be willing to talk about the issues I wanted to explore, I 

also assumed that our pre-existing relationships would create a degree of comfort and 

willingness to be open with me about their identities and experiences. I wanted to hit the ground 

running and wanted participants who would potentially be more willing to be open from the very 

first interview.  

For the most part, this assumption was borne out. I had, in my opinion, a very easy 

rapport with all three teachers, who, in turn, spoke with candor about who they are, how they 

struggle with elements of their identity and what they think about various facets of history 

education. Communication was very open, resulting in ease with scheduling interviews and 

observations and I felt like a welcome guest throughout my time in each classroom.  

There were ways, though, that our pre-existing relationships impacted the research. 

Although Paul was part of a previous study, he and I had limited interaction with one another and 

I had not had much one-on-one time with him. Paul was an eager participant and loved the idea 

of being a part of a research study. As we are the same age and have similar interests, our 

conversations were very open and friendly. When we discussed what happened in class, it was as 

though we were peers and I was just another member of his teaching team. There were times, 

though, when Paul assumed that I might have an answer to an education-related question due to 

my research background and that he wished I could send whatever I wrote about him to his 

principal to show how good a teacher he was, though he knew the purpose of the study was not 

evaluative. While my interactions with Rob and Julie were also very positive, they were 

 

38 

	

impacted by our previous teacher-student relationship. On the first day in each class, Rob and 

Julie both took time to introduce me to their classes as their former teacher and both seemed to 

take pride in showing off who they were in the classroom and what they had learned from their 

time with me (though, it is worth noting that both mentioned often wondering if I could guess 

where they were going with a lesson or realized that they had learned a specific way of thinking 

from me). Despite my best efforts, our interactions often seemed to revert to a teacher-student 

model. Rob, for example, was often concerned about giving the right answer or relaying a good 

story. Whereas Paul was pleased to be a part of a research study, Rob (who I think also was) 

wanted to make sure he was pleasing me, even though I always responded that there was no such 

thing as a wrong response or bad story. Rob and Julie also often wanted to know what I thought 

of how their lessons went and I worked to avoid being evaluative, though, for my part, I would 

sometimes recommend resources or help them think through an issue they were having.  

 

The schools my participants taught at were all located in predominantly white, affluent 

communities. Just as my research participants do not represent a cross-section of teachers, my 

research sites do not represent the range of schooling contexts in Michigan. They do, however, 

allow for opportunities to think about this study’s issues in various ways related to their form 

(public school vs. program within a public school) and curricular imperatives (AP vs. 

Interdisciplinary Study vs. IB).   

 

I had recruited the participants in this study because I was familiar with their attitudes 

towards thinking about larger issues in history education and believed they would be interested 

and willing to take part in the study. Though I was not familiar with their teaching, I was 

fortunate to work with three compelling teachers doing interesting and vital work in their 

classrooms. I went into this study hoping that I would see some interesting lessons and came out 

 

39 

	

having seen teaching that challenged students to contend with issues of race and gender and 

challenged them to develop an appreciation for multiples perspectives and the connection 

between history and the present world we inhabit.  

Research Sites and Participants 

One of the challenges when writing about how one constitutes oneself is that all of my 

participants are the sum of their various parts and not at certain moments one element and at 

others another. To be certain, different aspects of oneself may be highlighted at different times, 

but it’s not as though one is a woman at one point in time and young at another or white at one 

moment and straight at another. As a result, while I will at times be talking about my 

participants’ sense of self in distinct, targeted ways, I recognize that often the picture is more 

complicated than I am painting but that my choices are meant to highlight specific ways of 

thinking about whatever issues are at hand. The introductions below are meant to provide a 

glimpse of each participant’s personality and the context in which they work. I will not delve too 

deeply into aspects of their identities at this point, as those will be explored in greater depth 

throughout the findings chapters.  

Julie Matthews. 

Julie is a twenty-four-year-old white woman in her second year teaching AP U.S. history 

at Park Lake High School. Park Lake is a small, predominantly white, middle-class community 

located about thirty miles away from a mid-size Midwestern city with a large healthcare system 

and public university. When I asked Julie about her identity, she mentioned her roles as a 

mediator and as an organizer, identities she saw as being important to understanding her 

professionally and personally. As a mediator, Julie always wanted to ensure that everyone’s 

voice was heard and would “let go of [her] own opinions” and play Devil’s Advocate to support 

 

40 

	

students with minority opinions. She saw her organizational skills taking root in how she 

organized and presented information and in being able to always think multiple steps ahead. Julie 

reported that it was the organizational elements of planning curriculum that drew her to teaching, 

as opposed to working with students.  

Julie’s mother is a world history teacher at the high school in Julie’s hometown. Because 

of this, Julie grew up in school, “riding her scooter around the halls” and she reported that school 

“felt like home.” For one of her birthdays in elementary school, she received an overhead 

projector, which she added to the pretend classroom she would play in at home. As a high school 

student, she “always tried to be more, tried to do more.” She was the class president and editor of 

the school yearbook. Julie planned on attending a prestigious public university, but when she 

received her acceptance letter she questioned whether or not that’s what she really wanted. Much 

to the surprise and chagrin of many of her friends and family members, Julie decided to go to a 

different public university instead, a school that, in the eyes of her friends, had less prestige. 

After a semester as a Writing for Publication major (her father wanted her to be an editor), she 

changed to Interdisciplinary Social Studies and the teacher education pathway.  

Upon graduation, Julie accepted the AP U.S. History position at Park Lake and is in her 

second year teaching there. Most of the teachers at Park Lake have been teaching for quite some 

time, and Julie sees herself as part of a younger cohort of teachers hired in recent years that are 

shaking up how classes are taught and taking initiative to develop new curricular approaches. 

Her principal recently told her that he views her as a leader in the school who is “interested in 

doing what’s best for students.” Even though she loves teaching, Julie doesn’t see herself in the 

classroom for more than ten years. “I’ve always been progressing towards something,” she told 

me. “I’m teaching an AP class; this is as good as it gets. I’m used to climbing a ladder and I 

 

41 

	

don’t have a ladder to climb here.” Julie imagines that she might do something with educational 

technology or curriculum design, perhaps starting her own consulting business.  

In the classroom, Julie sees herself as having a different personality than she does in real 

life. With students, Julie can be silly and dramatic in order to drive home points that she is trying 

to make. In her personal life, though Julie noted that she’s “usually the quieter one” who steers 

the conversation but only jumps in occasionally and that she’s “not a funny person.” Julie also 

works to cultivate a boring, domestic image of her home life. She assumes that students have 

ideas about who she is based on the social reputation of the university she attended and having 

been a sorority member. Therefore, she tries to curb students’ imagination about what she does 

in her free time.  

Julie’s classroom is bright and the walls are adorned with colorful posters depicting the 

presidents, notable front pages from the New York Times, collages of each decade of the 20th 

century, and posters with tips for reading primary sources. The desks are arranged in groups of 

four (each desk facing forwards) in a semi-circle facing the front of the room. Julie’s desk is at 

the front of the room, tucked in the corner near the door. She wishes that she could move her 

desk to the small room that acts as a breezeway between her classroom and the neighboring 

teachers’ classroom, but can not because of the internet hookup. While not ideal, she is glad that 

“it’s out of the way of where the learning happens.”  

Julie’s room is decorated with pieces that reflect elements of her identity. On one cabinet 

there is a collection of Lego models representing major American landmarks, such as the White 

House and Lincoln Memorial, that her father built for her (her mother’s classroom contains 

models of world landmarks). Behind her desk, on a bulletin board, are a graphic of her university 

mascot, the seal of the state fire marshal’s office (she used to work for them), and various letters 

 

42 

	

and awards showing her accomplishments, which she puts up “because [she] likes the students to 

know [she’s] proud when [she does] something and [she] likes to share that.” Julie explained that 

she wants students to see her classroom “as a positive space but also dedicated to a specific 

purpose. I want them to feel they are immersed in U.S. history.”  

Julie would often talk about how she felt very normal and easy to understand. “I feel like 

I’m a Plain Jane. I don’t know. Pretty straightforward,” she told me as we wrapped up our initial 

conversation about her identity. Later, she added “I also lived in that middle class white family 

where everything was good… I just had a very good, happy, well-informed childhood.” In these 

moments Julie recognized that her upbringing and background kept her from knowing certain 

information about the world, but still keeps from being fully implicated because she is a “Plain 

Jane” that has had a “traditional” life. 

I observed two units in Julie’s class. The first, which lasted seven days, was on the 

Progressive Movement. I was able to attend six out of the seven days, only missing a student 

work day. The second unit was a five-day look at World War II. I was able to attend four out of 

the five lessons, missing the lesson on Japanese Internment.  

Rob Castillo.  

Rob is a twenty-six-year-old Mexican American/Latino male in his third year of teaching 

at Northrup High School, a public school of choice that uses the International Baccalaureate (IB) 

program, located in Northrup, a predominantly white, upper middle class suburb of a large 

Midwestern city.  While the population of Northrup is predominantly white, the student 

population of the high school is overwhelmingly Asian, with a majority of students being of 

Indian or Middle Eastern decent. 

 

43 

	

Rob started our first interview talking about navigating his own racial identity. Rob’s 

father immigrated from Mexico as a young man and strongly identifies as Mexican, believing 

Latino to be a made-up identity and disliking Hispanic’s connotation of Spanish heritage. Rob 

remembered being a child and having to navigate the often confusing way in which the U.S. 

government and other institutions classify ethnic identity. Because his mother is white, Rob also 

had to navigate how his peers viewed him. In fourth or fifth grade, one friend asked him “are you 

more white or more black?” Initially Rob thought he meant in terms of pop culture preferences, 

but later realized he “didn’t fit into the box that [his friend] understood.” Rob considers his 

racial/ethnic identity to be somewhat in flux as he continues to learn more about himself, but 

currently identifies as Mexican American as it’s the “utilitarian, that is what I am” label that fits 

him, but also as Latino because of the “more connected, almost racial tie to it.” 

Beyond his racial/ethnic identity, Rob’s identity as a globally-minded, rational thinker 

was also very important to him. He often spoke about his desire to be open to multiple 

perspectives, especially in the transformation of his own political identity from being a “bleeding 

heart liberal” who would often have knee-jerk reactions to events to being more thoughtful and 

methodical to his approach towards interpreting current events.  

Both of Rob’s parents valued education, which contributed to his becoming a teacher. His 

mother teaches Kindergarten and his father dropped out of school after seventh grade, returning 

to finish school three years later after realizing he did not want to work on a farm. Rob also had a 

number of positive teaching role models who had a profound impact on him as a student. 

Combined with his beliefs that “education [is] a way to right some of the wrongs that society has 

placed on us” and that “education really can be a great equalizer,” Rob enrolled as a history 

major with a secondary education focus at a large public university.  

 

44 

	

In his role as a teacher, Rob sees himself as a mentor, especially to students who enroll at 

his school from outside the district. He sees himself as being able to empower students and 

provide opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. He noted when he’s looking at the students 

in his class who open-enroll, he thinks “you grew up in a rough part of town and if you would 

have gone to your neighborhood school, you may have been just fine. But you’re here and you’re 

going to do amazing. Even if this is just a stepping stone, let me hold it up for you. I love being 

your stepping stone.” One way in which he does this is by being the co-sponsor of the school 

Diversity Club, which he sees as a way to make other students aware of identity issues they may 

not have previously been aware of.  

In the classroom, Rob takes on a very calm demeanor. He rarely raises his voice and 

speaks in a very calm and soothing tone. He often dedicates the first part of class to informal 

discussions with students about their weekends or what they are interested in. During one lesson, 

Rob and his class had a long conversation about the movie Black Panther. In another, students 

discussed what they did on their spring breaks. During these times, Rob often elicits a lot of 

personal information from his students, but rarely shares information about himself. This is 

because he feels that as a young teacher, he needs to maintain boundaries. “For a lot of kids,” he 

said, “I’m the same age as their siblings. Obviously I have a different relationship with them… I 

don’t want to end up in any situation in which students view me as something other than a 

mentor.” As a result, Rob does not share his age, relationship status, or other, more personal, 

details with them. He does bring his ethnic identity into the class, especially in more informal 

situations such as discussing naming conventions in different cultures, but again, does not share 

too much as he feels he’s on “a pedestal or with a spotlight on me. If they don’t like it, then 

that’s going to feel like a personal attack on me.” 

 

45 

	

Rob’s classroom has student desks arranged in groups of four around the room. It is a 

messy classroom, with papers piled on the desk and along the windowsill. A row of soccer 

scarves hang above the windows and student work covers every bulletin board. On the white 

board at the front of the room there is a space to put sticky notes with thoughts and reactions to 

topics covered in class as well as a list of the class discussion norms. In the back corner of the 

room sitting on top of a file cabinet is a student art piece that depicts a bust of Nixon and the 

word OBEY in all caps below it. Rob likes talking about Nixon and finds it funny to have him 

constantly lurking in the background, though he doubts any of the students notice or get it. Rob’s 

room is also used by one of the Spanish teachers, so he does not have much time in it by himself. 

He usually has a Mexican flag hanging in the room but he has not had the time to put it up yet.  

I observed two units in Rob’s classroom. Northrup High School uses block scheduling, so 

class periods were 90 minutes long and met every other day. I was able to attend four out of the 

five lessons, missing the bulk of a lesson on Japanese Internment. The second unit focused on the 

Civil Rights Movement and lasted eight class periods. I was able to attend five of those periods, 

missing two days that were primarily student work days, one in which Rob was absent, and the 

final wrap-up seminar on what students learned from the unit.   

Paul Kacprzak.  

Paul is a thirty-five-year-old white male in his fourth year teaching as part of the 

Interdisciplinary Studies Program (ISP), which combines history and language arts at Roosevelt 

High School in Scarborough, a predominantly white, affluent suburb of a large Midwestern city. 

When asked about important elements of his identity, Paul immediately mentioned that a key 

component was his relationship to his family, particularly the strong bond and respect that he has 

for his wife, who he considers to be an equal partner in every endeavor he undertakes. Paul also 

 

46 

	

noted that, citing a joke from Saturday Night Live, he has “rabies for learning” and is constantly 

reading and learning new information. He also spoke a lot about his identity as a Christian, a 

theme that will be taken up further in Chapter 3. 

Paul’s path to teaching was more circuitous than the other participants. Originally, Paul 

was going to be a theater major, having been active in his school’s theater department as a 

student. After trying out that major, he ended up switching college and enrolled to become a 

minister, but moved away from that when he realized “there will be a day when I stand up in 

front of a congregation of people and I will be tired, maybe hungry and I’ll just phone it in.” Paul 

did not want to reduce someone’s religious experience to him getting a paycheck, so he 

combined his love of theater and his passion for working with people and decided to be a 

teacher. He ended up enrolling as a history major, though he is dual certified in history and 

English. Traces of his past majors are present in Paul’s teaching; he speaks in a booming voice 

and uses repetition in order to get his important points across.  

At school, Paul is a part of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program and works with five 

other teachers to create and implement an interdisciplinary curriculum for a group of 160 

students spread across all four grade levels. Outside of ISP, Paul teaches English classes, advises 

an after-school writing club and directs plays at a local theater. Due to the nature of ISP, the 

teachers have very easy-going relationships with the students. Paul is no exception. He often 

jokes around with students, loves to reference popular culture, and directs students to resources 

they might find interesting. He also engages in what he calls “Dad Mode” where he can be strict 

about something that he feels is in the best interest of a student, even though they may disagree. 

In general, Paul has a very easy rapport with students built on mutual respect.  

 

47 

	

Paul exudes a hip, nerdy vibe that is reflected in both his dress (bowties with patterned 

shirts) and his classroom. He sees his classroom as a direct reflection of himself. There is art on 

the walls created by his wife, son, daughter and himself. In the back corner is a cardboard cutout 

of Darth Vader that Paul got in high school. Instead of the customary presidential portraits found 

in most history classrooms, Paul has a set of drawings of the vice presidents called “Veeptopus,” 

which depicts a typical bust portrait of each, with an octopus on top of their head. Paul’s desk is 

in the front, left corner of the room, almost acting as a barricade from the rest of the class with 

him inside. Paul explained that his room is so infused with him because “when you walk in, you 

want to get the personality. You want it to be a nice, safe place, you want it to be happy and then 

you want shit to look at when you’re bored.” He sees the various elements of the room as 

opportunities to connect with kids when they ask who painted a piece of art or why he has certain 

objects on display in his room.  

The Interdisciplinary Studies Program is a two-hour block where language arts and social 

studies curriculum is taught together in a four-year curricular cycle – American, Global, Western 

Civilization, and Anthropology. The 2017-18 school year was the American year.  The core 

classes of ISP are based on a seminar model where students discuss key texts related to the time 

period and are mixed-age, meaning that any seminar includes a variety of students from all four 

grade levels. In addition to core classes, there are trimester electives and year-long grade-level 

requirement classes. These classes typically meet once a week, though they may be moved or 

canceled for a week if there is some other element of the program that takes precedence. Because 

of this varied schedule, I actually saw Paul teach a number of classes. I observed two core units. 

The first was focused on the 1920s and primarily centered on reading The Great Gatsby. The 

second was a unit on the 1950s and 1960s that first looked at the sanitized and idealized vision of 

 

48 

	

the 1950s that dominates popular culture and then moved towards the more complex realities, 

especially centered on racism and the Civil Rights Movement. I also had the opportunity to 

observe portions of Paul’s economics class, the grade-level requirement for juniors, as well as his 

electives on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and American science fiction in short stories and short 

films.  

Researcher Positionality 

 

Key to qualitative research is the need to understand one’s own positionality as the 

researcher. In many ways the experience of this project has been about the construction of my 

own identity as a researcher. As I observed my participants, I felt an urge to focus in on the 

curricular decisions they made and was often tempted to chime in during class discussions. 

These impulses were connected to my own identities as a former American history teacher and 

social studies teacher educator as well as my immersion in the day-to-day aspects of a history 

classroom for the first time in years. While I did largely remain external to the class proceedings, 

there were a handful of instances where I posed a questions or was invited to contribute by the 

participant. Throughout the study, though, I had to be sure that I was focusing on the questions I 

had set out to ask and not be distracted by other issues I became curious about during the course 

of the study.  

Beyond my own personal identity formation, I also had to take into consideration how I 

positioned my participants. I have already discussed how our pre-existing relationships shaped 

the nature of our interactions, but I also needed to consider how my status as a straight, white, 

able-bodied male acting in the role of researcher played a role in positioning participants in 

specific ways. What did it mean to talk to Julie about issues of gender as a man who has not 

personally experienced the issues at stake? What did it mean for Rob and I to discuss the 

 

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uncertainty around his racial identity when I have always been certain of my own racial identity? 

How, if at all, did my Catholic upbringing and my own uncertainties and ambivalences around 

organized religion impact how Paul talked about his own Christian identity? In many ways, I 

don’t know the answers to these questions, but I will take them up in the preludes for each 

findings chapter.  

Beyond how my own identity was at work in carrying out the study, a brief biographical 

sketch of how I came to this project might help illuminate my motivations and ideas about the 

relationship between the self and curriculum. Prior to pursuing my doctorate, I taught middle 

school social studies for ten years in central Illinois. As a beginning teacher, I did not see the 

way in which I was implicated in the curricular choices I made; the curriculum was the 

curriculum and I was there to implement it. As a result, I thought that I was a neutral entity that 

did not influence what was possible for my students to learn. In my 6th year of teaching. I moved 

to a small, nonsectarian private school where I was hired, and given complete control, to write 

and implement the middle school social studies curriculum. It was through this process that I 

began to realize how my curricular choices did not reflect some sort of objective reading of the 

past, but rather were a reflection of my own values, experiences, and conceptions of the 

discipline of history. 

 

Beyond developing course curriculum, the school’s founder was very particular about 

how the physical space of the school should be arranged to convey our values. Therefore, she 

was very precise about how each classroom should be decorated and she preferred a very 

finished, almost museum-like aesthetic. I chose to adorn my walls with photos of historical sites 

I had visited that were connected to various units I would be teaching about. While I considered 

these photos, such as a shot of Roman architecture in Ephesus, Turkey, to simply be a reflection 

 

50 

	

of the kinds of history we would study, they marked the curriculum as an outgrowth of my own 

experiences and worked to construct the curriculum just as much as reflect it. 

 

Having also taught during multiple presidential elections, I came to see how my own 

political values and worldview played a role in shaping my curriculum. Students are often 

curious about the political orientation of their teachers and it was a question I was constantly 

presented with. Though I often did not shy away from sharing my viewpoints, I never gave 

students a label that they could fix their misconceptions to or that would collapse the nuance of 

individual political thought, instead telling them that it was obvious if they paid attention to what 

we covered and discussed in my class. When discussing the Gilded Age, for example, I stressed 

the viewpoints and experiences of the labor movement and working class individuals instead of 

the prominent industrialists of the time. Similarly, my unit on Reconstruction focused on 

competing visions of freedom and rights in postbellum America and the ultimate failure of the 

government to secure a multiracial political structure in the face of white supremacy. The 

centrality of race, gender, and class and a critical view of the past (and present) were deeply 

embedded in my curriculum, not because they were the “correct” way to analyze history, but 

because I believed they were the best approaches to engage students’ thinking about society, 

especially when considering the kinds of thinkers I wanted to help shape for the good of our 

society both in the present and future. 

 

My understanding of history is always developing but at the core I have always been 

interested in why historical actors made the choices they did. This interest connects to my own 

interests as a researcher as I seek to uncover the underlying mechanisms that shape how and why 

teachers make decisions or how, more broadly, we construct and make meaning from narratives 

about the past. As a doctoral student, I have become deeply interested in issues related to the 

 

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relationship between collective memory and history and how our understandings of narratives of 

the past are always mediated through our selves via elements of our own identities, experiences, 

and beliefs. I believe there is much potential for how we teach and learn about the past if we 

understand the way people make sense of it and acknowledge that such sense-making is 

mediated via a host of processes, many inaccessible to us, and always partial and subject to 

change. In short, my self is deeply inscribed in this study and the issues raised here are issues 

that are reflective of my own intellectual trajectory and ones that I think may prove fruitful for 

the field moving forward.  

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

 

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CHAPTER THREE 

INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL IDENTITIES 

 

Introduction 

In this chapter I explore the way that teachers’ personal identities are implicated in the 

curriculum in order to complicate our understanding of how a teacher constructs and is 

constructed by their curricular decision-making.  These processes are important because they 

have implications for how the curriculum is interpreted and enacted and the way in which the 

impact of an identity is felt through curricular decision-making. In addition, engagement with 

identity can either open or close dialogue about issues related to factors such as race, gender, 

class, and religion.  Identities are multiple and fluid, intersecting and interacting in different 

ways in different contexts. For the sake of this chapter, I divide the identities that teachers 

addressed into two categories: intellectual and socio-cultural. I define intellectual identities as 

those that reflect how they navigate the world around them and/or the character traits they see as 

making them who they are (e.g., caring). I define socio-cultural identities as factors such as race, 

gender, class, and religion. Most socio-cultural identities are present at birth, but their meaning to 

an individual is mediated by societal discourse that favors some identities over others. 

Intellectual and socio-cultural identities are intertwined, but separating them for the sake of the 

chapter will hopefully make my points clearer.  Drawing on Butler (1990) and Jenkins (2014), 

this chapter explores identity as something that someone does as opposed to something that 

someone has. In other words, an identity takes on meaning as it is enacted and discursively 

contended with, in this case, through the lens of the curriculum.   

 

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Using data from interviews and classroom observations, I argue that various elements of 

each participant’s identity are present in the curricular choices they make, both in terms of how 

content is selected and interpreted as well as how that content is pedagogically implemented. I 

begin by looking at how and why each teacher makes claims about and implicates the intellectual 

aspects of their identity in the curriculum, observable through their underlying purposes of 

history education, structure of learning activities and interactions with students. I then explore 

how elements of each teacher’s sociocultural identity (e.g., gender, social class, race, age, etc.) 

are asserted through the curriculum via the ways a teacher may interpret and enact content. By 

exploring these ideas, I argue that a teacher’s self is connected to what happens in their 

classroom in multifaceted ways as they enact elements of their identity in curricular translation 

and that, at times, curriculum can be a space for teachers to work through uncertainties related to 

their own identity.  I end by briefly touching on implications for thinking about these kinds of 

connections and what can be gained by teachers thinking more deeply about their own 

implication in the curriculum. 

Intellectual Identities 

I started the first interview of this study by asking participants to tell me about 

themselves and, in doing so, to identify two or three identities they considered important for 

understanding them. Two out of my three participants began this process by referencing 

intellectual or attitudinal elements of their identity, meaning that the facets they focused on had 

to do with how they mentally navigate the world around them and/or how they wish to be seen 

by others. Julie explained that two of the most important facets of her identity, both in her 

personal and professional lives, were that she was a mediator and that she was very organized. 

Julie saw herself as a mediator in her personal life because she was the point person for her 

 

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family, contacting others and serving as a go between when there was a need. In addition, when 

out with a group of friends, Julie would often sit back and let other people talk, jumping in to 

contribute to and guide the conversation as needed. Julie saw her identity as an organizer taking 

shape in the way she was always focused on what needed to get done and her knack for thinking 

multiple steps ahead. This was evident in her wedding planning as she mentioned only having 

one final day of prep work with the wedding still over two weeks away.  

Paul immediately shared that a key component of his identity was being a part of the 

larger whole of his immediate family, as well as his love of learning and his caring disposition. 

Paul explained that, having been together for almost half of their lives, he and his wife had 

experienced several formative moments together, so, he claimed, “every decision I make is going 

to filter towards this other person… and their input is valued on an equal level to mine.” Paul’s 

love of learning is evidenced by his time spent reading. “I’m an avid reader,” he explained, “I 

think a lot, very introspective. I just want to learn. I want to know everything about everything.” 

Paul visits a variety of news sites to gain a wide perspective on the world, including NPR, CNN, 

the New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News.  

Paul’s most dominant identity was that he saw himself as caring, a trait that he positioned 

as the result of his Christianity, and that took shape in how he dealt with other people. Paul did 

not see his Christian identity as being directly reflected in his teaching because he wanted to be 

“encouraging and inclusive of all faiths,” and did not want to “intimidate students and come 

across as proselytizing.” Yet, his intellectual Christian identity was consistent throughout all of 

Paul’s classes (except economics), specifically through his focus on the concept of invisibility 

and shining a light on the marginalized. Paul’s elective on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for 

example, ended with a final project that required students to identify a group of people who go 

 

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unnoticed in day-to-day life, interview members of that group and create a presentation about 

them so that “hopefully we can wake up a little and see them for who they are.” During his class 

on science fiction, Paul dedicated a lesson to the Afro-Futurism movement and the importance of 

science fiction as a means to promote conceptions of the future where marginalized groups are 

equal. Paul connected this focus on the invisible to his religious identity, explaining “that’s all 

my Christianity right there. That’s where it comes from…[it’s] about empathy for others, caring 

for others, especially the less fortunate. I can basically just read the Beatitudes.” While official 

declarations of religious faith did not find their way into Paul’s teaching, the underlying message 

of many of his lessons was an outgrowth of how he constructed and enacted his Christian 

identity as being a caring individual as opposed to being focused on dogma. 

 

Rob was the only participant who did not start with intellectual aspects of his identity, but 

rather started with a discussion of his racial/ethnic identity through moments of childhood 

confusion concerning what that identity had meant. While I can’t say for sure what led Rob to 

lead our discussion with race (was it our discussion before the interview about the Diversity Club 

he co-sponsored? Was it due to him using the template of an identity activity he recently used 

with that group? Was it because when a white person asks a racial minority about who they are, 

they are immediately positioned as other?), it was notable that he, the lone racial minority in this 

study, began with a discussion of the uncertainties he felt about his race and gender, while Julie 

and Paul focused on personal traits. Due to time constraints, we were not able to finish the first 

interview in one sitting. During our follow-up interview, though, Rob mentioned his thinker 

identity several times, referencing it in relation to almost every other aspect of his self that I was 

following up on from our first interview. When I asked him why the thinker identity had not 

come up in our initial interview, Rob suggested that it was because he “had framed out that [he] 

 

56 

	

was already talking about race and history and culture” due to our conversation before the start 

of the interview. Again, I am not certain why Rob led with elements of his socio-cultural 

identities, but believe it might be due to the idea that if one is a racial minority, there is an 

assumption that that identity structures all of your other identities. Paul and Julie, on the other 

hand, may not have felt a need to discuss race, as both teach in predominantly white schools, 

were talking to a white researcher, and live in a society that implicitly rewards whiteness. In our 

second sit-down together, however, Rob made sure to assert being a thinker as a means of 

claiming an intellectual identity that he perhaps had not felt the opportunity to previously 

discuss.  

In the rest of this section, I use a poststructural lens to explore how the implication of 

teachers’ intellectual identities is a complex interplay of how they construct their own identity in 

relation to the curriculum and assumptions they make about how they perceive and are perceived 

by others. This approach will help complicate the appearance of seemingly straightforward 

connections between how participants intellectually constructed themselves and what they do in 

practice.  

The Mediator 

The connection between participants’ intellectual identities, their beliefs about the 

purpose(s) of history education, and their classroom teaching seem fairly straightforward, thus 

overlooking the complex ways in which teachers negotiate their identities in those spaces. Julie’s 

mediator identity was connected to her desire for students to 

see beyond the Park Lake bubble. To see that there is a world out there. My goal is 

bringing to light that there are other issues out there that we can still be looking at so that 

when they leave home they aren’t shocked by what they see or what they talk about.  

 

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Even though Julie described her mediator role as “always in the middle and playing Devil’s 

Advocate if needed” by being willing to let go of her opinions to support a student with 

marginalized opinions, this element of her identity worked in the broader capacity of introducing 

students to concepts and ideas they had not encountered in their relatively homogenous white, 

middle class school district. One day during a lesson on the ideological differences between 

Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, for example, students in Julie’s class began asking 

about affirmative action, a policy that frustrated them because of the unfair advantage they 

interpreted it as providing racial minorities.  Using her insider status as a white woman to try and 

mediate students’ understandings. Julie explained “when I went to college and someone told me 

I got to where I am because I was privileged… I was really upset because I felt like I had worked 

really hard and I deserved to be there.” She continued by explaining to students that kids at Park 

Lake have a lot of resources to help them be successful, unlike nearby towns that had large 

African American populations. By the end of the lesson, students still did not like affirmative 

action, but recognized the disparities that exist.  

 

In the above example, Julie is constructing her identity as a mediator by, borrowing from 

Butler (1990), performing as one. By doing so, Julie hopes to be recognized as a mediator by her 

students. By leveraging her whiteness to make a claim that “[she] gets it, [she’s] been in their 

shoes,” Julie exposes them to information they have not considered, both in terms of their 

privilege to ignore the schooling conditions of cash-strapped schools primarily attended by 

students of color, but also in sharing the experience of someone who once thought like them but 

now thinks differently. Simultaneously, though, Julie is able to avoid her own potential 

implication in affirmative action, by focusing the conversation on race and avoiding the way in 

which that policy also seeks to promote gender equity.   

 

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The Rabid Learner 

Much like Julie worked to claim and construct an identity as a mediator, Paul worked to 

bridge his personal identity as a rabid learner to his identity as a teacher. Paul’s physical 

appearance aided in this identity construction and performance. He wore dark-rimmed glasses 

and had a beard, which lent an air of being slightly older than his 35 years, and most days he 

dressed in a patterned shirt, with a differently patterned bowtie and the occasional cardigan or 

sweater.  The vibe he gave off was that of a hip, young professor. During seminars, Paul sat at 

his desk, outside the circle of students. One day, during a seminar on The Great Gatsby, students 

were discussing the extravagance of Gatsby in terms of his wealth. After students mentioned 

wealth several more times, Paul, who had been staring at his computer, seemingly not paying 

attention, raised the question “Does Fitzgerald ever talk about wealth?” As students had been 

discussing, Paul had grown curious about their word choice, looked up an online version of the 

book and searched for the number of times (4) and the contexts in which “wealth” showed up in 

the novel. Students asked Paul to look up the frequency of synonyms for wealth, which led to a 

discussion about the difference between wealth and money, being rich and being wealthy.  

Another day, after a particularly contentious debate between a student and practically 

everyone else, the student approached Paul after class about how he felt about no one taking up 

his discussion ideas. Paul told the student “in order to steer conversations, you have to ask more 

questions and make less statements.” “But I didn’t like their answers,” the student responded. 

“Understanding their answers is a different thing. You need to learn to listen.” 

In both of these scenarios, Paul was making identity claims about what constitutes a 

learner, who he is as a learner and how he wants students to perceive him as such. Paul used his 

curiosity to note an interesting distinction between how students discussed money in The Great 

 

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Gatsby and how F. Scott Fitzgerald did, then relied on his resources to find an answer. In that 

single interruption, Paul projected a claim about his curiosity and desire to learn, while 

simultaneously modeling for students how to ask questions that will prompt deeper discussion. In 

the interaction with the student after class, Paul again stresses the image that a learner is 

someone who can defer to others and listen to understand their viewpoints (like Paul does with 

his wife) and not someone who just airs their thoughts without consequence.  

 

Both Julie and Paul constructed connections between their intellectual identities and their 

classroom practice in order to back up claims about those facets of their identities. Through her 

example of being a white person who came to terms with affirmative action, Julie constructed 

and performed an image of herself as a mediator, in the sense that she represented an unpopular 

and underrepresented viewpoint in order to challenge students to think differently, as well as in 

showing her own example as someone who changed their mind about the policy. Paul’s largely 

seminar-based classes allowed him opportunities to construct and display ways in which he was 

a learner and the benefits that such an identity can have in discussion.  

The Thinker 

The most consistent intellectual identity, in terms of teaching practice, was Rob’s thinker 

identity. “I really pride trying to be an open-minded and thoughtful person,” Rob told me. “I 

think studying history taught me that a lot.” During our second interview, Rob framed several of 

his other identities in reference to who he was as a thinker. His decision to no longer follow the 

Catholic faith was a result of his thinker identity allowing him to decide to not “keep practicing 

[his] faith because that’s what [he] always did.” It also mediated his political identity. Whereas 

just a year prior, Rob would have reacted to allegations about sexual misconduct in university 

athletics programs by wanting the coaches fired or reacted to President Trump’s election by 

 

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immediately wanting to get him removed from office, his thinker identity came into help him 

question whether he was “being an ideologue or an opportunist” instead of rationally thinking 

through the available evidence and then making a conclusion. By citing the influence of his 

thinker identity in these ways, Rob worked to create and perform an image of himself that valued 

reason and rationality to make a claim that his ability to engage in rational thought was applied 

to multiple situations. 

Rob’s focus on thinking pervaded his classroom and took form both through Rob’s own 

projection of himself as a thinker as well as his desire for his students to also adopt that identity. 

Therefore, Rob’s class demonstrates the way in which a teacher’s identity is constructed through 

the curriculum, while simultaneously being an example of how students undergo the same 

process. Rob used language to support the development of student thinkers. The desks in his 

classroom were arranged into groups of four that Rob called “think tanks” and class typically 

included writing prompts that students would record in their “thinking journals.” He also started 

most lessons by reminding students of the roles they would take that day, be it historians, 

political scientists, or another type of social scientist. Through his language choice, Rob worked 

to have students perceive themselves as thinkers and historians and not just students sitting in 

their 3rd hour social studies class.   

Like Paul, Rob used elements related to his appearance to project his thinker identity to 

his students. Most class discussions involved students sitting at their seats. Rob would often sit in 

a chair, near one of the front tables, positioning himself on the same level as students. As they 

talked, Rob would typically either sit upright in the chair, often stroking his beard thoughtfully. 

Other times, he would lean forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, looking thoughtfully at 

who was talking. In those moments, it was almost as if Rodin himself had installed him there.  

 

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Rob’s overarching purpose of history education reinforced his identity. He “always tries 

to get kids to connect to the bigger picture,” working to get them to put the historical information 

they learn into context and to make connections as to why it matters to them and why it matters 

to the broader world. This desire to be open-minded and to understand the context through which 

an historical event takes meaning across time is reflected in how Rob understands the purpose of 

teaching history.  

I want you to understand why things are the way they are, structurally, and where you fit 

in that. How can I get you to understand those structures and how they became the way 

they are, but also to understand that you play a role in it; you can change [those 

structures] or continue them if you want, but should recognize you’re doing it. 

Being a thinker meant that one would be more receptive to multiple perspectives and open to an 

understanding that there are structures that impact how those perspectives are formed and how 

the world is experienced by different people. Most importantly though, being a thinker conveyed 

the opportunity for agency. Being aware of these deeper structural meanings meant that one 

would have to make a decision whether or not to act. Being a thinker didn’t assume you would, 

sometimes the rational decision is to not get involved; but by being aware, Rob saw himself and 

his students as having a choice in how to be in the world.  

 

From a curricular standpoint, Rob created inquiry activities that allowed students to hone 

their intellectual identities, engaged them in the work of historians, and also projected an image 

of who Rob was intellectually. Students would often research a question, interpret their findings 

and then make an evidence-based claim to answer the question. This included, for example, 

having students research arguments related to whether the U.S.’s use of the atomic bomb was 

justified by having them place those arguments on a yes-no spectrum where the position they 

 

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chose to place each claim indicated how strong they thought the argument was. During another 

lesson, Rob had students research information about the rise of Japan and Germany in order to 

decide whether or not American foreign policy was effective in the lead-up to World War II. In 

his Civil Rights Movement units, students took part in a simulation where they had to serve on 

different committees responsible for planning various elements of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

These activities were the result of Rob’s conviction that factual memorization was not going to 

help his students achieve or do better. He argued: 

The skills I try to help develop throughout their time with me, that’s what’s going to help. 

Can they be critical of a source? Can they view the different sides of something? Can you 

pull meaning from an image? I’m not going to achieve those higher level things by 

lecturing and making them memorize a timeline.   

 

Rob acknowledged that his thinker identity was deeply reflected in his teaching. 

Although it resulted in rich inquiries, it also resulted in his students being discouraged from 

taking a firm stance on a historical issue because of Rob’s concern with oversimplification. The 

result was that while Rob supported student understanding, he also kept students from being able 

to stake a firm claim and argue it. In the two Four Corners activities I observed, students shied 

away from the extreme positions. Even when Rob told students they needed to be able to take an 

evidence-based stance, he would follow it up with a comment about how he didn’t want them to 

firmly commit to a side because he recognized there was grey area.  

 

Despite Rob’s acknowledgement of the implication of being a thinker, Rob used his 

intellectual identity to claim distance from the curriculum, as well. Rob took his thinker identity 

to mean that he was capable of objectively analyzing competing perspectives, claiming “if I 

ditched rationale and jumped to conclusions based off my beliefs, I wouldn’t really be able to 

 

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teach thinking. I would be teaching a singular idea.” Rob failed to recognize that his identity 

functioned as a perspective and was predicated on a set of beliefs about who he is as a teacher as 

well as what he imagines a thinker to be. The result was that Rob would sometimes rely on his 

open-mindedness as a sign of objectivity capable of removing these values.  

 

Rob’s choices simultaneously reflected and constructed who he was as a thinker. By 

creating a discussion- and inquiry-based classroom, Rob made claims about and reinforced his 

own intellectual identity.  Participants initially stressed their intellectual identities when thinking 

about aspects of themselves that are important to understanding who they are. The instantiation 

of these identities in the curriculum resulted in opportunities to both claim and construct visions 

of what those identities entailed.  

Socio-Cultural Identities 

 

Despite their initial focus on their intellectual identities, participants’ socio-cultural 

identities were also deeply implicated in their practice. Whereas teachers were often forthcoming 

with intellectual facets of how they understood themselves, I typically was responsible for asking 

questions about race, gender, class, and religion. Like the preceding section on intellectual 

identities, I use Jenkins' (2014) conception of identity to explore how the implication of teachers’ 

socio-cultural identities is a complex interplay of how they negotiate and construct their own 

identity in relation to the curriculum and assumptions they make about how they perceive and 

are perceived by their students. I begin this section by connecting Rob’s thinker identity to his 

socio-cultural one and then develop more detailed narratives of the process of socio-cultural 

implication for Julie and Paul.  

 

 

 

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The Thinker, Revisited 

 

In the previous section, I traced how Rob’s intellectual identity as a thinker was 

embedded in and expressed through his thoughts about history education and his classroom 

practice. Rob positioned his thinker identity as being one of the most important elements of 

understanding him as a person and as a teacher. This identity, though, was not the only identity 

being realized in Rob’s teaching, nor was it an aspect of his identity that operated independently 

of other aspects. When Rob and I discussed his thinker identity, he mentioned that it came out of 

studying history and growing up in a biracial family, where he saw different lives co-existing. 

Rob’s racial/ethnic identity, and his ongoing navigation of what he considered that identity to be, 

was connected to his thinker identity and vice-versa. In some ways, his racial/ethnic identity does 

not seem to be at play in his teaching, but it was an underlying factor in how he conceptualized 

his units on World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. 

 

During his World War II unit, Rob’s coverage of the course of the war was relegated to a 

single class period and was structured as a jigsaw activity. He even made light of his decision to 

spend so little time on the battles by asking his students how long World War II lasted. When 

they replied that it lasted six years, Rob responded “today it’s going to last for about 56 

minutes.” He then had students rotate around the rooms in groups, taking notes on major events 

from each year of the war. Prior to starting the unit, Rob explained he would go through the 

course of the war quickly because he didn’t “want to add to the fanaticism and the love of war 

and this weird passion that people have for death and destruction.” From his thinker position, 

Rob felt that “history curriculum, in general, is wars… and then everything else is just happening 

between wars.” This focus results in there being a lack of attention to how “this war destroyed 

that family… or a genocide happened.”  The course of the war is “important to learn about,” he 

 

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said, “but I don’t want to learn about it in the sense that war’s super cool and now you 

understand why your Call of Duty game is the way it is. It’s a toxic part of our culture.”  

 

Rob’s racial/ethnic identity was also at play, though. He made sure to discuss Japanese 

internment during the war, citing his desire to “highlight the experience of marginalized 

communities” because “I’ve had enough experiences in my life to see both sides of the coin… I 

have a unique ability to understand the perspectives of the oppressed and those who oppress.” 

Once again, Rob focuses on his thinker identity; he is able to see multiple perspectives and can 

therefore teach about Japanese Internment in a way that handles both sides of the experience. He 

has this vantage point, though, because of experiences related to his racial/ethnic identity, an 

argument further bolstered by his claim that he probably wouldn’t be as committed to teaching 

about Japanese internment if he didn’t feel solidarity as a fellow minority. Rob further implicated 

his racial/ethnic identity as he explained that he wouldn’t mind engaging a more celebratory look 

at the war, such as using the famous photo of the sailor kissing the girl at the parade, but that he 

doesn’t feel strongly about those images. The reason, according to Rob, for this lack of 

patriotism for World War II is because his father’s side of the family was living in Mexico and 

therefore were not involved in the war, and his maternal grandfather wasn’t able to serve due to a 

physical disability. He also downplayed patriotism because “post-war glory (the G.I. Bill, The 

Good War, Suburbia) is at the core of segregation that exists today.”  Knowing that racial and 

ethnic minorities who served in the war came back to discrimination at home mad him wonder 

“what my fate would have been. Would I have been able to pass as white enough?... I think any 

instance in history in which my identity would be put into question makes me feel 

uncomfortable.” Throughout his World War II unit, Rob’s thinker identity and racial/ethnic 

 

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identity were implicated in one another, interacting in ways that allowed Rob’s racial identity to 

enter the discourse of the classroom without making it plain to the students. 

It’s Obvious What Side I’m On 

 

Although Julie’s gender identity was not among the initial elements of her self she listed, 

she acknowledged her identity as a woman played a role in understanding her and who she was 

as a teacher. While Julie’s gender identity entered into various facets of her life as a teacher, such 

as the types of discourse she needed to adopt in meetings, I focus this section on the way Julie 

used her curriculum to assert, construct, and make sense of her identity as a woman as well as 

uncertainties in understanding her gender identity in relation to the contemporary women’s rights 

movement. I will provide some description about Julie’s approach to teaching the Women’s 

Rights Movement first, followed by more in-depth analysis.  

 

Julie asserted that her gender identity played a role in how she made curricular decisions 

in two ways. First, she saw her identity as a woman being responsible for her own interest in 

addressing women’s history, an attentiveness she doubted would be as deep for a male teacher. 

Secondly, she explained that “feeling discriminated against has led me to focus a lot more on 

Native Americans, African Americans, and things I don’t identify with but I’ve felt the need to 

bring in their voices because they aren’t always heard.” Therefore, Julie’s identity as a woman 

both impacted what was taught and constructed elements of how she understood that identity, in 

this case, linking being a woman to a history of discrimination and lack of voice.  

 

Julie initially planned that the last two days of her Progressive Era unit would be 

dedicated to the different historical phases of the women’s rights movement. Partway through the 

week, though, Julie started to make radical changes to how she was going to teach about 

women’s rights due to the revelation that a Park Lake student had been sexually abused by Larry 

 

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Nassar. This revelation prompted Julie to think about “what is going on right now and what we 

are fighting for because it’s not like there’s a manifesto of everything we believe.” As she read 

different articles that night, Julie realized “if I can’t even wrap my head around this, students are 

not wrapping their heads around it because they’re not paying attention to it.” As a result, Julie 

decided to modify her lessons on the women’s rights movement by spending a day on women’s 

rights in the Progressive Era and then shifting to women’s rights today.  

The first day of the lesson was similar to how it had been previously taught. Julie, 

however, started class by referencing the protests and increase in female political candidates in 

the wake of Donald Trump’s election, as well as the #metoo movement. She told students 

It’s very weird for me to get up and talk about [the women’s movement]. I try to be the 

mediator and not give you my opinions. In this case, though, it’s obvious what side I’m 

on. Therefore, I wanted you to hear about the movement from people other than me.  

Julie then proceeded to play recordings of two men: Mr. James, an English teacher at Park Lake 

who ended his statement by telling men they needed to “shut up and listen to what women have 

achieved,” and Blake, Julie’s husband, who argued that the movement is not about “women 

versus men.” It’s that not “everybody is born with the same rights you have. Up until know 

you’ve learned about great men, but that leaves out half the population.” After playing the clips, 

Julie carried on with the rest of the lesson that she had originally planned, which included a 

lecture on the phases of the women’s rights movement, an activity about the theme of continuity 

and change, and a video about women’s suffrage. 

 

The next day, Julie extended the lesson by introducing the new group activity she created 

in the wake of her own struggle to understand the women’s movement. “I’m really excited about 

this,” Julie remarked.  

 

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For this project, the scenario is that its 2050. I want you create a textbook excerpt about 

what’s happening with the women’s rights movement right now. Look at textbooks and 

how they discuss women’s movements in the past. There’s no particular thing that I’m 

looking for, but I want you to interpret the information you see. 

Julie split the class into groups, some all boys, some all girls, most mixed. The students had the 

rest of the day as well as the next day to work. As students worked, Julie circulated around the 

room, asking students about what they were thinking and giving advice on how to compose their 

sections.  

Julie’s curricular change demonstrates multiple ways in which her identity as a woman 

was being constructed and contended with through the curriculum and ways in which she both 

distanced and implicated that identity in her decision-making. First, Julie saw a direct link 

between being a woman and her interest in women’s history. Therefore, Julie’s conception of 

who she is as a woman is reflected and constructed through her desire to talk about the historical 

experience of women in the classroom setting, with students having a richer experience as she is 

not a man. Secondly, Julie linked the discrimination that she has felt to the discrimination that 

other marginalized groups in American history have felt, thus giving her a sense of affinity for 

and motivation to represent those groups, while also linking women’s history to a similar history 

of marginalization. Julie also saw some degree of connection between herself and the women’s 

rights movement, positioning herself as part of the movement, or at least as part of a community 

of women, by using the word “we” multiple times when discussing aims and who the movement 

was for.  

During the enactment of the lesson Julie’s identity as a woman was both distanced and 

implicated. Despite starting the lesson by saying “it’s obvious what side I’m on” Julie never 

 

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explicitly explained her own position, instead relying on students’ prior understanding of who 

she was via stories she had previously told in class about her relationship with her husband. 

Additionally, in a class about the historical experiences of women, male voices dominated. 

Julie’s audio clips about the meaning of the contemporary women’s rights movement were both 

told from the perspective of men. It turned out that Julie had asked two of her female colleagues 

to record their thoughts, but neither was able to get to it in time. Julie realized the irony prior to 

class but decided to move ahead because 

 I realized I had something powerful with these two males speaking. I don’t think they 

would have been discounted if I had another female voice in there, but I wanted people to 

know this is not just me in my classroom. It’s not my ideas that I’m putting on you. 

Julie, in many ways, seems to be directing this element of the lesson at her male students, who 

she saw as predominantly resistant to learning about women’s history. During the course of the 

lesson, only two female students participated in the whole group setting and the video she 

showed as an overview of the suffrage movement was narrated by a man. Julie’s distancing can 

be interpreted as an intersection between her gender identity and her mediator identity. She 

explained that she wanted to help build awareness of the issues but did not want to force her 

interpretation down students’ throats.  

Despite this distancing, Julie’s gender identity was intimately tied to her decision to 

extend her Progressive Era unit by a day and a half to accommodate this new activity. As she 

explained, “This whole project came out of me as a female trying to make sense of what was 

happening and recognizing that if I can’t make sense of it, most students are not making sense of 

it.” In a later interview, Julie remarked that the genesis for the lesson was her “working through 

what a feminist is” and by extension, how she saw the degree to which her own identity as a 

 

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feminist connected to larger discourses about what it means to be a feminist. I argue, then, that 

the ways in which it seems Julie distances her identity from the assignment in her interactions 

with students is actually an expression of her own uncertainties about her relationship to the 

movement and points towards an engagement with difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998). 

 

In discussing the current atmosphere, Julie used collective pronouns like “we” to position 

herself as a part of the movement, yet felt uncertainty regarding its overarching purpose. When 

asked why, Julie explained that “it’s one of those things, like, you don’t know what you haven’t 

experienced. I can hear the stories and I can see what’s happening to people. I’ve been fortunate 

enough that’s never been a problem [for me].” As a result, Julie did not attend the Women’s 

March in 2017 or 2018 because of this lack of discrimination and explained:  

I did not go to and I’m not… I am sure why. It was always I would have to take work off 

and it was… If I was there in the moment at the time of the march, I would love to 

participate. But for me, I hadn’t had enough discrimination in my life that it was worth 

taking a day off of work to go march for it. 

Despite connecting her coverage of historically marginalized groups to her own understanding of 

being discriminated against as a woman, Julie repeatedly explained that while she might have to 

be careful in how she says something or how she’s perceived, she’s never felt as though she has 

not had a voice or an opportunity to speak. To her, she thinks the movement “should never be… 

a girl gets to stand up and tell them [boys] exactly how it is because everyone’s had a different 

experience.” She described being “conflicted between men thinking they know what’s best and, 

you know, I listened to you, now let me fix it. They’re trying to help, so don’t tell them not to.” 

This conflicted feeling about what role men should play was connected to her own experiences 

with her husband and father who she saw as well-meaning and would not “want blamed for 

 

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women being not equal because they’ve always made me equal in my life.” Here, Julie shows 

engagement with the concept of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998). She recognizes that 

access to voice is a driving factor in the contemporary Women’s Movement and that men need to 

stop speaking for women. Yet, she has not faced the kinds of discrimination that the Movement 

references and she has felt supported by the men in her life. Therefore, she feels a tension 

between the experiences that other people have had and the experiences she has had, which 

potentially leads to her confusion about the meaning of the Women’s Rights Movement today.  

 

Julie’s own lack of being discriminated against and belief that the women’s movement is 

not about access to voice connected to how she approached the subject in class. Class discussion, 

as noted above was dominated by male voices, both in the resources that Julie brought in and 

who she called on in class. When asked about this, Julie connected her own feelings of access to 

what her female students potentially felt in discussion, wondering  

if what’s happening with the boys speaking up and the girls not - is it a product of the 

girls feeling like they can’t or is it a product of feeling like they can [speak up] and 

therefore they don’t have to or they don’t feel like they have a right because they haven’t 

experienced that stuff? 

Julie questioning why her female students don’t speak up in class is seemingly a reflection of 

Julie’s own conflicted feelings. Instead of possibly being a case of not having their voices heard, 

Julie suggested her students could possess the same agency she felt and chose to remain silent. 

Alternately, they could inhabit the same confusion that Julie contends with and don’t feel like 

they can speak to a set of experiences they have not lived.      

 

Julie’s gender identity played a prominent role in how she navigated the content of her 

curriculum as well as how she interacted with students. Her engagement with gender was not 

 

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consistent (e.g., gender was not directly addressed in her World War II unit) but it became 

prominent in moments where Julie questioned the meaning of her own identity in relation to her 

understanding of the broader cultural discourse about what it means to be a woman, as well as 

how she understood her students.  

The Blue Collar Perspective  

Earlier in this chapter, I discussed Paul’s curricular focus on invisibility and marginalized 

groups. While he cited his Christian identity as the reason for this focus, Paul’s working class 

background, an identity he did not initially discuss, was also connected. Our conversation about 

Paul’s blue collar perspective originally emerged during our interview prior to the 1920s unit. 

When I asked Paul what strengths he brought to the ISP team when planning the unit, he 

responded that he doesn’t like The Great Gatsby, the key text students would be working with 

for the unit. “It’s just rich people ruining people’s lives,” he explained, citing the absence of 

working class and African American lives in the novel.  

 

Paul’s feelings about the book carried over into his teaching, first coming to light during 

a lesson he called “The Great Interdisciplinary Studies Art Project.” For this project, students 

were asked to create an artistic representation of an assigned portion of the book. As students 

worked, Paul drew his own representation of a section from Chapter Two. His drawing depicted 

the scene where the narrator, Nick Carraway, joins his cousin’s wealthy husband, Tom 

Buchanan, on a trip to Manhattan. On the way, the pair visit a mechanic’s garage in Queens 

owned by George Wilson to talk with his wife Myrtle, Tom’s mistress. The comic strip included 

three panels. The first frame showed small stick figures of Nick and Tom arriving at the garage, 

the second panel depicted the exterior of the garage and its neighboring buildings, and the third 

panel showed Tom and Nick leaving, with Myrtle following some ways behind.  

 

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After students completed their work and shared a couple examples, Paul provided context 

for his own illustration. Prior to explaining his work, Paul noted his own distaste for the novel:  

I don’t like this novel. I’ve read it before. I’ve taught it before. Read it in high school… 

One of the things I don’t like about this novel is that it focuses too much on the wealthy. I 

like the characters of Myrtle, George Wilson. I like these people and I want to know more 

about what’s happening with them… Because there are some literal casualties in this 

novel and it seems the super wealthiest people walk away relatively unscathed. 

Though Paul did not explicitly address his own working class roots, his decision to highlight the 

invisibility of working class characters is connected to how he constructs his own identity, 

particularly in relation to his predominantly middle and upper-middle class students. He then 

turned back to his own artistic interpretation and explained that he  

minimized the characters from the novel and decided to focus on the restaurant, the for 

rent building and the repair garage because one of the criticisms I have is not enough 

focus on these characters. So they walked in, they talked, and then you see Myrtle going 

to meet Tom, but the thing is they’re small, they’re insignificant. 

He went on to explain how George’s garage and the restaurant next to it are presented in the 

novel as being in the middle of nowhere, but that it’s a nowhere based on the perception of the 

narrator. If there is a restaurant and a garage, Paul reasoned, there must be customers who visit 

those businesses and a book could probably be written about the lives of the working class 

people who are otherwise overlooked in the book. Several students chimed in that they also did 

not like the book and outlined similar reasons for feeling that way (e.g., the characters are 

shallow, they’re stuck up and don’t realize it, they’re surprised that there are consequences to 

their actions).  

 

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Paul ended up class by issuing a challenge to the students who do not care for the book, 

as well as himself.  

I’m going to look at you to champion Myrtle, to champion George, to champion 

Wolfsheim. I’m going to challenge you to tell me where the working class are in the 

novel, where are the African Americans? Can you find them? Are they there?... 

Sometimes it’s important to talk about and notice what isn’t in the novel, right? 

Paul also challenged students who liked the book to champion the main characters as well, to 

speak up for the lavish parties and the experiences they have in the book. After once again noting 

the importance of paying attention to what’s not in the book, Paul dismissed students to hang 

their artwork on their lockers before the bell rang.  

Originally, when I asked Paul why he cared about the underrepresentation of African 

Americans and working class whites in The Great Gatsby, he cited his historical background and 

the field of history’s move away from great man history to focusing on regular people. When I 

reframed the question in terms of the perspective he brought to teaching the novel in a 

predominantly white, upper middle class context, Paul stressed his own working class 

background. “I would say my perspective is the blue collar perspective,” Paul said. “We didn’t 

own our own home. We lived with my grandma. I worked my way through college, things like 

that.” As a result, Paul saw an ability to “draw [students’] attention to the other folks.” Paul even 

ended our conversation about social class and The Great Gatsby by saying the perspective he 

brings to The Great Gatsby allows him to say “Hey – I didn’t grow up like ya’ll did, so in case 

you’re not seeing it, let me go ahead and bring that up to you.” In this case, Paul’s sense of self 

connected to his own working class roots, takes a subtle shift from critiquing the absences of the 

 

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book to critiquing the absences he sees in his students’ own understanding of the world. It’s as if 

they became the residents of West Egg and he was an ambassador from the Valley of Ashes.  

Paul’s social class identity linked to his Christian identity as he taught about the Civil 

Rights Movement. In that unit, elements of his own religious identity became more slightly more 

pronounced at times due to his connection to the religious elements of the Civil Rights 

Movement. Paul explained  

I can’t identify with MLK by being a black man but MLK and I know the same Bible 

stories. We have the same concept of nonviolent resistance. We have the same concept of 

pacifism… That’s an area where I can stand proud and say ‘when MLK is referencing 

Christian concepts and ideals, I know what he’s talking about and can tell you what he’s 

talking about because I know them intimately.’  

When the class read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Paul was very excited to expound 

on King’s reference to Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego and explain why King would have used 

that biblical allusion. He was shocked, however, that his students had never heard those names, 

or the story of The Fiery Furnace before and bolted out of class at the bell to search out if any of 

the other ISP teachers or students in the hallway had heard the story. Paul was so excited about 

the story because it was an opportunity to share a piece of him that he otherwise considered 

hidden. “That’s not an area I get to cross over into a lot, especially in a public school,” he 

explained. “I’m very cautious, but in those moments where it’s a direct literary reference, I have 

an excuse to [talk about it], without proselytizing.” In this moment, Paul leveraged his Christian 

identity in order to help students better understand the point that Martin Luther King, Jr. was 

making when discussing the marginalization of African Americans and the need for white 

moderates to give their support to the movement.  

 

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Paul’s students were resistant to the potential ramifications for their own lives if the 

promise of integration were to be followed through on. Paul liked to use the example of possibly 

integrating Roosevelt High School with a primarily African American high school in a nearby 

school district. One day, after a particularly intense lesson where students claimed that they 

wouldn’t be friends with any students who came over from the other high school, Paul and I 

debriefed on what he was thinking about the class and his students’ attitudes about race. “I’m a 

little troubled. I guess I always suspected how possibly elitist they were,” he said. It was 

interesting to me that Paul cast his students’ negative reactions to integration as the result of 

socioeconomics, when the comments in class, to me, seemed so racially motivated. It could be 

that Paul was experiencing difficulty in being able to rectify his vision of the students that he 

enjoyed teaching, and in some cases, had taught for years, while also contending with the 

problematic feelings that had about members of different racial groups. At the same time, Paul’s 

interpretation was unsurprising, as he constructed his own identity as someone with a blue collar 

upbringing via the contrast to his students’ more privileged childhoods. Part of me also suspected 

that his avoidance of race had to do with the severity of calling someone a racist or implying 

racist thought. Paul, though, felt that Roosevelt students tended to closely link issues of race and 

class and had a hard time disconnecting the two. He also seemingly framed his own reaction 

along class lines because of his own frustrations with those moments where students resist his 

desire for them to be more open-minded and egalitarian. Paul explained that it’s been 

challenging to try and understand his students’ motivations when they get away from history and 

are challenged to think about issues of discrimination in their own lives. At the end of his 

response, Paul sighed. “Rich people, man. Rich people be doing rich people things.” 

 

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 In this moment, Paul positioned his students’ difficulties with racial issues as being tied 

to their class identity, a move that also allowed Paul to not implicate the role his own whiteness 

plays in thinking about these issues for himself. In this way, the focus on Paul’s students’ elitism 

seems to some degree to be an outgrowth of Paul’s own experiences navigating social class at 

Roosevelt. He had been a part time teacher his first few years there and had to live off food 

stamps to support his family. He held some frustration at both the idea that there were not poor 

kids at Roosevelt (there are) and the invisibility that he experienced being someone who worked 

in a good school in a professional job and still had to take government assistance. These feelings 

of invisibility were both reflected in and constructed by Paul’s curricular choices and his desire 

to highlight the marginalization of people along socio-economic lines in his teaching.  

Each of the three participants in this study implicated socio-cultural elements of their 

identity in their curricular choices. Through these moments, teachers constructed and/or 

contended with what it meant to claim those aspects of their self, positioning their identities both 

in terms of broader societal discourse as well as how they perceived and were in turn perceived 

by others.  

Discussion 

 

Drawing on Jenkins (2014) and Butler (1990), my goal, as stated at the beginning of the 

chapter, was to explore the way that teachers’ personal identities are implicated in and 

constructed through the curriculum. Dividing elements of the self into intellectual identities and 

socio-cultural identities, I make the case that both forms of identification are present in how 

teachers conceive of themselves and relate to their curriculum. Using a poststructural approach, 

my interest is not inherently related to the specific identities that teachers claim, but rather how 

those identities are enacted through and reified by the curriculum. Two questions, therefore, 

 

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grew out of the data in this chapter. First, why did Julie and Paul lead with intellectual identities 

(and why did Rob assert his later) and second, why did certain socio-cultural identities come 

more directly into play than others? In this section, I will explore possible answers for these two 

questions.  

Why Intellectual Identities? 

As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, Julie and Paul led with intellectual elements 

of their identities in the initial discussion we had about their identity. Rob, who discussed more 

socio-cultural elements, made sure to assert this intellectual thinker identity during our second 

sit-down with one another. Why did my participants lead with or later assert these identities as 

opposed to their race, gender, social class or other socio-cultural elements?  

 

First, it seems that these intellectual traits are connected to discourses related to how 

these participants wish to be seen as teachers by their students, colleagues, and themselves. Julie, 

who sees herself as organized, hoped students would recognize that she “makes decisions for 

very specific purposes, that [she doesn’t] intend to give them busy work, and that [she] always 

hopes there’s a purpose.” Furthermore, she wants students “to see the organization and thought 

that goes into [her] teaching.” For Julie, being a teacher, in the eyes of her students, means that 

she’s intentional and thoughtful about the work she does and that, through her organization, the 

curriculum builds towards being something that is meaningful for her students.  

 

Paul similarly couched how he hoped students saw him in the traits that he originally 

listed as important to understanding him. He hoped that students would see him “as a teacher 

who cares about them, someone who’s there to help them learn and has their best interest in 

mind.” Paul’s list reads as almost a backwards rendition of the original three elements of his 

 

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identity that he stressed: he’s caring, he’s a rabid learner, and he puts family first, which in this 

case translates to his desire for students to understand he considers their best interest a priority.  

 

Rob is the only participant to deviate from this pattern with students. On the two different 

instances that I asked Rob how he thought he was viewed by students, he talked about how 

different students would inherently view him in different ways, but thought they would 

ultimately say he’s “funny, caring, and a good teacher who makes things relevant.” Rob’s 

response deviated from the dominant thinker identity that he expressed in most situations, but 

connected to conceptions about teaching that Rob holds from his own experiences as a learner, 

which largely are about the importance of interpersonal relationships and recognizing the 

personhood of his students (an idea that is further developed in Chapter 4). Therefore, Rob 

thought primarily about how students viewed him along more relational lines.  

 

Rob’s thinker identity did come through with how he wanted his colleagues to view him, 

though. He mentioned that he often liked leaving his door open so that his co-workers could 

come in and see what he was doing with his students. He particularly viewed himself serving as a 

case study for how one “can do more provocative and forward-thinking lessons” that weave 

“connections between identity and history.” Rob wants to be an example for teachers who might 

work in disciplines where it is harder to bridge the content with the learner, such as math. Julie 

and Paul, on the other hand were more concerned with how their colleagues saw them 

interpersonally, with both hoping colleagues saw them as being dedicated to their respective 

jobs. Additionally, Paul, reflecting the tight-knit interpersonal and family-like dynamics of the 

ISP team, wanted his colleagues to see him as someone “who’s going to work with them, listen 

to them, care about them.” 

 

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Second, these intellectual identities, in many ways, came across as being more certain in 

terms of how participants understood them and their connection to their practice, representing 

elements of themselves that that they perhaps have more control over dictating the meaning of. 

In other words, Julie can claim she is a mediator, Rob can claim he is a thinker, and Paul can 

claim he is a learner, and they can easily take actions that help construct those identities through 

the lessons they create or how they interact with students. Consequently, they can also reflect on 

those identities and make pedagogical changes that can bring them more in line with the type of 

teacher they want to be. Furthermore, intellectual identities connect to discourses about what it 

means to be a teacher or to have a teacher identity. While many people may imagine an older 

white woman when asked to describe what a teacher looks like, popular discourse around 

teaching often focuses on themes such as being caring, knowledgeable and organized. All three 

participants spoke to this kind of discourse. Therefore, it was through the labels that, Julie, Paul 

and Rob gave themselves that helped them construct conceptions of who they are as teachers and 

what it means to teach. 

 

Socio-cultural identities are harder to navigate, though, because they often reflect more 

uncertainty in how they are understood and navigated, especially in the classroom. As previously 

discussed, Rob has a lot of uncertainty about racial/ethnic identity and his understanding of that 

identity shifts as he continues to get older, learn more about himself and navigates how other 

people are interpreting him at any given moment. In the specific context of his classroom, Rob 

wondered how many of his students actually saw him as Mexican American versus how many 

just assumed that he is white. Julie expressed similar uncertainty about what it means to be a 

woman, especially when thinking about her own experiences and how she is interpreted by her 

male students especially. Paul, at times, positions his working class background in opposition to 

 

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the majority of his students’ socioeconomic status, while also seeming to feel that identity is, to 

some degree, invisible to his students. Therefore, while socio-cultural identities are deeply 

important to understanding who teachers are in the classroom, it seems unsurprising that they 

would first and foremost consider their intellectual identities as they simultaneously make claims 

and construct images about who they are as teachers. Saying that that one is a mediator or a 

thinker creates more of a mental image of how those identities take shape in the classroom than 

saying that one is a woman or Mexican-American does.  

The curriculum itself also plays a role in favoring intellectual identity. Rob and Julie both 

worked in contexts with strictly structured curriculum (IB and AP, respectively). As they taught 

more formal curriculums, it is likely that they were required to cover topics that do not resonate 

with them. For example, Julie’s gender identity was at the forefront of how she talked about the 

role of women in the Progressive Era, but that identity was not particularly present earlier in the 

week when she was talking about the multiple reforms that marked the era. Therefore, different 

elements of Julie and Rob’s identity asserted themselves at different times and in different ways 

depending on how they saw themselves connected to the curriculum. Paul, on the other hand, 

worked with a much looser curriculum that he had significant control over. Due to the seminar-

based structure of the ISP, Paul had far more opportunity to write himself into the curriculum. 

This was especially true in ISP electives, which were completely based on whatever each teacher 

was interested in teaching about. The structure of curriculum plays a mediating role. I argue that 

some element of one’s identity is always at play, but the formal curriculums of Rob and Julie’s 

classroom played a mediating role in where they asserted themselves and where they didn’t, 

whereas Paul’s classes more accurately reflected the lens through which he sees the world.  

 

 

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Identities Implicated and Distanced 

 

If there is a single thought to sum up this chapter, it’s that socio-cultural identities also 

matter to how teachers relate to the curriculum. As I said at the outset of this chapter, 

representing the complex, interconnected ways that my participants’ socio-cultural selves are 

implicated in or distanced from the curriculum is challenging, so, for the sake of analysis, I 

targeted the specific identities that dominated their discourse in order to represent the processes 

at play in this phenomenon with more clarity. From a poststructural methodological approach, 

this move can be problematic in multiple ways, but there are two that I think are especially 

important here. The first is that I am complicit in how these teachers constructed their identity in 

our time together because I was asking questions about elements of their identity that they did 

not initially identify on their own. I think my questions and observations were justifiable and I 

hope I sufficiently presented the complexity at play in how my participants conceptualized 

themselves. The other problematic element is that one could read this chapter and come away 

with an essentialized understanding that I talked about gender with Julie because she’s a woman, 

race with Rob because he’s Mexican American and social class with Paul because of his working 

class background. I want to end this chapter by exploring how these categories are implicated 

across all three participants and the reasons why these particular identities were implicated or 

distanced by my participants based on larger cultural discourse about identity and power.  

 

I have written about gender, race and social class only in terms of the specific participant 

who represented traditional notions of what these categories mean. However, gender does not 

mean “woman,” race does not “non-white” and social class does not mean “poor.” Despite the 

choices I made for data analysis in this chapter, identities of race, gender, and social class were 

implicated in each teacher’s practice. During our initial interview, Rob explained that he was 

 

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proud to be male, which he saw connected to his ethnic identity as in Mexican culture “there’s a 

lot proscribed to [being male], like machismo.” Rob struggled with the meaning of his 

masculinity, though, at other times claiming he wasn’t particularly proud to be a man due to the 

patriarchal culture of the United State. When thinking about his gender in the classroom, Rob 

admitted “I’m probably not aware when my [gender identity enters] because I don’t have to think 

about being a male like I have to think about my last name or how people might perceive me.” 

Rob recognizes that socially he doesn’t have to think about being a man because, unlike his 

racial/ethnic identity, it isn’t questioned by larger society. Instead of seeing his gender identity 

connected to the formal curriculum and his pedagogical choices, he largely saw it coming 

through in more informal interactions he had with male students about how to be a decent 

person.  

 

Park Lake, where Julie taught, was the least racially diverse of the three schools. While 

Julie leveraged her whiteness, at times, to challenge students to think more deeply about 

affirmative action (as described earlier in this chapter), discussions about race also made her 

uncomfortable. “I tread lightly,” she explained, 

because I almost feel like I don’t have the authority to talk about it. I know I have a 

responsibility to talk about it… I can tell them what I’ve seen, but I’ve never experienced 

that. I get a little gun shy when we get to those conversations and it’s finding the balance 

between I have to talk about this but I’m not sure how to do it. 

Julie thought it was necessary to talk about race, though, so “that we don’t have people like me 

who are uncomfortable talking about it,” and to prepare her students for difficult conversations 

she envisioned them having in college.  

 

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Paul more directly implicated his gender and racial identities. Topics related to gender 

and race consistently came up in his classes, especially in the 1950s/60s unit where there were 

lessons dedicated to The Feminine Mystique, the life of Peyton Place author Grace Metalious, 

and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as in his science fiction elective which included 

discussions about the importance of expanding gender and racial representation in science fiction 

literature. Paul saw his role as being able to use his perceived authority as a white male to draw 

attention to underrepresented voices, but noted the limitations of his whiteness and masculinity 

because he knew that he “can’t ever possibly scratch the surface” of knowing “what it’s like to 

be a woman,” or understanding what it’s like to be Black. Paul’s goal was to avoid mansplaining 

and/or whitesplaining perspectives that he could not speak to/for. While Paul addressed and 

thought about gender issues more than Rob seemingly did, it still was an identity that seemed to 

come and go. Paul recognized the way in which being a white male conferred distinct privileges, 

but never really delved into how his identity functioned in classroom interactions with students, 

beyond wanting to be sure to honor the voices of his students without turning a spotlight on 

them. 

 

Paul was also the only teacher to substantively discuss his religious and social class 

identities. Julie never discussed her religion and Rob talked about his Catholic upbringing in 

terms of his current rejection of that identity. In regards to social class, Rob and Julie both 

discussed growing up in middle class households. Julie referred to her own upbringing as “that 

middle class white family that most people relate to in some way” and recognized that she has a 

hard time thinking outside of how wealthy people would view things. Rob similarly notes that 

his family was always comfortable growing up and that social class was not something he 

 

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thought about much, outside of his own distaste for the wealth discrepancies that existed between 

students at Northrup. 

 

Key to understanding how and why participants implicated some identities and were able 

to distance themselves from others is the broader societal discourse that surrounds them. 

According to Foucault (1972) discourses are the means through which people make sense of the 

world and are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 49).  

Therefore, as participants construct their identities in and through the curriculum, they are 

simultaneously making claims about and working to understand those identities. Julie’s gender 

was implicated in part because she saw that element of her self as constantly being challenged by 

her male students and she recognized the ways in which women’s experiences are hardly 

represented in the history curriculum. Julie did not see herself possessing the same kind of 

authority her male colleagues had in relation to students. At the same time, she had her own 

uncertainties about what it means to be a woman and a feminist in the current context of the 

#metoo movement and calls for increased political action to confront the election of Donald 

Trump. Therefore, the conflict she felt in trying to construct and navigate her own identity as a 

woman found expression in the curriculum. Similarly, Rob’s racial/ethnic identity saw reflection 

in his desire to highlight the experiences of those who have been oppressed and casting a critical 

eye at the policies of the United States. Even though he questioned the degree to which his 

students recognized his racial identity, he still imbued the curriculum with his sense of self. In 

terms of gender, though, Rob (and Paul) did not have to think about being men because they 

already had perceived authority and spoke to students’ expectations about what kinds of teachers 

are highly knowledgeable.  

 

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Social class and religion rarely came up outside of Paul’s experiences, though. This may 

be because the identities that Julie and Rob felt in these moments was more reflective of the 

dominant discourse surrounding them. Growing up in a predominantly Christian country either 

as Christians or as people with knowledge of Christianity but lack of attachment to another 

identity, allowed religion to be distanced from Rob and Julie because their comfort with the 

dominant discourse, which is also reflected in the structure of public schooling, allowed them not 

make a connection between whatever degree of faith they each have and their curricular 

decision-making. Paul, while making deep connections between the attitudinal elements of his 

Christianity in regards to caring, was still able to claim that he did not connect his Christian 

identity to his teaching because he didn’t want to proselytize. In this case, the predominance of 

Christian discourse allowed Paul to implicate that identity while continuing to see it was 

distanced from his practice.  

 

Social class was similar, with a slight difference. Rob and Julie both struggled to think 

about how their social class background came into play in their classroom. This seems to be due 

to their backgrounds matching their students’ backgrounds. Both grew up in middle class homes 

and both taught in middle class schools, therefore there was no challenge to their class identity 

that would cause them to think about it. Paul, on the other hand, grew up in a working class 

neighborhood with parents who struggled financially. He taught, however, in a school where it 

was not uncommon for students to drive a better car than he had or to take vacations whenever 

there was a break. Therefore, Paul more willingly implicated his social class identity because of 

the tension between his own experience and the experiences of most of his students.  

 

 

 

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In this chapter, I sought to explore thee complex and interconnected ways that elements 

Conclusion 

of a teacher’s identity enter into a teacher’s curriculum. While the teachers in this study initially 

focused on who they were intellectually and how that connected to their work, elements of their 

socio-cultural selves, such as gender, race, religion, and social class, were also embedded in their 

content choices, pedagogy, and interactions with students. There were clear ways in which some 

elements of a teacher’s identity were more visibly at play, but it’s not as though one aspect of an 

identity functions at a time. Rather, it’s the ongoing intersection of multiples identities, 

intellectual and socio-cultural, that enter into the classroom. Power is at play through this process 

as one’s relation to broader societal discourses and the ways in which students construct the 

meaning of a teacher’s identity influence which identities are more directly implicated and which 

ones are distanced.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FOUR 

REMEMBRANCES OF LEARNING HISTORY 

 

Introduction 

This chapter explores participants’ engagement with memory, primarily in considering 

their own learning as students of history and the connection between those memories and their 

curricular decision-making in the present. In other words, the question posed is to what degree 

does one’s remembrance of learning history relate to how one teaches history? In considering 

this question, I am not aiming to claim causal connections from one’s past experiences to their 

present actions. Rather, using Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert’s (2000) conception of 

remembrance, I explore how the memories these teachers surface act as pedagogical moments 

meant to narrate who they are and/or want to be and justify their actions in the present. These 

acts of remembrance can also allow teachers to critically think about their own education in 

order to interrogate the influence their own learning has had on their teaching (Rothenberg, 

1994) as well as to investigate the degree to which elements of their own past, as learners, are 

relived in the present-day (Chang-Kredl and Wilkie 2016).  

 

I begin this chapter by looking at how my participants use their own pasts as learners in 

order to understand and give credence to how they teach, both through their own curricular 

decision-making as well as via their relationship to students. I then explore what gets forgotten in 

history education, in terms of their own experiences as students of history, from elementary 

school through college, as well as in relation to what they believe their own students will retain. 

Finally, I consider the implications that arise for history education related to memory’s potential 

 

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as a source of pedagogical inquiry, the kinds of learning that resonated with my participants as 

students and what they hope to enact in their own classrooms. 

Teachers’ Remembrance of Their Own History Education 

Memory, individual and/or collective is operationalized via remembrance, or how a 

memory is elicited, used, and understood in the present. To Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert (2000), 

remembrance is inherently pedagogical and “all formations of memory carry implicit and/or 

explicit assumptions about what is remembered, how, by whom, for whom, and with what 

potential effects” (p. 2). Therefore, the memories we elicit are laden with values and can be used 

to justify decisions and actions we view as desirable, as well as deny those we wish to avoid. In 

other words, what and how people remember (and forget) is important.  

In exploring participants’ remembrances, it is important to note, from a poststructural 

perspective, that we craft stories about ourselves that help us feel at peace with who we are and 

what we do. In these particular instances, the accuracy of the memories being recalled and 

operationalized is not important. Rather, it’s the process through which participants gives voice 

to their own experiences and provides through lines from those experiences to their own teaching 

that I wish to highlight. As Paul stated, unprompted, after discussing a memory related to why he 

became a history teacher: “whether that’s how it happened or not… my modern memory shapes 

that as more of a transformative moment.” In this section I am interested in those transformative 

moments. What is it about what and how these particular teachers remember that illuminates 

how they bring themselves into the curriculum? While it is possible that some of these memories 

may have a direct connection to the day-to-day activities of each teacher, there is just as much 

the likelihood that these memories serve as a representation of an element the participant may 

 

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have already held within themselves, perhaps unknowingly, and that they instead bolster an 

aspect of themselves that was already present.  

History is the Most Human Thing 

As a high school student, Rob was tracked in general education courses that included 

lecture-heavy history classes. Despite this, Rob enjoyed history and considered it his favorite 

subject, because, as he remarked, he did not have any other kind of history education to compare 

his against. It was not until his senior year, as a history major at a large, public university, that 

his conception of how history could be learned was challenged. It was during that year that Rob 

took a senior thesis course focused on slave resistance and rebellions of the antebellum period. 

This course differed from what he was used to because “it wasn’t the government’s policies, the 

war it was in, or the major era and what happened. It was human experience, the people whose 

stories you don’t hear.” Whereas his high school readings were just reiterated in the next day’s 

lecture, Rob had to be an active reader and participant in this class.  

I have to use the information and now we’re engaging in this discourse where my 

understanding is going to deepen. And that was a cool thing because you would leave 

class like, I thought I understood it, but then you engage and you’re like “oh wow, I 

missed some things or I understood that differently” or “I really did get that and I brought 

that to the table.” 

 

Rob’s remembrance of his senior thesis course draws out a theme of the importance of 

humanity when thinking about both history and the act of teaching, more broadly. When asked to 

discuss the memory of teachers who were formative to him, there was a consistent theme of his 

personhood being recognized. The first teacher he spoke about was his home economics teacher, 

Mrs. Jensen, who recognized his pain after his girlfriend broke up with him. Rob loves to cook 

 

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and while Mrs. Jensen helped inspire that in him, it was her caring nature and willingness to 

offer her classroom as a safe space for him that resonated the most. “She saw me as a person as 

well as her student,” Rob noted, “and that meant a lot.” Similarly, while remembering his senior 

methods instructor, Jaime, Rob acknowledged Jaime’s importance to his development as a 

teacher, but led with Jaime’s initial recognition of Rob’s Latino identity as an affirmative 

moment where an element of his identity that is often overlooked was recognized. Even when 

discussing his mother and her importance to his identity, Rob shared how, whenever he did 

something stupid, his mom would sit with him to talk things out. As a result, Rob “started to 

think of my actions and… understand that everything that I do has impacts on other people.” 

These examples demonstrate how Rob’s focus on humanity can be seen throughout his 

various remembrances. While I cannot make claims about where the importance of humanity for 

Rob comes from, it is clear that while such a focus may have been absent from his high school’s 

history courses, it was certainly present in important and formative relationships during 

schooling and in his home life. This theme is also expressed in Rob’s own teaching in myriad 

ways.  

Whereas Rob had had an engaging experience as a high school student in a lecture-based 

class, it was the humanity-based approach to history that he cites as transformative to him. This 

focus on humanity carried through to his day-to-day practice.  Rob often created opportunities 

for his students to think about complex issues related to the human experience of history because 

he saw the value in doing so. At the end of his unit on World War II, after a more typical class 

discussion about whether or not the United States met its war aims in dropping the atomic 

bombs, Rob used the picture book Hiroshima No Pika to stress the human side of the U.S.’s 

decision. The book, which is fiction, portrays the suddenness of the explosion and the traumatic 

 

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impact on those living in Hiroshima. After reading the book to the students, Rob had them get 

out their journals and record their thoughts and feelings about the book. After a brief discussion, 

Rob explained to the students that 

When we consider these monumental moments in history… we always have to come 

back to the central thing as being humanity and people. When we say that’s war, that’s 

what happens, that’s to make an acceptance of something that doesn’t have to be. It’s 

always important to consider the humanity, as well. 

Similarly, Rob also focused on the human elements of the Civil Rights Movement. 

During that unit, Rob used the example of the lynching of Emmett Till to drive home the 

destructive reality and legacy of racism in the United States. At the time of the unit, Rob’s school 

had been experiencing several instances of students using racial slurs in the hall, either directed 

at one another, or via jokes and song lyrics. On the second day of the Civil Rights Movement 

unit, Rob showed a clip about Emmett Till from the documentary Eyes on the Prize. When Till’s 

mutilated face was shown, Rob froze the image on the screen for two minutes. With the image 

on the board behind him, Rob told students “every time you use the n-word or make a racist joke, 

people think of this because this is the history it’s attached to.” Through this choice, Rob was 

trying to create a human connection to the consequences of racism and to impress on his students 

that the words they use have power. This was especially important for Rob who imagined his 

students becoming doctors in large cities having “not once considered what Black Americans go 

through.” His hope was to burst his students’ bubble and have them begin to understand the 

human impact of injustice. 

During the next lesson, Rob provided the class with a piece of art that depicted Emmett 

Till and Trayvon Martin together. As his students discussed the piece, Rob discussed how 

 

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Trayvon Martin was dehumanized by the media just as Emmett Till had been by his killers. 

“News organizations,” Rob explained, “were going through his Facebook and found a picture of 

him giving the middle finger. That was the picture they used. He was 17 and pretty big and 

maybe he was scary. They didn’t talk to his family members.” By bringing up the way the media 

shaped the narrative around Martin, Rob was seeking to restore his humanity. Instead of Martin 

being presented as a stereotypical scary black man, Rob repositioned him as an innocent child 

who was just another in a long line of lynched black children. 

 

On that day, Rob not only worked to humanize black youths who were the historical 

victims of racism, but also showed his own focus on being the caring and affirming teacher that 

he valued in his own education. After the bell rang, the lone African American student in the 

class, Evelyn, was still in her seat, sobbing. Rob immediately went to her side. Though, out of 

respect for their interaction, I did not listen in on their conversation, Rob later explained that he 

allowed her to feel what she was feeling and listened to what she was thinking about, then 

encouraged her that the purpose of the lesson was not to bring up these issues to her, but to help 

her personal knowledge of these kinds of experiences become shared knowledge to those who 

might not know they exist. 

 

The remembrance of these humanizing moments from Rob’s past, both in the content of 

history and through interactions with those who educated him, supports Rob’s own desire to 

recognize those that are often left out of history as well as the students he interacts with on a 

daily basis, both in terms of their identity and through their own engagement with the 

curriculum. While Rob seems to have a pre-existing disposition that lends itself to this kind of 

approach, his remembrance of his own schooling allows him to justify his belief that “history is 

the most human thing” by connecting it to his own experiences as a learner.  

 

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I’m Not Going to Teach It the Same Way She Did 

While remembrance can be a means of supporting the positive choices one makes, it can 

also be used as a justification for what one does not want to do or be. Unlike Rob, whose 

remembrance can be viewed as a means of positively justifying his approach to history, Julie’s 

remembrance serves as a reminder of the kind of teacher she does not want to be because she 

“never had good U.S. history teachers” and part of the reason she decided to become a teacher 

was because of questioning her teachers’ methods and asking herself “wouldn’t it have been 

better if [they’d] done it a different way?” Julie did mention having good teachers for other 

social studies subjects. Her mother was her World history teacher and Julie remembers it being 

an impactful experience due to the projects, discussions, and her mom’s propensity for telling 

historical stories full of interesting facts. For the purpose of this study, though, I will focus on 

Julie’s experience learning American history due to her own role as an American history teacher 

and the way she navigates that identity vis-à-vis her own remembrance.  

As an 8th grader, Julie had a teacher who primarily taught by having students take Cornell 

notes. Much like Rob, she did not have an issue with this approach as a student. Later in life, 

though, she felt angry that that’s how she learned U.S. history because “there were all of these 

interesting things that I didn’t understand or didn’t know how cool they were.” Julie cited the 

memory of a class field trip to Gettysburg where the only thing she remembers is the guide 

“telling us that that there were two people there and the rule was if someone was going to the 

bathroom, you didn’t shoot them.” Julie reported this memory was frustrating because “I didn’t 

know what [Gettysburg] was… and that’s a result of that style of teaching. It wasn’t made 

interesting for me and I didn’t know enough to make it interesting for myself.”  

 

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Ironically, Julie frequently mentioned wanting to be able to share fun facts with students, 

the tidbits of historical knowledge that are not commonly known and that her preferred teachers 

had an ability to weave in. While her memory from Gettysburg could certainly be considered a 

fun fact, it resonated for a different reason because it represents the limits of her learning; she 

had no context to connect the fact to. As a teacher, Julie is concerned about becoming like her 8th 

grade teacher. When assigning independent seat work, Julie explained “I always feel like I’m 

that teacher, like I’m sitting at my desk making them do this work. I have to tell myself it’s okay 

that once a week they sit down and do their work.” 

 

Julie’s remembrance of being an A.P. U.S. History student provides a more complex 

relationship with her past, primarily because her own A.P. U.S. History teacher, like her, was a 

young woman who was also in her second year of teaching. Julie mentioned that part of the 

problem with her A.P. U.S. History teacher was that  

it was always very clear that [the lessons she taught] were someone else’s and I don’t 

know that it was that she wasn’t prepared for it, but it was all surface-level and lecture 

and not much of us thinking historically, of us becoming better students… but I put 

greater pressure on myself because I don’t want my students to just have a lecture every 

day. 

According to Julie, when her teacher did try to move beyond lecture and include discussion in 

class, the results were still dismal. These discussions were “awkward” because “we hadn’t built 

up any norms and I don’t know if she knew her place in discussion, either,” she explained. 

Julie’s remembrance of her experience in that class was so bad that she said her first thought 

when her principal called to let her know that she was hired at Park Lake was “I’m not going to 

teach AP U.S. History the same way she did.” In general, Julie was very critical of her own 

 

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experience as a student in that class. Upon further reflection, though, she was able to empathize 

with elements of her teacher’s experience. “Now that I’m teaching,” she explained, “I recognize 

that there are definitely days where I go in and I’m very uncomfortable with the lesson I’m 

teaching because I just don’t feel I have the background knowledge to answer questions; I’m 

praying they don’t ask me questions….” Overall, Julie saw her own experience in American 

history classes as being sub-par, lacking in the kind of content and pedagogical processes that 

she best learned from. As a result, she saw herself as wanting to avoid similar approaches in her 

own teaching.  

Through her remembrance of her own AP U.S. History teacher and her identification 

with her teacher from having a similar demographic profile, Julie is able to imagine an alternate 

self that is ineffective at her job. She does mention that part of the reason why everything may 

have been more surface-level back then was because the test was different, however Julie also 

uses her remembrance as a means to give justification to her own lack of a senior AP teacher to 

mentor her. Julie is the only AP U.S. history teacher at Park Lake and although she may utilize 

online AP support groups as well as her mother and other former teachers, she does not have 

someone to go to and learn from in her own building. This particular narrative, though, allows 

Julie to see the benefit in that absence. Her former teacher who, in some ways is like Julie, was 

never comfortable in her lessons and was not as effective of a teacher. Julie, on the other hand, 

does not have anyone to be subservient to and therefore has to rely on herself to not fall into the 

same traps that her own teacher did. At the same time, Julie is able to critically look back and 

explain why classroom discussions did not go well – there were no norms. As a result, Julie 

spends time creating classroom discussion norms in order to avoid that same problem. Through 

the creation of those norms, Julie seeks to become invisible in her class discussions, allowing 

 

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them to be fully student-led (a goal not yet met), as opposed to the hyper-visible teacher who 

inexpertly controlled the class.  

The Slow Accumulated Progress of Learning 

 

As discussed in the prelude to this chapter, not all memories stem from our own 

experiences, nor do all memories of learning about the past or what it means to teach have to be 

from formal K-12 learning experiences. Paul serves as an example of both of these phenomena.  

When initially asked how he would characterize his K-12 history education, Paul responded 

“Yeah. I don’t remember it. I mean, it’s almost like a blip on the map. If you had asked me pre-

college… what was cool about history, I don’t know that I’d be able to tell you…” Paul’s 

university experiences were very different, though, and he credits the demystification of 

academic history and the resulting belief that he could be a historian to a professor’s 

remembrance. As Paul relates the story, he took a university history course where the professor 

told a story about a morning where he was reading a history text and making corrections as he 

read. When the professor’s wife entered the room, she asked what he was doing. The professor 

responded that he was correcting errors and that he was more than qualified to as he also had a 

PhD in history and had studied the subject matter. The result of hearing this story, according to 

Paul, “was like if a bolt of lightning struck me. Just the idea of being equal with people that had 

always been demigods. It was that moment that I was like ‘I, too, can be a historian.’”  

 

Through the preceding story, Paul recounts a moment of clarity, which had previously 

been lacking, that started him down the road of becoming a teacher. While he had been a good 

student in high school because he “didn’t have to try,” he struggled finding success at the 

university level. After first majoring in theater and then in ministry, Paul would often skip class 

and his grades faltered. Once he decided to be a teacher, though, all uncertainty was gone. As he 

 

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recounts: “Theater major? Struggle with grades. Minister? Struggle with grades. Teacher? I 

walked into my university and just A’s the whole way. Never missed a class. Everything was on 

time… There was no looking back.” The use of this remembrance allows Paul to create a 

narrative where he had an epiphany about the subject he was studying, followed by an epiphany 

about himself which then directly led to his success in college and feeling that teaching was a 

natural fit for him. 

 

Unlike Rob and Julie, Paul had a tendency to link his memories of learning about history 

back to popular culture. This is not surprising, as Paul is known to both his students and co-

workers as a reservoir for pop culture references, obscure and mainstream. When asked to share 

a memory, experience, or story about an impactful teacher, Paul cited George Feeney, the main 

teacher from the 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World. Paul saw a parallel between himself and Corey 

Matthews, the show’s protagonist, as they were roughly the same age when the show aired, and 

he admired how Mr. Feeny was not only a teacher, but a mentor to his students. As a pre-service 

teacher, Paul used a picture of Mr. Feeny on the binder for his educational philosophy class 

because Mr. Feeny “has this quote where he says education is not little tests and quizzes, it’s like 

the slow accumulated progress of learning.” The character’s quote was important to Paul because 

it’s the realization that he “may never see the fruit of what [he] did in the classroom because it 

might just be that moment I wasn’t even paying attention to.” His commitment to the idea of the 

slow accumulation of learning also speaks to Paul’s own journey into teaching. Through the fits 

and starts of his postsecondary education, Paul gradually came to the point where the factors that 

needed to combine did (teaching, after all does contain a fair amount of theater and ministry) and 

he is now in a place where is happy and feels professionally fulfilled.  

 

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Paul’s use of popular culture does not only relate to how he became a teacher. Most of 

the time when I asked Paul about what he learned in high school history, his answer was nothing 

or that he couldn’t remember any specifics outside of a couple memories that he shared. This 

was true not only regarding how he thought about teaching, but also how Paul learned about the 

past. Paul mentioned that he had no recollection of learning about the 1950s and 60s in school. 

Rather, Paul learned about it in bits and pieces over time, combining and making sense of the 

various sources he encountered: 

I grew up on Back to the Future and I’ve watched Happy Days and my parents were born 

in the 50’s. So I’ve been able to piece it together, I don’t really remember someone sitting 

me down and being like… “here’s the 1950s…” I love Better Homes and Gardens and 

stuff like that from the ‘50s and ‘60s and like, I think I just kind of studied a lot of that on 

my own. 

Paul was largely in charge of a 1950s Experience that his team ran for their students to 

learn about how the 1950s viewed itself, how the 1950s viewed the future, how the 1950s is 

viewed by the future, and what the realities of the 1950s are. Just as Paul gradually assembled an 

understanding of the 1950s, he asked his students to do the same. The only guidance they had in 

the activity was the four prompts outlined above. Through interacting with various popular 

culture, including issues of Better Homes and Gardens, students were to construct answers to 

those guiding questions. Paul, then, is bringing his self to bear on the curriculum. He did not 

have someone tell him what the 1950s meant and he’s not going to provide that for his own 

students. They instead were required to learn by interacting with non-traditional sources and by 

thinking about the time period from different angles, including a supercut that Paul created from 

clips of movies about the 1950s that were made later. This video included what Paul remembered 

 

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learning on his own as some of the major themes of the 1950s that have been taken up culturally: 

fast cars, cool music/dancing, and putting up a façade of perfection.  

Paul’s remembrances of learning history demonstrate the importance of collective 

memory or the way in which we create our own memories from others’ memories, to an 

individual’s remembrance. It is not Paul’s experience of questioning history that led him to 

teaching; it was the memory that his professor shared that led to his epiphany. Similarly, it is not 

one of Paul’s teachers who he remembers as an example of a good teacher in his life; it is a 

fictional character from a mid-90s sitcom that resonated with Paul. Our remembrance of the past, 

both our own and the cultural narratives that we take up or critique (such as Paul in the 

1950s/60s unit) is closely connected to the memories and experiences of those we interact with 

as well as the way that collective memory is instantiated in culture. Therefore, as Paul 

remembers, he remembers through a variety of sources. Rob and Julie take part in the same 

process, but it is through Paul that we see the clearest example of this process in action.  

Complicating the Narratives 

The narratives above illustrate the way that teachers may use a remembrance of their past 

experiences in order to justify their actions in the present and/or a vision of who they want to be 

as a teacher. The examples I provide might give the impression that there is a direct connection 

between how a person narrates their memories and how those are expressed in the present. 

Analyzing data using poststructural theory, though, exposes issues that complicate the 

relationship between a present-day remembrance of the past, which seeks to justify one’s actions 

in the present, and what happens in the classroom. The narratives that we create often focus on 

the positives to give a forward-moving momentum from Point A to Point B. When negatives are 

cited, they are often framed as a challenge overcome, a dark spot that can be used as a reference 

 

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point to make change. We see this phenomenon in American history classes with the widespread 

adherence to a narrative of the United States as a country of ever-expanding rights and continual 

progress. We know, though, that this narrative overlooks contradictory evidence that would 

complicate the story and create a more nuanced understanding of the topic, our history, and 

present character. Individuals can engage in the same process with how they narrate their own 

lives. This is neither a negative nor a positive; it is just a facet of the process of remembrance and 

how memory is taken up to present a particular version of ourselves. While I by no means aim to 

cast doubt on how my participants framed elements of their self in relation to teaching and the 

curriculum, I do want to complicate our understanding of how the process of remembrance 

occurs and in turn create a more nuanced understanding of how each teacher sees her/himself in 

relation to the curriculum. 

While Rob did not personally point out the theme of humanization/humanity in his 

remembrances, that element is found throughout his memories of being a student as well as the 

pedagogical choices he makes. This does not mean that he never deviates from that kind of 

understanding, though. As mentioned above, Rob chose to follow up a class discussion about the 

use of the atomic bomb in WWII with a reading of the story Hiroshima No Pika. After a brief 

discussion about student reactions, Rob re-directed the conversation to being about the book as a 

historical source, asking the class why it is “important and necessary as historians to take in both 

human and more objective perspectives.” The students mentioned that one could eliminate bias 

and learn a more comprehensive view. When asked what kind of bias people could develop by 

just reading Hiroshima No Pika, students responded that one could think “Americans are 

monsters” and would be ignorant of the reasons the United States dropped the bomb in the first 

place.  

 

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Similarly, Rob criticized the prompt they used for the American portion of the lesson’s 

discussion (“Was the use of the atomic bomb justified?) because it was too subjective. Rob 

specifically discussed this issue using the IB framework, claiming that it would make a bad 

internal assessment (a mastery assessment completed at the school level) because there is no 

source that would allow a student to quantitatively prove that argument. Much of Rob’s criticism 

of the question as an assessment stemmed from his uncertainty that a student could be capable of 

making a nuanced enough argument to argue the morality of the act one way or another. 

Therefore, while the question was a good prompt for verbal class discussion because there were 

so many avenues one could take, it was inappropriate for a written response, in his view, because 

the burden of evidence in an internal assessment is higher. 

 As discussed in the previous chapter, Rob prides himself on being a thinker and highly 

values reason, rationality and being open to a multitude of perspectives, all dispositions that he 

views as being important for engaging with history, but are absent from the memories that he 

speaks about. A tension emerges in Rob’s understanding of and approach to history because on 

the one hand, he wants students to delve into the humanity of those that lived in the past, a 

process that can often make it difficult to maintain distance, while on the other hand he wants 

them to be able to stand back and objectively consider the viewpoints in question.  

It is not an issue that Rob holds these potentially conflicting viewpoints, people often 

simultaneously hold many different perspectives. understanding the past is certainly a balancing 

act between being able to look at the big picture from a distance and to better understand 

historical actors on a human level. While he does not always do this, Rob specifically positions 

the discipline of history as something that needs to be objectively engaged and quantitatively 

measured, at least at times when fidelity to the discipline is merited. This is not to say that there 

 

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is not merit in that approach or that Rob is right or wrong in his thinking, just that his own 

actions and beliefs complicate the humanity narrative he has built for himself through his 

remembrances.  My point is that these tensions need to be brought to the fore and made sense of 

in order to see how they interact and what impact, if any, the potential mixed signals have on 

students. This is especially true in the case of World War II as Rob’s preferred objective prompt, 

which would have had students answer whether or not the use of the atomic bomb was effective 

at reaching U.S. war aims, could allow for the erasure of the Japanese perspective, which is 

unnecessary for answering that question.  

While Julie is able to use the remembrance of her own AP U.S. history experience as a 

template for what not to do, she overlooks the way that she is implicated in doing several of the 

same things her teacher did. For example, one of the reasons why Julie did not think her AP 

teacher was effective was because “she didn’t know the content, she didn’t know how to teach 

this style class” and “was making [connections] right along with us.” When discussing her own 

struggles and development as an AP teacher, though, Julie explained how the previous year “was 

interesting because [she] learned right along with [students].” “I was pretty open with them about 

it,” she explained, “that it had been a long time since I took it and we were going to learn about it 

together.” Furthermore, Julie also explained that “it’s very difficult to figure out what I need to 

teach and what the students need to learn on their own.”  

As a further example, Julie often does not feel confident in her content knowledge. She 

attributes part of this to her own experience as a learner, where she would get frustrated by 

teachers who felt “they were right no matter what” and viewed issues as being black or white. On 

the other hand, she also had teachers “didn’t know what they were doing,” which was also 

frustrating because “[they’re] supposed to be the one that knows this.” Consequently, Julie tries 

 

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to reach a middle ground where she can admit that she does not know something, if there is time 

to find an answer and have resolution. Otherwise, she might “steer the conversation away from 

the things [she doesn’t] know.” Julie admits that not knowing information is scary but that “it’s a 

better classroom because of it” as “it gives [students] a little more flexibility in how they 

interpret things.” 

Julie uses the remembrance of her own experience as an AP U.S. history student to think 

critically about her own education and use those experiences as a means to shape her own 

teaching in the present. In setting out the ways that she is different from her AP teacher, Julie 

overlooks that their similarities may extend past the parallel that they are both young women in 

their second year of teaching. Julie marks herself as uncertain, yet ultimately competent; she is 

able to search out resources, rely on others, and take advantage of the ways the AP curriculum 

has been updated in the past few years to create a more compelling and, hopefully, student-

centered class. Because she has outlined these differences, she does not seemingly dig deeper 

and work to understand how their parallel experiences may have otherwise compared and think 

about what lessons may lie in those similarities. 

In a similar vein, Paul’s own forgetting and reluctance to engage in remembering 

overlooks his own slow accumulation of knowledge. Just as Julie may be unwilling or unable to 

see multiple parallels between her and her teacher, Paul’s inability to remember what he learned 

as a K-12 history student overlooks the process that he implicates himself in as a teacher, namely 

that education is not about pinpointing a specific moment when you learned a discrete fact as 

evidenced by success on an assignment or a test, but that knowledge builds, layer after layer over 

time, often in ways that are not immediately recognized.  

 

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Each of the teachers in this study draw upon their own memories in ways that help 

legitimize their actions in their present-day classrooms. While none of the participants seemingly 

teaches in ways he or she was taught, there are ways in which they avoid the kind of critical 

engagement with their memories of learning that Rothenberg (1994) views as an important 

component of challenging Lortie’s (1975) “apprenticeship of observation.” Rob, Julie and Paul 

may not teach like they were taught but there is potential to further develop their understanding 

of the connection between their own experiences as students and their actions as teachers.  

Things Forgotten, Things Remembered 

Rob, Julie and Paul all used memories in ways that reinforced their conceptions of what it 

means to be a teacher with many of their memories relating to interpersonal connections they had 

with teachers or experiences that happened in college or after. One of the most surprising 

findings in this study was the fact that, as high school history teachers, neither Rob, Julie, nor 

Paul had vivid memories of their own high school history education. Each participant struggled 

to identify what exactly they remembered from their own history education and lacked more than 

one or two vivid memories of their high school classes. Rather, their content knowledge either 

came from university-level experiences or during the course of their professional career. It was 

experiences outside of school or exposure to new ways of thinking that made them reconsider 

what history meant to them and could mean to others. In this section, I will explore the role that 

forgetting plays in thinking about the kinds of experiences that were impactful for my 

participants. Of course, it is impossible for me to know what my participants actually forgot 

because I was not present for their initial experiences, nor can I be fully sure that the experiences 

they told me about were the only experiences they remembered. However, it is possible to fill in 

the holes of what was forgotten by thinking about what was remembered and to explore what 

 

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impact, if any, that has on how each teacher thinks about their own curricular and pedagogical 

choices.  

The Meaning of Forgetting 

After Julie was hired at Park Lake, she was required to attend an AP training seminar in 

order to be qualified to serve as the school’s AP U.S. History teacher. While sitting at the 

seminar, teachers started discussing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. “I was like ‘I don’t 

even know what that is. How am I going to teach this?” Julie reported. As a result, she had to 

learn about the time period on her own, an experience that led it to become one of her favorite 

units to teach. When I asked Julie why she thinks she forgot that time period, she explained: 

I’m wondering if part of the reason I don’t remember that information is that I was so 

focused on [figuring out the AP format] that I had that information at the time of the test 

but it disappeared after that. 

While Julie does not remember specifically learning about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 

she imagines that her teacher had lectured on the topic, as that was the primary pedagogical 

strategy she used.  

 

Julie’s remembrance of forgetting about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era illustrate 

several ways in which remembering and forgetting are intertwined and how the teachers in this 

study made use of their inability to remember their own experiences as high school students. 

First, forgetting about the existence of the time period forced Julie to learn about it on her own. 

This experience led the time period to resonate more with her because she explored her own 

interests and had an epiphany about the cause/effect relationship of the Gilded Age and 

Progressive Era, a moment she views as having positively impacted how she teaches the topics. 

Ultimately, Julie’s forgetting was beneficial to her and her students. Second, Julie’s inability to 

 

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recall how she learned about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era caused her to conjecture how 

she must have learned about it, through lecture. Even though Julie does not have memories of 

lessons about that time period, she creates a sort of stand-in memory that fits her overall 

narrative about her own experience as an AP student (that her teacher was inept and primarily 

lectured). Finally, Julie’s remembrance points us in the direction of the nature of what 

participants did and did not remember about their own history education, which can be used to 

think about their own teaching as well as broader lessons for the field.  

 

Rob and Paul engaged in similar kinds of thinking about the experiences and topics they 

forgot. Much like Julie, Rob ultimately saw a benefit in not having developed strong content 

knowledge as a result of his own education: 

I really didn’t have that knowledge base, so I probably would have come across as a little 

uneducated about things that are supposed to be important… Once I’d gone through all 

these teacher prep programs and I’d learned about history in a nuanced way, I then could 

approach and learn this new material. At the end of the day, not knowing much about the 

content actually helped because then I learned about it and found what I want to get 

across to the kids. 

Again, it’s not a negative to Rob that there’s not much that he can remember from his own K-12 

history education because knowledge that he gained from his teacher prep courses challenged 

him to think about history in more complex ways, which allowed him to think about content in a 

way that would be more targeted towards his students.  

Rob also made assumptions about how he learned about World War II. Although he did 

not specifically remember his experiences, the preponderance of lecture and his being tracked in 

a lower class led him to think that unit was “this battle, this battle, this battle. Here’s how we 

 

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won. Let’s watch Pearl Harbor.” Again, in the absence of a memory, Rob created a narrative that 

fit his existing conception of what his own education had been like. In the case of the Civil 

Rights Movement, though, Rob claimed that he did not have any traditional academic learning 

experience about it. Instead, he suggested that it’s one of those topics “that almost feels like 

common knowledge. It’s almost one of those things that just feel like ‘when didn’t I know about 

it?” Rob claims that despite not having formally learned about the Civil Rights Movement, by 

the time he got to college he could explain the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and 

Malcolm X’s ideology and that he felt as though he had always known King’s “I Have a Dream” 

speech. While it’s entirely possible that Rob could have picked up understandings of those 

concepts from the cultural milieu, it might be that he forgets learning about those topics due to 

his own affinity for the material. Perhaps he sees his understanding as stemming from within as 

opposed to being explained to him by someone else.  

Participants had a wide range of answers when asked why they think they forgot about 

their history education. Julie wondered if she didn’t remember history because her classes “made 

sense, because they were easy.” Unlike her history courses, Julie remembered AP chemistry and 

AP English because they took her out of her comfort zone and challenged her to confront her 

own limits and recognize her growth as a student. These challenges were absent from her history 

classes and she sees the lack of discomfort contributing to her forgetting. For Rob, it was because 

he was in lower tracked classes with students who were not fully engaged with the material, 

including himself. The classes he remembered were ones where learning was accomplished 

through doing, such as home economics, or where he saw information that was applicable to how 

he could understand the world, like statistics.  

The reasons why Paul forgot influences him as a teacher because: 

 

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The day-to-day isn’t important. It’s a slow gradual build-up of information over time, it’s 

precept upon precept, layer upon layer, you add to yourself. And so much of school as a 

student is literally a blur. 

He added by making a connection to his own teaching: 

I know for a fact that most of those students who walked out of Econ today aren’t going 

to remember that lecture. They’re going to forget it like five seconds after they get out of 

there. But it’s, “Did Mr. K. [Paul] listen to us and change the format? He cared. He stood 

up there and explained things,” you know, little stuff. 

To Paul, the ability to pinpoint a moment when something was learned is irrelevant because 

learning is cumulative and ongoing. As discussed earlier in this chapter, he views it as quite 

possible that he will never quite know what his students will learn because it may be a moment 

that he wasn’t paying attention to.  

 

Julie and Rob also contended with how their own students will forget, just like they did. 

Julie believes that the students will end up having a similar experience to her, where: 

they’ll remember a lot of the early stuff. We spent a lot of time on that. They’ll remember 

a lot of the end because it’s relevant to their daily lives. I’m guessing they’ll have a 

similar experience that I did, that {The Gilded Age/Progressive Era] was just somewhere 

in the middle and I think people forget 1800-1920. 

Rob, though, did not as easily see why students would forget, only that they would. He ended 

one of his interviews with what he saw as a humorous anecdote about some of his former 

students: 

We were looking at the impact on two civilian populations during World War II and this 

group of seniors had a quiz about it and they all did poorly and the excuse was that I 

 

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didn’t teach about WWII in sophomore year. I thought that was such a funny, interesting 

justification of why you didn’t do well on a quiz in your senior year is because two years 

[before] I mysteriously didn’t teach about World War II. Like for six weeks you were 

asleep or I was doing such a poor job that you think we didn’t learn about it. 

Unlike Paul and Julie, Rob does not quite see the process that he went through applying to his 

own students. Even though I believe he told the story because we had been discussing what he 

imagined his teachers hoped he had taken from their class, he did not make the connection that 

his students would only remember bits and pieces of their time together, just as he had. Rob’s 

inability to see that his own students could be capable of forgetting is Britzman’s (1998) concept 

of difficult knowledge at work. As Garrett (2017) notes, engagement with difficult knowledge 

“means being able to recognize that there is knowledge we simultaneously do and do not want to 

have” (p. 24). On the one hand, Rob recognizes that his students forgot what they learned in his 

class. He is able to recall the story and his need to share it before ending that day’s interview 

signals that that experience holds significance to him. On the other hand, Rob’s telling of the 

story is marked with disbelief. The reason why this anecdote seems difficult for Rob to contend 

with is not necessarily that his students forgot information, it’s that their inability to recall what 

they learned potentially marks Rob as having done “a poor job.” As Rob does not want to view 

himself as a bad teacher, he seemingly recalls the story as a funny example of how students will 

make excuses that don’t, to him, make any sense. 

What Gets Remembered? 

So if most of their K-12 history education was forgotten, what did the participants in this 

study actually remember? Both Rob and Julie recalled projects, though as Julie noted she doesn’t 

really know how much she learned from the construction of a large, 3-dimensional map of 

 

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ancient Rome but it made her interested in the topic. All three participants also remembered 

teachers who were engaging, caring, or who did funny things, like Paul’s government teacher 

who looked like and did impressions of Robin Williams.  

It is not surprising that projects and personalities would be remembered. Many of us still 

have material evidence of projects we completed as children tucked away in our (or our parents’) 

basement or attic, and swapping stories about teachers good, bad, and weird is a time-honored 

tradition seemingly shared by everyone, as school is a fairly universal experience. The 

experiences that really resonated with my participants, though, were the ones that Rob described 

as being based on “humanity and community.” Rob particularly remembered watching films and 

reading narratives, what he described as “non-traditional ways of understanding history.” Movies 

stuck with him because he was a visual learner, but the experience of watching Schindler’s List, 

The Pianist, and reading the work of Elie Wiesel allowed him to see the “narrative, human story 

side of things.” In the case of learning about the Holocaust, these experiences allow him to no 

longer see the impact in terms of “this number, six million Jews,” but to instead see it as “six 

million of those stories.” 

Similarly, the primary memory Paul had of his American history education was the day 

his teacher invited in a Vietnam veteran to talk about his experience in the war. In remembering 

a class where Paul claimed he could not remember anything, he said that he could tell the vet’s 

story verbatim. Paul went on to describe the vet’s story about being deployed and being told that 

his group would be able to go home if X number of casualties have occurred. The moment that 

stuck with Paul was when the vet asked the class how they thought he felt when he found out 

about a soldier dying. “I was happy,” Paul remembered the vet saying, “because we were one 

more closer to being done. That’s a terrible way to feel about life.” Much like Rob, Paul’s 

 

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example stresses the humanity and complex emotional experience of having lived through a war, 

an experience that was so powerful for Paul that it is more or less the sole thing he remembers 

about learning history in high school, almost twenty years after the fact.  

Discussion 

 

Throughout this chapter, I’ve used Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert’s (2000) conception of 

remembrance to look at how participants narrated their own learning as history students and the 

connection such narratives have to justifying their own vision of who they are as teachers in the 

present. Julie, Rob and Paul all demonstrated that connections do exist and that memories are 

operationalized through the act of remembrance to make claims about who each is or wants to 

be. However, this process is not necessarily straightforward, and I can not claim that a teacher 

engages in a specific action because they elicited a particular memory that reinforces it. I also 

cannot claim that the memories that participants elicited are representative of the scope of what 

they actually remember. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, there may be memories that teachers 

repress or choose not to discuss because they do not want to contend with their implication. I 

also explored what participants forgot about their history education and the insight that can be 

gleaned from their omissions and what they remember in light of their forgetting.  

Most research about the relationship between teacher identity and memory uses a 

psychoanalytic framework. Chang-Kredl and Wilkie (2016), for example, have teachers create 

narratives of a childhood memory to create a space where “the teacher can look back in nostalgic 

identification with his/her remembered child self and forward to an anticipated identification” 

related to the adult the child will one day become (p. 317). That is, that, from a psychoanalytic 

perspective, teachers are psychically working out elements of their own pasts in the present-day 

context of their classroom. Rothenberg (1994), on the other hand, sees engagement with one’s 

 

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memories of learning as a space to combat Lortie’s (1975) “apprenticeship of observation” and 

to engage more deeply in interrogating and understanding how one’s personal experience as a 

student impacts an individual’s teaching. In both studies, there is a belief that the memories one 

holds have a connection to present-day actions. The elicitation of memories can help surface that 

influence and help a teacher more critically understand how they conceptualize their field or 

make pedagogical decisions.  

 

The work in this study deviates from this existing research. Largely, this is due to 

methodological differences. Memory work, as currently conceptualized, often focuses on having 

teachers create written narratives that they revise and then, in working with others, make sense of 

by looking at themes that may connect to today. As this study was not entirely focused on 

memory work and because I was interested in how teachers remembered in real time, I chose to 

instead elicit memories through questions that the participants had not been previously provided. 

I thought, and still think, that there is much to be gained from understanding what immediately 

comes to a person’s mind in their telling of the past, just as there is something to be gained from 

engaging in a more focused, written remembrance.  

 

What is evident, though, is that the participants in my study did not engage their own 

memories in ways that spurred them to critically reflect on their own experience, either as a way 

to understand how they engage in a repetition of their own experiences or as a means to critically 

analyze the “apprenticeship of observation,” nor would they have necessarily engaged in 

memory work without the prompting of my questions. Out of my three participants, Julie perhaps 

was closest to doing this type of work. Her remembrance of her own AP U.S. History experience 

led her to critique the problematic, in her view, features of her own education, such as over-

reliance on lecture and a lack of clarity in class discussion protocol, and to consciously work to 

 

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avoid those same pitfalls. However, she was not able to recognize the parallels given an 

opportunity in the conversations we had. It would be interesting to see how participants’ 

understanding of why they elicited the memories they did and how those remembrances justify 

their actions in the present would change if they took part in more focused memory work. 

 

One of the most fascinating findings to emerge from this study was that none of my 

participants, all history teachers with degrees related to their field, could remember much of their 

own K-12 history education. This was especially remarkable given that Rob and Julie graduated 

from high school less than ten years ago. On the one hand, this finding, especially as it relates to 

what participants did remember, points to the need to further explore the kinds of pedagogical 

approaches that resonated with participants and why those approaches had such an impact. On 

the other hand, there is also a need to understand the relationship between teachers’ own 

experiences and what they project their students will and won’t remember.  

 

In considering the kinds of pedagogical experiences that participants remembered, three 

trends emerged. First, participants tended to report activities where they learned through doing. 

In their history classes, projects and simulations resonated with them, though both Julie and Rob 

raised the importance of interrogating whether a project or simulation is remembered because it 

was fun or because it had deeper educational merit. Second, engagement with texts that added an 

emotional and human understanding of history were powerful. This was evident in Rob’s 

discussion of the various Holocaust-related movies he saw and their impact on helping him 

simultaneously recognize the large scale of the Holocaust while illustrating the specific impact 

that event had on the individual victims.  Similarly, Paul’s remembrance of the Vietnam 

veteran’s troubling story of being happy to hear when his fellow soldiers died demonstrates a 

kind of historical understanding not typically found in sources used in history classes. Finally, 

 

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the experiences they remembered, often not within the realm of a history class, were those that 

challenged them and took them outside their comfort zones. Often, this theme was talked about 

in terms of their learning. Julie, for example, had to confront the challenge of learning how to 

write in her AP English class and she struggled in AP chemistry. There is also the struggle, 

though, where one’s understanding of the surrounding world is challenged. Too often, history 

classes provide answers that can be located in a textbook passage, overlooking the way in which 

historical claims are constructed and, in the case of K-12 education, often stripped of their more 

controversial elements. The findings from this chapter point to the potential of restoring those 

challenges and that uncertainty in order to facilitate learning that goes beyond the end of the unit. 

 

However, it is also important to think about the tension/difficulty that potentially exists 

when teachers who don’t remember their own learning have to confront the nature of what their 

own students will or won’t remember after being in their class. The participants in this study 

recognized this possibility in various ways. For Julie, it was logical that her students would not 

remember learning about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, just as she hadn’t, because it fell 

in a time period that is often culturally forgotten. Paul’s belief in the slow, accumulated progress 

of learning signaled awareness that he might not see the fruits of his labor. Rob, on the other 

hand, expressed disbelief that students who had only had him two years prior could completely 

forget that he had taught them about World War II. All three of these responses signal different 

ways that teachers cope with the potential limitations of their own impact and the disconnect 

between feeling as though they can’t remember what they learned, yet having faith that their 

approach to teaching will result in lifelong memories. Further exploration into this idea could 

result in more nuanced engagement with how teachers understand their own learning and what 

that means for their approach to teaching.  

 

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In closing, interrogating participants’ memories of their own learning allows for insight 

Conclusion 

into how teachers may narrate their memories in order to justify elements of who they are in the 

classroom today. In addition, these remembrances provide insight into how teachers learned as 

history students and how their own experiences as learners connect to the pedagogical choices 

they make in their own classrooms. Further engagement with the ideas raised in this study can 

more directly involve teachers in interrogating the impact their memories have on their identity 

as teachers and the long-term influence they see themselves having on students. In addition, it 

can also lead to a more complex view of the kind of learning experiences that teachers were 

impacted by and what, if any links, those memories have on teacher practice.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIVE 

EXTERNAL FACTORS 

 

In this chapter, I explore external factors related to how elements of the self connect to 

Introduction 

 

the curriculum. Specifically, I look at how teachers construct elements of their identity via the 

way in which they think about the explicit curriculum of their school and/or program, their 

conception of what it means to be a historian, and their perceptions about who their students are. 

By engaging in this analysis, I follow Segall’s (2003) poststructural examination of the Michigan 

Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) and the discourses and discursive practices that 

surround it. Segall argues that “the meaning of the MEAP is not considered… as simply ‘out 

there’ waiting for teachers to decipher it, but constructed by teachers as they interact with it and 

with the discursive practices that go along with it” (p. 292).  In this chapter, I seek to understand 

how teachers constitute themselves in relation to the various external factors they encounter in 

the day-to-day realities of teaching. Like Segall, I argue that these external factors do not hold 

meaning in and of themselves, but rather it is how teachers perceive and navigate the discourses 

that surround these external factors that have an impact. Such understanding can provide a 

clearer picture of when and where teachers see themselves having agency in their work, as well 

as the way that the discourses of these external factors are navigated and the resulting impact 

they have on how a teacher imagines what is and isn’t possible in their teaching. I begin the 

chapter by exploring how participants constructed themselves in light of the explicit curriculum 

they were each tasked with implementing. I then consider the role that conceptions of the nature 

of the discipline one teaches has on teaching. Threaded through both of these themes are the 

 

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perceptions about the character and needs of students that position teachers to enact their 

identities in particular ways.  

The Curriculum Giveth and the Curriculum Taketh Away 

Chief among the pedagogical constraints that teachers might feel is the explicit 

curriculum they are required to teach. The explicit curriculum of a school, or the official goals 

and objectives intended to be taught (Eisner, 1985), is usually adapted from standards and 

guidelines that have been adopted by the state. The participants in this study, though, used three 

different curriculum formats that deviated from the more typical process: The Advanced 

Placement curriculum (Julie), the International Baccalaureate Program (Rob) and a curricular 

adaptation process unique to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program (Paul). Explicit curriculum 

can certainly impact what gets taught and how, but how it is enacted is further mediated by the 

context of the school in which it is being taught, including the degree of academic freedom one 

has and the amount of pressure from parents and students one feels. Conceptions of the impact of 

the explicit curriculum varied both within and among participants’ experiences. At times, it 

helped facilitate meaningful learning experiences that were an expression of an element of the 

teacher’s own identity, while at others it was an obstacle that created a time crunch and a need to 

keep moving forward through required content. In this section, I focus on how Julie and Rob 

conceptualized their relationship to their respective curriculum programs and the way in which 

their perceptions of the discourses around their curriculum simultaneously allowed them to 

accomplish and kept them from achieving.  

The Top of the Ladder 

 

Julie saw her status as an AP teacher as a positive indicator of who she was as an 

educator because, according to her, people who teach AP are “always the good teachers; they’re 

 

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the ones the kids love.” However, Julie also felt “restricted by the curriculum framework for AP” 

because “there’s still so much to cover that I feel like sometimes it’s… a topic a day.” Instead of 

focusing on breadth, Julie wanted to be able to “dive into topics,” so students could develop a 

more nuanced understanding of the past.   

 

From the outset, these two statements illustrate a discursive tension that Julie experienced 

through her perception of the AP curriculum. On the one hand, the status Julie saw conveyed to 

her as an AP teacher allowed her to construct an image of being a good teacher who was skilled 

and had a close relationship with her students. Simultaneously, though, the AP curriculum 

inhibited Julie from being the kind of teacher she desired because the quick pace and assessment-

based focus of the class led to an inability to explore topics more in-depth. In this section, I focus 

on how Julie’s perceptions of the AP curriculum both positioned it as an obstacle to her 

curricular goals and allowed her to focus on interests that were important to her.  

 

Julie’s interactions with the AP curriculum reflect Foucault’s (1980) conception of 

power, with Julie at times being constituted by the power she perceived the AP curriculum 

having over her curricular decision-making and at other times exerting her own power either 

against, or in tandem with, the discourse of the AP curriculum. Julie’s AP curriculum was an 80-

page document that included 55 pages of standards intended to be covered prior to students 

taking the AP exam in early May. The high number of standards and short timeline for covering 

them reflects the discourse of Advanced Placement classes; these are considered college-level 

courses and in the conception of AP, that means that coverage is fast, largely factual, and 

independent learning is a key to success.  Even though the AP curriculum was demanding, Julie 

felt she did “get a little bit of say” in her classroom, especially in relation to how she wanted to 

organize the curriculum. The year prior to the study, Julie had been frustrated by the official 

 

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order of the units because, as someone who positioned herself as an organizer, the units did not 

flow well into one another, especially, in her opinion, when it came to student knowledge 

retention. As a result, Julie shifted the order of the units. This change allowed her to further 

insert herself in the curriculum as she positioned the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in a 

cause/effect relationship and “picked things that would demonstrate that relationship,” thus 

reflecting “the way [she] think[s] about this time period.” In this case, Julie’s view that the AP 

curriculum did not precisely lay out how to teach worked to her advantage as she was able to 

impart her own understanding on the interrelationship of elements in the curriculum.  

 

While Julie felt restricted by the curriculum, she still created space for her own interests 

and strengths to come through. When asked, in the context of her Progressive Era unit, how she 

decided which content to include in a unit and which to leave out, Julie replied  

I don’t know if this is a good teaching method or not, but I pick the [content] that I like. I 

pick the things that I know, mainly because I enjoy teaching them, but also I feel like my 

kids will get more out of it if I enjoy it or if I understand it. 

Here, Julie recognizes her own agency in making selections about what to teach. It is somewhat 

surprising that the requirements of the AP curriculum are not even mentioned. Rather, Julie 

focuses on the content that interests her. Even though it is her own interests that she is selecting, 

Julie argues that students will get more out of the class because she will be more motivated to 

teach what she likes, as opposed to focusing on information she does not fully understand or 

enjoy.  

When it came to her World War II unit, though, Julie explained her choices in terms of 

the AP curriculum and her students. Julie explained that she asked herself “what do I think is 

going to be important on the test? What do I think they can understand without my guidance?” 

 

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Even though she placed importance of her curricular choices in terms of the AP test and her 

students’ abilities, Julie still chose material that connected with her own interests. Julie discussed 

her almost complete exclusion of the course of the war, explaining “I don’t enjoy teaching 

[battles] at all… and it’s something the curriculum doesn’t’ spend a lot of time on. It basically 

says they need to know what island hopping is and about D-Day.” Julie also couched her 

inclusion of the Arsenal of Democracy as a result of her own experience taking a college-level 

Michigan history course. In these examples, Julie initially situates her curricular decision-making 

in relation to the AP curriculum; the curriculum says, after all, that only two elements related the 

course of the war that have to covered.  Even though Julie starts by positioning her decision-

making in relation to the AP curriculum, she shifts her rationale to include that her choices 

reflect her own interests. Therefore, Julie uses AP curriculum to dictate her decision-making at 

times when it is advantageous to use the AP as rationale for certain decisions. In the case of 

World War II, a stricter reading of the AP curriculum supported Julie’s decision to not teach 

about specific battles, which reflected her own interests. She couldn’t teach about specific 

battles, after all, because they weren’t specified in the explicit curriculum. At other times, Julie 

exerted her own power to circumvent the curriculum, as was the case when a loose interpretation 

of the AP curriculum allowed Julie the flexibility to focus on the topics that she wanted to and 

that made sense to her during the Progressive Era, as well as assert her own organizational 

tendencies. The curriculum served a dual purpose as facilitator and inhibitor, both roles that, in 

these cases, helped Julie make the curriculum choices she wanted to implement. 

 

While Julie saw the freedom to insert herself and select topics that she wanted to focus 

on, she also saw the AP curriculum inhibiting her pedagogical choices. In the first lesson of her 

Progressive Era unit, Julie displayed an excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and read a 

 

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short passage depicting the graphic nature of the Chicago meatpacking industry. In our 

discussion at the end of the unit, Julie explained that she wished she could have students read 

The Jungle. When I asked her why she couldn’t, she explained that it wouldn’t be worth taking 

so much time to read the book because “it’s a question on the test.” “In the end game of the AP 

test,” she argued, “I don’t know that it’s beneficial to take that much time to read The Jungle, 

even though I feel like most kids would probably enjoy it.” In this example, Julie sees worth in 

having the students take a deeper dive into a motivating cause of Progressive Era reforms; in 

fact, she has a class set of books, which indicates one of her predecessors did just that. However, 

Julie adopts the discourse of the AP curriculum that the focus should be on test preparation, 

where historical events or texts are reduced to a multiple-choice item or essay question. Instead 

of asserting what students stand to gain from reading the book, Julie positions it as what they 

have to lose; the instructional time dedicated to the book wouldn’t be worth the “pay-off” of how 

the book is potentially represented on the AP exam. The implication is that time spent 

developing a deeper understanding of reform movements in the food industry would result in 

time missed learning about other topics, which would then be detrimental to students’ ability to 

perform well on the test.  

 

Even though she claimed that she did not have time to read The Jungle during the 

Progressive Era unit, Julie expanded the unit by one and a half days in order to accommodate her 

lesson on the contemporary women’s rights movement (as detailed in Chapter 3). This decision 

was an outgrowth of her own struggle to understand the movement, related to issues of identity, 

and also because she believed her students to be experiencing a similar struggle in understanding 

the meaning of the contemporary movement. Whereas The Jungle couldn’t be used because of its 

weak relation to the test, Julie had students spend an extra day and a half of instructional time 

 

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creating their textbook excerpts. Recognizing this disconnect is not meant to criticize her 

pedagogical choice, as it does, after all, take much longer to read a novel as a class than it does to 

work on a small project. Rather, what’s interesting about the choice is that when Julie avoided 

the possibility of teaching The Jungle, an issue that might have its roots in potential uncertainty 

over how to teach a book, it was because the AP curriculum inhibited her from doing so. 

However, when Julie wanted to extend instructional time to deal with a topic of that she saw 

reflective of her own uncertainties, she was able to expand the amount of curricular time given to 

the project, even though there was no way that material could possibly be on the test.  

 

Julie also frequently discussed her desire to cede more control of the class to her students, 

wanting to have more student-led discussions and projects. Once again, the discourse of the AP 

curriculum was positioned as inhibiting her from doing so. When asked why she could not cede 

control, Julie responded “it’s hard for me to say, with the AP test in mind, they may not 

understand every single thing that they need to understand.” Julie used the AP curriculum to 

explain why she could have a more student-centered class. It was the specter of the AP exam that 

haunted her pedagogical decisions and kept her from changing her approach and not her own 

uncertainty about her students’ ability to take responsibility for their own learning, a hesitation 

she also expressed. This uncertainty cycled back around and connected to the AP test again as 

Julie felt pressure from her students to deliver a certain kind of course as “they took this class to 

get college credit, not change their understanding of U.S. history.” Therefore, the AP curriculum 

not only structured her understanding of what could and could not happen within the realm of an 

AP class, but it also positioned her students in certain ways. Students in Julie’s class were both 

immature enough to be trusted with more control over their learning in the class, yet mature 

enough to take a class that relied heavily on students taking responsibility for learning material 

 

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on their own. This dual conception was reinforced by the AP curriculum. In order to ensure that 

students got the experience they wanted, one that would lead to college credit, Julie had to 

maintain control to deliver the test preparation she believed they required to pass the test.   

 

Julie simultaneously constructed herself, via discourses surrounding the AP curriculum, 

as a good teacher who had made it by her identity/status as an AP teacher, as well as a teacher 

who fell short of her goals of a discussion-based, student-centered class focused on in-depth 

engagement with the curriculum due to AP’s onslaught of information. Julie used the curriculum 

to reflect her interests but ultimately taught in ways that reinforced a vision of AP education as 

dependent upon a succession of quick, surface-based understandings of a litany of topics as well 

as a need for students to succeed on the test.  

The Dog and Pony Show  

 

Rob was my other research participant who taught within a very rigid explicit curriculum 

Whereas Julie centered her criticisms of AP in the AP curriculum itself, Rob perceived that the 

issues in his experience weren’t due to the IB curriculum, but due to the challenges of having a 

common curriculum across three campuses as well as what the IB curriculum was perceived to 

represent to parents and school officials. Like Julie, Rob navigated his curriculum in ways that 

allowed him to express elements of his identity, but unlike Julie, Rob did not necessarily take 

issue with how the IB curriculum discursively shaped him, but rather how the discourses that 

surrounded how his administrators and his students’ parents perceived the IB did.  

 

At its core, Rob felt there was congruence between his personal vision for education, 

(focused on developing students’ understanding of themselves, the structure of the world they 

live in and an ability to recognize their own role and ability in making the world more just), and 

 

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the vision set forth by the IB curriculum. “In its truest sense,” Rob told me, “the IB curriculum is 

beautiful.” He continued: 

The goal of the learner profile and creating these well-rounded students who… [are] 

thinkers, communicators, principled, like, yeah, 100%... [and] not just being a bookworm, 

but also the portions like creativity, action, and service…. The model itself fits my view 

of teaching really well. 

The problem, Rob suggested, “[is] my school really prides scores and our ranking. Our prestige 

is based on that.” The school had taken steps to tone down the score-based rhetoric, but “at the 

end of the day, [students] still have to sit and take the exam.” Therefore, Rob had to teach in 

ways that would ensure his students would do well if they happened to get a strict examiner who 

required “a perfect thesis and an absurd amount of specific facts” so that the school’s scores 

would not be on the line.  

 

It wasn’t just the school that was the problem, however. Rob stated that parents exerted a 

great deal of pressure on the school and their children, which in turn caused students to frame 

their learning in relation to the discourse of what the IB meant as a means to future success. In 

the case of parents, the IB meant that students would be educated for the purpose of “really 

successful testing, really successful grades, and the stepping stone to a great university.” 

 

In Rob’s telling, the IB curriculum had a transcendent quality to it that made it 

“beautiful.” Since he saw a great deal of overlap between his own commitments and that of the 

IB, he believed that his students would do just fine on the exam if he could “teach the way [he] 

want[ed] to teach, in a really beautiful way.” However, even though it was the IB curriculum that 

dictated what the exam looked like and positioned its program of study as a stepping stone 

towards access to and success in higher education, Rob saw school policy and parental attitudes 

 

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as being at fault for compromising what the IB meant and, therefore, compromising elements of 

his own approach to teaching. Rob explained his issue with the IB wasn’t the skill-based work 

that it required students to learn, most of those skills he saw himself teaching anyway, but that it 

was the formulaic expression of those skills he viewed as a burden. Those formats, it seems, 

were primarily an outgrowth of and problem because of the way they were assigned meaning by 

IB test scorers, parents, and the administrators at Northrup High. As a result of all of these 

discourses, Rob felt that he needed to put on a “dog and pony show” in order to appease the 

various actors whose perceptions were so important. 

 

 Like Julie, Rob still found ways to operate within and assert his own identity through the 

curriculum, but he was also simultaneously critical of and complicit in the ways it limited his 

teaching. One of Rob’s frustrations was that technically Northrup was one of four campuses that 

comprised a single high school despite being geographically far flung from one another. That led 

to a curricular challenge because Rob had to give common assessments on the same day as his 

colleagues at the other campuses, despite not really working together in a collaborative way. In 

addition, any changes a teacher wanted to make to the curriculum had to be approved. Yet, Rob 

still found spaces in his curriculum to make himself present. For example, when schools had to 

pick a non-European authoritarian state to study, Rob lobbied for Cuba, even though the other 

campuses had chosen to do China. Rob was granted an exception. Rob explained that he was 

excited to teach about Cuba because “it connects to my identity. Being able to have sources in 

Spanish… that was a big thing I was excited about.” Therefore, even though commonality was a 

factor, he was able to work around it to promote a unit he situated as important to himself. While 

the commonality of the Northrup’s four campuses at times positioned Rob in unfavorable ways, 

 

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he was still able to overcome that commonality in ways he thought were pedagogically 

beneficial.  

 

Due to the commonality across campuses, Rob often felt crunched for time and his 

penchant for having students engage in inquiry activities, such as his two period (out of five 

periods dedicated to the unit) activity about the rise of Germany and Japan in the lead-up to 

World War II or his decision to watch the documentary 13th in class, contributed to that feeling. 

Rob remarked that the main obstacle to his teaching was “always time” because he would be 

capable of teaching a year-long class about any of the topics he in the curriculum. However, Rob 

situated his inability to fully explore topics in the context of IB and of his students, noting that he 

had “a responsibility to students to go through more thematic things and set them up for the 

content they going to need in the next program.” In addition, even though he disliked the 

commonality aspect of his job, Rob felt “a responsibility to [his] colleagues” and need to 

maintain some commonality in order to “make sure that the experience in [his] class is not [so] 

radically different from another class that it causes tension between students.” This feeling of 

responsibility made Rob at peace with having a prescribed curriculum because he saw himself as 

being able to stay on a single topic for a long period of time. Therefore, having a set of 

guidelines ensured that he would meet the responsibility he felt towards his students and fellow 

history teachers to cover the material needed for success in higher grades. 

 

Overall, Rob saw the IB curriculum as an entity that spoke to creating well-rounded 

students through curriculum that would help achieve many of his own curricular goals. He was, 

however, frustrated by the way in which he saw the overarching goals of the IB curriculum, and 

his own ability to speak to them, compromised by the desires of other stakeholders in the school. 

Even though Rob was frustrated by the “dog and pony show” he had to occasionally put on, he 

 

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was complicit in how the IB curriculum functioned via his own issues related to timing, adoption 

of discourses related to students needing to be prepared for the next level of curriculum and his 

desire to be respectful of the commonality he was supposed to share with his colleagues.  

 

While the AP and IB curriculums existed above and beyond Julie and Rob, their 

perceptions of the discourses that surrounded their respective curriculum played a major role in 

the power each felt in their ability to make curricular decisions. For Julie, the AP curriculum 

could be navigated in ways that allowed her to assert elements of her own vision of history 

education, but ultimately resulted in her teaching in ways that followed the more rapid-fire, 

surface-level discourse of AP courses. Meanwhile, Rob perceived the discourse of the IB 

curriculum itself to be highly reflective of his own values, yet it was his perceptions of the 

discourses that other curricular stakeholders brought to bear on the IB program that 

compromised what the curriculum was meant to promote. At the same time, though, Rob still 

bought into these other discourses as he felt pressured to make sure that his students were on-

target and on-topic in the eyes of parents and administration. 

The Nature of the Discipline 

 

Another factor that influenced how participants constructed elements of their identity was 

their perception about the larger field of the academic discipline they taught and how they 

perceived their relationship to it. In this section, I focus on the experiences of Paul and Rob in 

order to understand how they crafted images of who they are as teachers in relation to their 

perceptions of the expectations of what it means to be a member of that field. Just like the 

exploration of curriculum, though, the teacher’s perception of the discipline and the discourses 

that surround it is not only shaped by their own conceptions, but also their perceptions about how 

their students view the field and what they think students expect to get out of it.  Similar to Julie 

 

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and Rob’s relation to the curriculum, Paul and Rob both shape and are shaped by their 

assumptions about what it meant to be someone who identified as part of their discipline in 

relation to the specific context of their students.  

The Sage on the Stage 

As part of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program (ISP), each teacher facilitates a once-

weekly grade-level requirement course that students have to take to fulfill pre-requisites for 

graduation. The 2017-2018 school year was Paul’s first year teaching the junior-level economics 

course. I decided that I should see Paul teaching economics as a means of observing any 

differences that might exist between how he approached that class and the more typical ISP core 

class. I went into my initial observation with two pieces of information: the week before Paul 

had his class play the board game Settlers of Catan and the focus of the lesson I would observe 

was discussing that experience.  

Instead of holding class in his room, Paul taught economics in the “little theater” on the 

other side of the school. Students sat in auditorium-style seats and Paul stood behind a lectern on 

the stage. A large pull-down screen took up a large chunk of the stage and a PowerPoint titled 

“’Everything’ You Need to Know About Economics You Can Learn From Settlers of Catan” 

was displayed on it. Over the course of an hour, Paul explained the connection between the board 

game and economic principles such as scarcity, opportunity cost, comparative advantage, and the 

laws of supply and demand. Occasionally Paul asked students to illustrate a concept with an 

example from their experience playing Settlers, but overall it was a very teacher-centered lesson.  

 

I was slightly surprised to see Paul teach such a lecture-heavy class, especially because it 

did not connect to how he, or any other ISP teacher, typically taught. Lecture was not unheard of 

in ISP and many units began with a whole group lecture to give context for the material to be 

 

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learned, but it was not typical in the otherwise seminar-centric classes. I assumed it might be a 

fluke, but other observations were very similar. Most classes were focused on an economic 

concept, such as the costs of production, and might include a small activity or two, but otherwise 

were primarily lecture-based.  

 

Paul’s approach to teaching economics stemmed from his perceptions of how his students 

perceived learning that subject as well as his own discomfort with the material. When I first 

asked him about his choice to teach in the auditorium, Paul responded, “that’s talking to 

[student] expectations of what an econ teacher looks like and that’s legitimately me saying ‘you 

want a sage on the stage? Here’s the stage. Here’s your sage.’” Paul had initially designed the 

class to work like an online course. Due to the once-a-week format of the class and the 

increasing likelihood students would experience an online course in their college career, Paul 

envisioned students watching Crash Course Economics videos, reading from the textbook, and 

completing quizzes on their own. Class time would be spent as a place to work and Paul would 

be available to answer questions for students. Students did not like that approach, complaining 

that they could not learn on their own, hence Paul’s decision to lecture. “Since I’ve been doing 

it,” he explained, “I haven’t had any complaints.” 

 

Paul explained most of his choices in light of what he perceived his students’ 

understanding of what an economics class and teacher should look like. In the rare, for his 

economics class, moments where Paul attempted to teach in a way that more directly connected 

to his vision of education and bucked his perception of what an economics class was supposed to 

look like, he would end up reframing what he had done in a more traditional, lecture-based way. 

The decision, for example, to use a popular board game, like Settlers of Catan, to teach economic 

principles was inspired. Yet, instead of following that activity with a discussion about what 

 

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students had experienced, Paul created a lecture that told them what they had experienced. Paul 

explained his decision as a “riff on we did thing I thought you should have done but now I’m 

going to do a thing you want me to do so that you can feel it was legitimized.” Paul worried that 

his students would not see the connection between playing the game and learning economics, so 

he lectured as a means to confront his fear that they would not buy the lesson as being an 

acceptable way to learn economic principles. 

 

Even though Paul framed the decisions he made about economics as being an outgrowth 

of what he thought students wanted (based on his perceptions and the reality that they did 

complain), there were other elements at play. Paul’s pedagogical decisions about economics 

arose from his own conceptualization of the field and its shortcomings, as well as his own 

discomfort with the curriculum. “I think my struggle with the students in econ is also my 

struggle with econ,” Paul remarked. “It’s so quantitative at times and I have no interest in being a 

math teacher.” For Paul, it was the very nature of economics he had issues with because it wasn’t 

social studies; it was math. Paul wished that instead of economics, students would take a 

personal finance class that more directly applied to their lives and would be more appropriate for 

high school students because he did not see the purpose of micro- and macroeconomic ideas, at 

least in terms of the formal economics curriculum used in Michigan: “I have a hard time finding 

the ‘so what?’” he said, “in econ the answer is ‘because I said so.’” As a result, Paul did not view 

himself as having much control over the curriculum, drawing most of his materials from pre-

prepared curriculum. He characterized his approach as “monkey flips a switch teaching.” 

 

Paul’s feelings about his students and his perception about the discourse surrounding the 

field of economics education (which he initially filtered through his students) combined with his 

students’ perceptions of what an economics class should look like to construct a particular image 

 

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of teaching and learning economics that simultaneously resulted in the reification of that image 

through Paul’s actual practice. Interestingly, Paul was able to recognize that there were 

alternative ways of teaching economics. Besides taking a more personal finance approach, I 

asked Paul how he would feel if he taught an elective called Board Game Economics, where 

each week students played a different board game that illustrated an economic concept. Paul 

loved the idea and could see how students could defensibly learn through those experiences. 

When I asked him why he thought it would make a great class, he responded “because I wouldn’t 

feel the pressure to do the content expectations.” The combination of Paul’s perception of 

economics as mathematics masquerading as social studies, his own discomfort with the 

curriculum, and his students’ perceptions (and Paul’s interpretation of those perceptions) of what 

an economics class should look like resulted in a more lecture-based approach and foreclosed the 

possibility of a more creative, student-centered way of learning the material. Paul was able to 

imagine a different approach for teaching economics free of the discourse surrounding a required 

course. Within the bounds of a traditional economics course, though, Paul felt he could not 

deviate from the expectations that such a requirement entailed. 

I’m Not That Historian 

 

Much of Paul’s approach to economics was the result of his own misgivings about the 

field and his perceptions about who he thought his students wanted him to be in that context, but 

both Rob and Paul also constructed specific images of themselves in relation to the discipline of 

history. Julie, on the other hand, seldom spoke about herself as an historian, and when she did it 

was typically in response to a specific question I asked that positioned her as such. I will present 

possible reasons why this was the case in the discussion at the end of this chapter. In this section, 

though, I will explore how Rob and Paul claimed identities as historians not only through their 

 

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own conception of the field, but also through imagined threats to their conception via the spectral 

figure of “that historian.”  

In Chapter 4, I relayed the story of the Vietnam veteran who visited Paul’s high school 

history class. As he told me that story, Paul tripped on what he thought the right word would be 

to describe a group of soldiers stationed in the war. “I don’t know the proper terminology,” he 

said, deviating from the story for a moment, “I’m not that historian.” After finishing his story 

and our discussion about that experience, I asked Paul to elaborate on who that historian was. 

“Just the Battle Historian, right?” he replied, “The History Channel Historian. You know, ‘here’s 

the number of casualties…’ you just walk through [and] they’re doing a football play-by-play.” 

Even though his tone seemed to indicate differently in his delivery of that, Paul said that he was 

always amazed at that ability. “If you’re not that, you’re not quite there, yet,” Paul said, 

indicating that to some degree he equated mastery of minutiae as an indicator of being able to 

identify as a historian. Rob had a similar conception of that historian, the history buff, an older 

gentleman who would, in Rob’s imagination, approach his students and inquire into their 

historical knowledge by asking questions like “how do you feel about the Battle of the Bulge?”  

 

As Rob and Paul both had constructions of that historian, how did this imagined other’s 

expertise compare to their own identities as historians and what they were trying to achieve with 

their students? Furthermore, what role did this imagined other play in either fortifying or 

challenging the conceptions that Rob and Paul held? First, Rob and Paul both positioned 

themselves as historians who focus more on the larger themes of history. Rob connected this 

disposition to his own shortcomings in being able to tell someone exactly what happened. “I 

know that sounds bad, but I’ve never been the person who tell you every name, every date, of the 

name of every bill… For me it was always how I understood… and applied that to the bigger 

 

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picture.” For Paul, such a conception of history, of looking for the larger connections between 

ideas, linked to his appreciation of the slow accumulation of knowledge. If, after all, the devil is 

in the details, then there is no inherent reason to be focused on the universalizing factors that tie 

ideas together. Both Rob and Paul attributed much of their identity as historians to the professors 

that they each had in college. “Most of who I am as a historian and as a teacher is a result of my 

university professors,” Paul explained. “I was kind of a blank slate and allowed the university to 

say ‘we’re the experts,’ here’s how to do these things.” As discussed in Chapter 4, it was Rob’s 

experience in a senior thesis class that he credited with allowing him to see how history can take 

on larger themes and introduce more human elements. 

 

Paul and Rob’s conception of the field of history being more concerned with larger 

themes that thread through or transcend units was evident in their teaching. For his unit on the 

Civil Rights Movement, Rob wanted students to understand that there were bottom-up 

(grassroots) and top-down (law-based) approaches to the Civil Rights Movement. He specifically 

focused on grassroots movements as a way to spur student agency for making change in the 

world and saw a correlation between what students learned as historical knowledge in that unit 

and connections he hopes they’d make to their own ability to address incidents of racism in the 

school, as well as participate in events like the National School Walkout held in the aftermath of 

the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For Paul, the entire ISP 

curriculum was built upon the idea that large scale themes take precedence in understanding the 

humanities. The entire American Year curriculum was centered on a set of essential questions 

such as “What are the American myths? How do they shape us?” and “Can we still dream the 

American dream?” 

 

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So why the focus on that historian if Paul and Rob had clear visions of who they were as 

historians as constituted by their own training as undergraduate students and realized through 

their teaching? The specter of that historian served as a bogeyman, of sorts, who challenged Rob 

and Paul’s own understanding of history through the larger social discourse of what it means to 

know history. History, in the popular imagination, often consists of the ability to rattle off names, 

dates, and discrete facts with ease, and results in people who are primed to be contestants on 

shows like Jeopardy! This discourse is reflected in and created by educational programs like 

those on seen on The History Channel, which are often comprised of historical images 

juxtaposed with talking heads who supply meticulous detail about the event being covered. Paul 

spoke to this dominant discourse when he imagined a dialogue between a “pissed off History 

Channel fan” student and their dad: 

 

 

 

Dad: Have they talked about the Battle of Antietam, yet? 

Student: No. 

Dad: What are they teaching you? 

Through this dialogue, Paul speaks to the dominant social discourse of history that focuses on 

minutiae and rote memorization because, in the words of Paul’s imagined student’s father, 

“that’s how I learned it.” 

 

That historian, then, represents the fear that their students will be perceived not to know 

anything about history, and by extension that they themselves do not know anything about 

history, if confronted by someone who has strong historical knowledge. Rob spoke about this 

fear of students not learning anything in the strongest terms, saying that “it comes from [his] 

insecurity that something [he] dedicated [his] life to doesn’t bear any fruit.” He also worried that 

his class “will become someone’s example of how we fail as educators.”  Paul’s fear seemed to 

 

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be related to being personally discredited with the imagined student from above believing that 

the History Channel would be a better teacher.  

Neither Rob nor Paul subscribed to minutiae-based history instruction, but they spoke 

about the success/failure of units that I observed in terms of this more popular understanding of 

history. Rob, when discussing the end of his Civil Rights Movement unit, claimed that his 

students’ lack of specific details (a problem in his eyes) in their end-of-unit seminar was the 

result of “doing thematic teaching rather than timeline history or the very factual bullet-point-

style.” He wasn’t worried that students didn’t learn who Ralph Abernathy, someone he had 

mentioned wanting students to know, was – they could google him. What they couldn’t google, 

was a nuanced understanding of the role the media played in the Civil Rights Movement or the 

nature of the grassroots movement. A moment later, however, Rob mentioned that the fear of 

history teachers is “that your kids’ gonna go out there and get schooled by someone because you 

didn’t teach them who Ralph Abernathy was.” While Rob was focused on thematic 

understandings of history and assigned more importance to overarching ideas that were hard to 

summarize in a single sentence, he was still somewhat influenced by competing understandings 

of history that he saw as placing discrete facts first. Paul was similarly concerned when students 

didn’t use specific details but conceded that the use of specific details was not a requirement on 

their assessment protocol. Rob and Paul both engage in an internalization of the popular 

discourse around history education. While they are committed to developing students’ 

understanding of the big ideas of history, they both criticize rote memorization of facts while to 

some degree evaluating their students based on a conception of history that favors the small 

details.  

 

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Unlike Paul’s teaching of economics, Rob and Paul both held positive conceptions of 

who they were as historians and taught in ways that backed up their claims to that identity. 

Despite having undergraduate history degrees and developing who they were as historians in part 

due to the models portrayed by their history professors, both Paul and Rob at times questioned 

their effectiveness because of subscribing to their big picture/thematic-based approaches and 

feared they or their students’ historical knowledge would be discredited if they encountered 

someone with a more traditional view of what history entailed.  

Discussion 

 

External factors played a key role in how participants both positioned their identities and 

were positioned by elements such as the curriculum, the disciplines they identified themselves as 

part of and their perceptions of their students, both in terms of who they saw their students as, as 

well as how they perceived students viewed them. While I position the curriculum, the fields of 

economics and history, and their students as external to the three participants, they in many ways 

gain meaning based on internal processes taken up by the participants. As Segall (2003) notes, 

the meaning of these external factors is not “out there waiting for teachers to decipher it” (p. 

292). While a curriculum, such as AP or IB is certainly something that exists outside of an 

individual, how it comes to take meaning for someone is an internal process. This is also true of 

how disciplines and students are viewed. At any given time, the teachers in this study were 

engaged in an internal dialogue about how they perceived their students, for example, and how 

their students were perceiving them. This is evident in Paul’s teaching of economics, where he 

often defends his pedagogical choices not because they stem in part from his own discomfort 

about teaching economics, but because he’s teaching in the way his students want him to and 

expect him to given the topic. This is not to say that the reason for Paul’s decision-making has to 

 

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be one or the other, it’s both, but how Paul creates a justification for what he does says a lot 

about how Paul is implicating himself in or distancing himself from the curriculum and the 

degree to which Paul sees himself as having agency to exert power and teach economics in a way 

that’s more in sync with who he sees himself as being.  

Power and the Curriculum 

 

I started this chapter by focusing on Rob and Julie’s relationship to the curriculum, 

arguing that they used their respective curriculum to make claims about who they were as 

teachers, both via the affordances they provided (in the case of Rob, philosophical affinity) or the 

obstacles they erected (in the case of Julie, only going as deep with material as the test required). 

But what about Paul? Where do his experiences fit in and can they tell us about the relationship 

between curriculum and self?  

 

I decided to focus on Rob and Julie at the outset of this chapter because they both worked 

in contexts that used curriculum that were created wholly external to them. The way they 

navigated their curriculum, as entities that were not only created outside of them and their school 

and state contexts, but also that had built-in accountability that resulted in pressure from 

administrators, students and parents, is potentially much different than how a teacher in a typical 

public school setting engages in this work. Paul does not give us much insight into how teachers 

operate in a typical public-school setting, due to the idiosyncratic nature of ISP, but, following 

Foucault (1980) he does allow us to see the power in feeling that one has control over the content 

and form of their curriculum, feeling at peace when he feels his voice is represented and 

discontent when he feels it is not. 

 

Unlike Rob and Julie, as an ISP teacher, Paul worked with five other teachers “who tend 

to philosophically, pedagogically agree with each other.” The ISP teachers functioned as a team 

 

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and had common planning time every day where they discussed and worked on creating the 

curriculum they taught. While they were held to the same standards as the rest of the school, the 

curriculum generated by the ISP team was unique to them. I could analyze Paul the same way 

that I analyzed Rob and Julie, as the ISP program has been around for over sixty years and 

definitely constructs very specific images of what constitutes the curriculum and how a good 

teacher teaches. Instead, I want to look at him as an example of the power of curricular control. 

Out of the three participants, Paul felt the strongest about his ability to enact his vision of 

education because he’s “enabled to enact my philosophies on education, my philosophies on 

teaching history and English… it has to be with being able to write the curriculum.” This feeling 

of curricular control was due to his work on district curriculum planning committees and the 

amount of control ISP had over their day-to-day and long-term curriculum. With the exception of 

economics, Paul always felt he had a voice in how the curriculum was created and therefore felt 

present because his perspectives were represented. This is not to say that Paul wasn’t constructed 

by his curriculum, he certainly was, just that it was a construction that he was at peace with 

because it was, to some degree, of his own doing.  

Who is a Historian? 

 

Just as a I did not talk about Paul in the first section of this chapter on curriculum, I 

specifically did not talk about Julie in relation to her perceptions of how she felt as a part of the 

field of history. Unlike Rob (who would at times start responses with “As a historian…”) and 

Paul, Julie did not really refer to herself as a historian, only doing so if I specifically positioned 

her to think about herself as one. The first time I asked her about her potential identity as one, 

her immediate response was “Uh-oh.” When I asked Julie the degree to which she felt like a 

 

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historian, she positioned herself as a mediator who interprets and presents the work that 

historians do. For example, Julie explained,  

I have an easy time with taking the historian’s side and putting it into an organization that 

I think other people will understand…. On the other side, I have a very difficult time 

giving definitive answers to things if I’m not 100% sure. 

Like Rob and Paul, Julie conceptualizes historians as knowing a lot of facts and dates, but her 

fear stems more from her students finding out that she does not know something. Julie described 

that process as “scary, but at the same time, it’s a better classroom because of it.” Instead of 

having fear about a different kind of historian finding out that she’s a fraud, Julie sees the benefit 

of the limits of her own knowledge because “it gives [students] a little more flexibility in how 

they interpret things.” 

 

There are two different, but potentially interconnected, explanations I have for why Julie 

did not identify as a historian with the same ease that Rob and Paul did. First, she was an 

Interdisciplinary Studies Major and therefore had a major comprised of a range of disciplines 

instead of just one. It may be that she doesn’t have (or feel she has) the degree of content 

knowledge or disciplinary expertise she might position a historian as having. Second, gender 

may play a role. History is a male dominated field, and it may be that Julie did not see herself as 

having access to that identity because of how she constructed her own image of a historian. On 

the flip side, it may be that, even though Rob and Paul were history undergraduates, their male 

identities enabled them to feel as though they can adopt that identity, even thought they are not 

engaged in the interpretive work that historians do on a day-to-day basis. As a result, their claims 

about who they are as historians help solidify and practice a particular vision of what it means to 

be a historian, removed from the more technical work of someone who researches, interprets and 

 

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writes representations of the past, while Julie’s lack of identification reflects her own view that 

teaching is translating what historians have done in ways students will understand. 

Perceptions of Students 

The most fascinating finding to me is the prominent role played by teacher’s perceptions 

of their students and the perceptions of how their students perceived their actions as teachers. 

Participants always seemingly had their students in mind as they navigated various issues related 

to the curriculum and their own identities. While this should be unsurprising as a teacher’s main 

job is the education of students, students were always present in how teachers thought about their 

own understanding of the curriculum and the discipline. On one hand, this was because they 

were engaged in the education of students, and therefore needed to take into account students’ 

experiences, preferences, and pre-existing knowledge. On the other hand, students were often 

used discursively to back up a position that had a different logic than was originally presented. 

This could be, in the case of Rob, stressing that his unit on Cuba was not just for him, it was for 

his students as well (who he saw as needing to get acquainted with a part of the world 

overlooked by IB), or it could be like Paul and the actions that he justified in his economics class 

as being what the students wanted. Again, it may very well be the case that students mattered in 

those instances, but how they were positioned in relation to other forms of discourse is deserving 

of a study in and of itself.  

Conclusion 

In this chapter, I followed Segall’s (2003) example of exploring how teachers perceived 

and were positioned by the discourses surrounding the MEAP by examining the relationship 

between teachers and the various discourses they enter into as they consider the relationship 

between their sense of self and external factors such as their curriculum, the discipline they 

 

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teach, and their students. Findings indicate that these factors are not really external, but rather are 

internally processed via the discourses that surround external factors and how those discourses 

are taken up by teachers. Teachers’ perceptions of these discourses help to construct particular 

images of who they are as teachers and how they relate to their curriculum and the disciplines 

they teach. Using Foucault’s conception of power, teachers are able to exert control over these 

factors related to the degree to which they feel they have an ability to do so.  

 

 
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER SIX 

CONCLUSION 

 

Introduction 

The goal of this study, as the name implies, is to show that identity matters to the work 

that history teachers do. Over the course of this dissertation, I have explored ways that the 

various identities that constitute a teacher’s sense of self are implicated in the curriculum and the 

ways in which the teachers in my study acknowledged or distanced themselves from that 

implication. I specifically focused on three mechanisms through which teachers’ identities were 

constructed in relation to their teaching. First, via the intellectual and socio-cultural identities 

they see constructed through and by their pedagogical choices. In other words, how they saw 

their identities reflected in their curricular choices as well as how they made and enacted claims 

about their identities. Second, I explored teachers’ own memories of learning and how through 

the pedagogical act of remembrance (Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert, 2000), teachers constructed 

narratives that made claims about who they were in the present, via their understanding of their 

own pasts. Finally, I explored teachers’ identity construction through the interplay between 

teachers’ internal perceptions of external factors related to their work, such as curriculum, the 

discipline they taught, and their students. In the rest of this chapter, I explore the ways in which 

this study, both through its content and methodology, contributes to the field of history/social 

studies education as well as the implications of this study for future research related to my 

findings.  

 

 

 

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Contributions to the Field of History/Social Studies Education 

Examining elements of who a teacher is or what they believe is not a new endeavor in the 

field of history/social studies education, although it is an underexplored area of research. As 

discussed in Chapter 1, there is a body of research stemming from the 1980s about the impact of 

teacher beliefs and conceptions about the nature and purpose of social studies/history education 

on teachers’ curricular decision-making. In recent years, attention is again being paid to the 

impact that elements of a teacher’s identity have on what and how they teach. In this section, I 

will revisit that literature and place my study in conversation with it in order to explore 

connections and differences across these works as well as what this study specifically contributes 

to the field.  

Teacher Perspectives  

Building on research started by Adler (1984), Goodman and Adler (1985) explore how 

pre-service elementary social studies teachers’ perspectives about social studies education are 

taken up in the classroom. Goodman and Adler pointed to the ways in which teacher perspectives 

about social studies ranged from its status as a non-subject to its importance as a means of social 

change and that teachers often draw from a variety of perspectives across the span of a school 

year or even a day. Goodman and Adler suggested that official conceptions about the purposes of 

social studies, like that suggested by Barr, Barth, and Shermis (1977), have little relation to what 

pre-service teachers actually believe and do in the classroom and that pre-service teachers are 

generally lacking the skills necessary to implement a vision.  

 

Goodman and Adler (1985) provide an important glimpse into the way in which teacher 

perspectives about the nature and purpose of social studies don’t inherently align with scholarly 

views about the field as well as the way in which practice is often incoherent, with teachers 

 

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drawing from a range of perspectives instead of holding to a specific vision at all times. Evans 

(1989, 1990) also connects to this finding in that teachers often had a dominant way of teaching, 

but that they also drew from a variety of the typologies he established (e.g., storyteller, scientific 

historian, cosmic philosopher), even though how teachers taught did not necessarily sync up with 

how they represented their teaching to the research. These finding are backed up in this study in 

the way Rob stresses the potential for history to teach students about humanity in order to gain 

empathy, while simultaneously believing that it is important to step back and rationally consider 

what happened in the past. It is also seen in the way Julie stresses the importance of challenging 

her students’ conceptions of the world (bursting the Park Lake bubble) while primarily focusing 

on content coverage for the AP exam and seldom bringing in current events. 

 

Yet, I argue that across the lessons I observed, participants in this study demonstrated a 

fairly consistent vision of what they each see the purpose of social studies education to be and 

that those conceptions do connect, to some degree, to larger ideas about the purpose of learning 

history/social studies related to becoming critical thinkers who have the skills needed to 

challenge their own misconceptions and positively impact society. Paul and Rob had especially 

consistent visions due, in part, to their feeling that they had the power to more fully enact what 

they believed, whereas Laura saw her vision being hampered, in part, by the AP curriculum and 

her own lack of experience.  

What becomes important when using poststructural and psychoanalytic frames, though, is 

not only determining what perspectives teachers adopt but how and why teachers take up the 

perspectives that they do. For example, Rob wants his students to be able to recognize and 

challenge the underlying structures that impact society. This perspective does not only tie in to 

his understanding of history, but also to his experiences as a minority and his deeper desire to 

 

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have students develop the skills and knowledge base needed for challenging the status quo and 

being open to others who might look different than them. As mentioned above, this is not always 

consistently addressed, but it was certainly a vision that found expression through Rob’s 

teaching. Goodman and Adler (1985) recognize this incoherence and that there are underlying 

reasons why their participants take up or reject the perspectives that they do, but they do not 

delve deeply into what those reasons are or how and why they may play a role in mediating how 

teachers express those perspectives. Evans (1989, 1990) does recognize that teacher background 

plays a role, especially in regards to teachers’ political and religious beliefs, but his focus is 

centered more directly on how teachers represent their teaching and what they do in the 

classroom.  

 

Older research about elements related to teacher identity in history/social studies 

education largely focus on factors that are positioned as external to the teacher. Wilson and 

Wineburg (1988) were interested in how well teachers were prepared to teach social studies 

courses that fell outside of their area of expertise, such as an anthropology major teaching 

American history. They found that a teacher’s disciplinary background mattered greatly to their 

classroom practice, with teachers whose disciplinary background matched their teaching load 

facilitating more nuanced engagements with their discipline that more closely followed the 

established norms for their respective fields. 

 

The findings of this study also recognize the important role that discipline played. This 

was most directly seen in the disconnection Paul felt between his roles as an interdisciplinary 

teacher, which drew upon his history and English backgrounds, and as an economics teacher. 

Paul’s vision of economics was shaded by his own lack of comfort with the discipline and his 

inability to see why economics education, at least as mandated by the state curriculum, was 

 

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important for high school juniors to learn. The importance of disciplinary background was also 

inherent in how teachers viewed themselves as members of the fields they taught. Paul and Rob 

both referred to themselves as historians and both held undergraduate degrees in history. Julie, 

on the other hand, held a degree in Interdisciplinary Social Studies, and did not typically talk 

about herself in connection to any of the specific disciplines that comprise social studies.   

 

Wilson and Wineburg’s (1988) study stresses the important need for teachers to be able 

to access and use different ways of knowing when encountering social studies classes that fall 

outside of their disciplinary expertise, as different disciplines focus on different elements of 

understanding the social world. Yet, the authors place disciplinary understandings as being 

somewhat external to their participants; their specific disciplinary lenses are a result of their 

disciplinary training and the lack of training in other social studies fields. There are also internal 

factors at play, though, in how disciplines are understood and engaged. Paul’s feelings about 

economics and his decision to teach that class with a more traditional “sage on the stage” 

approach certainly reflects his own lack of economic understanding. At the same time, though, 

Paul’s decisions are filtered through, or at least rationalized by, his perceptions of how his 

students understand what economics education should look like. In his regular ISP classes, Paul 

felt that he had the power to teach in ways that he saw reflecting the interdisciplinary relationship 

between history and English as well as research-based conceptions of what sound pedagogy 

entailed. In his economics class, though, Paul’s discomfort with the discipline and his perception 

of what he thought students wanted out of an economics class resulted in a more traditional way 

of teaching that didn’t ultimately serve his students or him.  

 

Disciplinary affiliation, though, was not entirely positive. As I mentioned above, both 

Paul and Rob referred to themselves as historians, yet, as outlined in Chapter 5, both were also 

 

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consistently worried that their personal conception of history would be challenged by outsiders 

who held a more traditional, fact-based interpretation of what history looks like. Wilson and 

Wineburg’s (1988) conception of history seems to mirror that of Rob and Paul’s, yet Wilson and 

Wineburg do not implicate themselves and the way that their conception of history is itself a 

conception and not a hard truth of what the discipline should look like. Therefore, it is not only 

important to consider the internal elements at play in how and why teachers take up specific 

views of a discipline but to also acknowledge the way that a researcher’s own disciplinary 

understandings mediate how they interpret the teaching they observe and discuss with their 

participants.  

 

Poststructural and psychoanalytic lenses require researchers to complicate our 

understandings of often taken-for-granted concepts. The pre-existing research on teacher identity 

primarily focuses on teacher beliefs and perspectives about the field of history/social studies 

education. However, these beliefs and perspectives, and the desire to adopt or reject certain 

beliefs and perspectives, are connected to other factors such as one’s personal identity and the 

internal perceptions they have about external factors, such as the curriculum or their students. 

While the findings of Goodman and Adler (1985), Evans (1989, 1990), and Wilson and 

Wineburg (1988) continue to be important for understanding how teachers engage in teaching 

history/social studies, this study contributes to understanding how elements like conceptions of 

the field and personal identities such as race, gender, social class, and religion play a role in 

shaping how teachers engage in practice. Recent research has started to address issues of race 

(Vickery, 2017) and political ideology (Knowles, 2018) in relation to teachers’ conceptions of 

citizenship, but research related to teachers’ religious beliefs and understanding is rare (White, 

2009) and work related to social class is seemingly non-existent.  

 

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Experience and Memory 

 

The work of Lortie (1975) is foundational to research on teacher identity and how 

teachers develop their beliefs and perspectives about teaching. “The apprenticeship of 

observation” points to the way in which teachers’ practices often uncritically reflect how they 

were once taught. One of the key interpretations of Lortie’s work is that teacher education has a 

limited impact on those learning to teach because their experiences as a learner are already 

deeply ingrained in how they imagine teaching. The participants in this study challenge that idea, 

however. All three teachers had limited recollections about their own learning as K-12 

history/social studies students and their teaching practices differed greatly from the memories of 

learning that they shared. In fact, Julie, Rob and Paul all indicated that the most powerful 

learning experiences they had were a result of their university-based teacher education courses 

and their professional experiences as practicing teachers. While not necessarily indicative of all 

teachers, this finding shows that the “apprenticeship of observation” matters not only in the 

positive takeaways teachers adopt from their own learning, but also in the negative examples that 

provide guidance in how not to teach. Julie specifically went as far as to say she did not want to 

teach like the A.P. U.S. history teacher that she had. Rob primarily remembered being lectured 

to, a pedagogical approach that he seldom uses, while Paul could not recall much from his K-12 

education. While it may be that teachers did not completely share their thinking with me, the 

stress on university experiences they each expressed demonstrates that university teacher 

preparation may play a larger role in the development of some teachers than Lortie recognized.  

 

The work of Kissling (2014) and Hung (2018) explore the importance of teachers’ prior 

experiences. Kissling specifically considers how teachers’ life experiences create a “living 

curriculum” that comprises “a course of learning across the times and places of… life” (p. 81). 

 

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Hung examines the ways in which Taiwanese teachers’ childhood experiences impacted how 

they engaged their students in controversial public issues as well as how they represented 

historical events to their classes. Both of these studies mark the importance of personal 

experience in how teachers think about their work and translate those thoughts to practice. In this 

study, I also examined teachers experiences (which I position as memories) and specifically use 

Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert’s (2000) conception of remembrance in order to consider how the 

memories that teachers elicit serve to justify their actions in the present-day. Like Kissling, this 

is largely interpretive work that I engaged in, drawing out teachers’ remembrances from the 

various interviews they took part in and implicating my own interpretations in how I chose to 

represent the what I had learned about my participants.   

 

The memory research that has been done in the field of social studies education largely 

focuses on issues of collective memory, especially as situated externally to the teacher (e.g., 

Reich, 2011; Reich, Buffington, & Muth, 2016; Suh, An, & Forest, 2014). This study, in 

conjunction with more targeted research on memory work along the lines of Chang-Kredl & 

Wilkie’s (2016) use of teacher-created memory texts, can help position teacher memories and 

remembrances in a new light: one that recognizes memory not as an external entity that is tapped 

into or taken up in different ways, but that which stems from the teacher’s own experiences and 

identities. This study is limited by the fact that I did not directly engage participants in direct 

forms of memory work, which usually relies on written narrativization of one’s memories, so the 

degree to which teachers ever interrogated their own practice from a critical standpoint without 

being prompted by me is unknown. However, such an approach can contribute to the field by 

taking up poststructural and psychoanalytic frames that seek to understand how power operates 

 

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through one’s remembrances as well the internal processes at play as one crafts stories and 

assign meaning to the past in terms of the present.  

 

Poststructural and psychoanalytic lenses can aid researchers in understanding the deeper 

processes at play in how teachers’ selves enter into how they plan and implement curriculum. 

While many elements of the content of my study have been taken up by prior research, especially 

in terms of teacher identity and teachers’ perspectives about the fields of history and social 

studies, there has not been much research on how the identities of practicing teachers are shaped 

by their intellectual and socio-cultural identities and remembrances of their past experiences. As 

I will discuss in the next section, these issues are important to consider for future research.  

 

More important though is attending to the questions and understandings a poststructural 

study that includes elements of psychoanalytic theory can do for the field of social studies 

education. A common criticism of poststructuralism is that the absence of absolute truth will lead 

to the development of runaway relativism where anything goes. This is not my intent, nor do I 

think it is representative of the aims of scholars who engage in poststructural work. Rather, 

poststructuralism requires that we question taken-for-granted concepts and relationships, to 

expose the ways in which they are constructed and to complicate surface-level understandings of 

the connections people draw between their thoughts and actions.  

 

In the case of this study, that means an acknowledgement that identity is not something 

that people possess, but rather something that people claim in negotiation of their actions with 

broader societal discourses (Jenkins, 2014). As Foucault (1980) argues, power is diffuse and 

while it acts unevenly, all people are simultaneously constituted by power relations and are able 

to exert power in the various networks they inhabit. This study raises questions about the power 

teachers have to either exert or ignore elements of their identity. How can a male teacher, for 

 

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example, claim to distance their masculinity from their curricular choices in ways that a female 

teacher is seen as incapable of doing? How does whiteness, especially in a primarily white 

context, both function as an invisible given as well as an opportunity to use the power conferred 

to whiteness through discourse to draw attention to marginalized communities? The identities 

that teachers are able to (or required) to claim and those that they can downplay are tangled in a 

complex of discourses that recognize and ignore authority and value based on those identity 

claims. By working to recognize these claims, one can analyze a teacher’s conception of their 

sense of self in relation to the curriculum and work to better understand how and why teachers 

make the decisions they do and move beyond simply considering the content of those decisions. 

 

It is also imperative that researchers who engage in this kind of work implicate 

themselves in the research process as a whole, as well as their findings. I view the content of this 

study as a snapshot of a particular time, place, and context that was taken with my particular 

camera. If another researcher attempted to replicate this study with the same teachers, units, and 

questions, the results would be different.  While qualitative studies almost always include 

statements of teacher positionality, often to situate why the particular questions of the study are 

being raised and how the researcher’s self is implicated in the genesis of the study, poststructural 

and psychoanalytic theory requires researchers to recognize that they are implicated in the same 

processes their participants are and that data analysis stems from the researcher’s own 

positionality and interpretive frames. Truth is not inherent in the data, rather claims about the 

meaning of that data stem from the theories and experiences the researcher brings to the analysis 

of the data. 

 

This study contributes to the field of history/social studies education by working to 

understand how elements of a teacher’s self, especially related to their identities, remembrances, 

 

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and perceptions of the curriculum, their students, and their disciplinary field. The relationship 

between a teacher’s self and the curriculum is complex and involves teachers implicating and 

distancing various elements of their sense of self based on the various discourses they encounter 

and power networks they are a part of.  

Implications for Future Research Teacher Education  

 

This study points to several potential implications for future research and teacher 

education. In their survey of the demographics of social studies teacher educators, Busey and 

Waters (2015) note that, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, “about 63% of 

secondary social studies teachers are male and an overwhelming 87% of social studies teachers 

are White” (p. 72). This statistic, coupled with the ongoing drive to make social studies 

curriculum more inclusive, indicates a significant need to make sense of how practicing social 

studies teachers understand how various identities they claim relate to their teaching.  

As discussed in the Chapter 3, teachers’ intellectual and socio-cultural identities play an 

important role in how the curriculum is engaged. Identity construction and navigation was 

especially at play when elements of a teacher’s self were seen as being at odds with the dominant 

discourse about the meaning of an identity (e.g., Julie’s identity as a woman). Conversely, 

identities that did not deviate from the dominant discourse were not interrogated (e.g., Rob’s 

gender identity). Therefore, there is a need to further investigate how teachers enter into or 

distance themselves from their curriculum. Such engagement will help teachers interrogate the 

impact their identity has on developing and teaching curriculum meant to convey a variety of 

historical voices.  

Research shouldn’t just be on those who identify as white and/or male, however. There 

are a huge variety of identities that teachers draw upon when conceptualizing their sense of self. 

 

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In this study, race, gender, social class, and religious identity were all surfaced, but there are 

many others, such as sexual orientation, that were overlooked and/or not a part of this study. 

Much more attention need to be paid to the role that these less physically visible identities play 

in the classroom, especially following up on my finding that these identities may be perceived to 

be invisible in school settings where a teacher’s identity reflects the dominant identity. Many of 

these frames, such as race, have been taken up in terms of student but not teachers. Social class, 

for example, as a lens for considering social studies teacher education, has seemingly not been 

considered. This study helps provide a lens for thinking about how to continue to expand the 

field beyond gender and race as its primary modes of analysis. 

Another implication is the need to better understand how students enter into the 

construction and acknowledgement of teacher identity. Participants in this study had very clear 

perceptions of who they believed their students were and what they needed. These perceptions 

shaped instruction both in terms of how teachers taught (such as Paul’s economics class) as well 

as how teachers made decisions about what lessons to impart on their students (e.g., Rob’s 

decision to use Emmett Till’s image to address racism in his school). While there is certainly 

more to gain by taking an in-depth look at teachers’ perceptions of how their students perceive 

them, and the resulting impact on identity construction, there is also a need to look at the 

students themselves. How do students perceive their teachers’ identities? A significant portion of 

Julie’s male students seemed to question her intellect due to her gender via the comments they 

made and their overall behavior in class. Their attitude definitely had an impact on how Julie 

positioned herself and made curricular decisions, but to what degree did those students recognize 

what they were doing? Did Paul’s students really believe that economics had to be taught by a 

“sage on the stage?” Did students recognize Rob’s ethnic/racial identity when learning about the 

 

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Civil Rights Movement or his identity as the son of an immigrant when discussing Japanese 

internment? These questions point to a need to further understand the dialogic relationship 

between how a teacher constructs their identity via the curriculum and the degree to which that 

identity is recognized or ignored by students as well as the impact that reception has on their 

understanding of the content.  

 

Research that uses critical approaches is important to understand how teachers engage in 

identity construction and what that process makes possible for their understanding of their self, 

their curriculum, their pedagogy, and their students. Critical lenses can help one see how power 

relations are navigated by history teachers and the way they make sense of their self and the 

curriculum. Where do teachers insert themselves in the curriculum? Where do they back off and 

present the curriculum as an objective statement about the past? How do the discourses teachers 

take up when implicating themselves (or avoiding implication) in the curriculum have an impact 

on what happens in the classroom? Engaging in this process can open up the discursive field and 

present new possibilities for how history education can be imagined. 

Research on Memory 

 

As I discussed in Chapter 4, the kinds of memory work that are currently being done in 

the field of teacher education have not yet been taken up in history/social studies education. 

Doing more targeted memory work, along the lines of Chang-Kredl & Wilkie’s (2016) use of 

teacher-created memory texts, can help teachers understand the ways in which their own learning 

is reflected in their practice. Such an approach can also be a means to interrogate one’s own 

education from a critical standpoint (Rothenberg, 1994).  

 

In general, participants did not remember their own K-12 history education. As suggested 

at the end of Chapter 4, more work could be done to explore the kinds of learning experiences 

 

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that resonated with currently practicing history/social studies teachers. The participants in this 

study discussed the importance of projects, engagement with texts that indulged a more human 

understanding of the past, and the role of discomfort in their remembrances of their own 

education. While these findings should not be taken as representative of others’ experiences, 

there is much that can be gained from understanding what teachers remember about their own 

history learning, what they perceive their own teachers’ goals to have been and to what degree 

there is a connection between how a teacher learned and what they do in their own classroom.  

Beyond engagement with what they did remember, there is also a need to engage what 

was forgotten. If, as my participants reported, teachers do not remember much of their own 

learning, what kinds of learning activities do they engage in today? If, for example, there is a 

teacher like Julie who forgot that a period of time she was responsible for teaching existed, then 

how does she go about learning that material? What resources does she use? What, if any, 

connection is there between the kinds of learning approaches and resources she seeks out and 

elements of her personal identity? Addressing these kinds of questions can help the field better 

understand the kinds of ideas, viewpoints, and disciplinary approaches that are opened up and 

closed off to teachers as they engage in learning about the content they teach. By extension, 

questions can also be asked about what the relationship is between the kinds of thinking teachers 

expose themselves to and what they do in the classroom.   

If our understanding of the world, and the past, is filtered through our own identities, 

what kinds of collective memory narratives resonate with teachers and how does that impact the 

kinds of historical events and perspectives they engage in class? How, for example, did Rob’s 

desire to avoid what he saw as fanatical engagement of World War II that seemingly took 

pleasure from the violence and loss of life challenge dominant cultural narratives about the war? 

 

157 

	

Concurrently, how did his view reflect a different kind of cultural narrative about the meaning of 

war. Alternately, how does the selection of topics to teach in a history class reflect a canonical 

understanding of what is and is not important to teach and learn about in a school and whose 

collective memories are left out of that process? Further engagement with the concept of 

memory, individual and collective, holds a lot of promise for further understanding the field and 

the connection between self and curriculum.  

Teacher Education 

 

While there are a multitude of ways that the findings from this study can be taken up for 

future research, there is also a need to consider the implications for teacher education. In other 

words, if we accept that teachers’ identities are simultaneously reflected in and constructed by 

their curricular choices, what does that mean for teacher education? Similarly, if teachers do not 

widely engage in critical reflections of their past experiences and their remembrances of their 

own learning, how can teacher education create more targeted, and hopefully impactful, 

experiences in engaging memory work? 

 

As Busey and Waters (2015) note, the social studies education field is overwhelmingly 

comprised of white males. As I argue in this paper, identities, both claimed and perceived, play a 

role in how teachers plan and implement curriculum. Therefore, regardless of demographics, pre-

service teachers need to be given opportunities to examine the influences that their own identities 

have on their work as well as how their identities are further constructed by the choices they 

make. This may take the form of activities like Epstein’s (1998) that asked students to identify 

and explain important historical figures and events in order to understand different racial sense-

making of the past. It can also take place by creating unit plans that are then critically analyzed 

 

158 

	

in groups for how they reflect elements of one’s identity both via choices related to content and 

pedagogy.  

 

In terms of memory work, pre-service teachers could create narratives about an episode 

of their own history education. They could then analyze these remembrance narratives with a 

peer to search for traces of their own experiences in how they conceptualize who they are as a 

teacher in the present and who they hope to be in the future. Furthermore, they could analyze 

these narratives to explore which themes they take up and which they ignore in order to better 

grasp the kinds of understandings they take up and what that allows and limits in their practice.  

 

Following the work of Chang-Kredl, Wilkie, and Ghaznov (2016), pre-service teachers 

could also engage in crafting narratives about who they were as students as a means to 

understand their own perceptions of who their students are and the degree to which that impacts 

how they think about their discipline and practice. For teachers who are in the midst of their 

student-teaching, there is a need to constantly reflect on how they perceive of the power among a 

variety of external factors, such as school policies, the curriculum, and their students, as well as 

their own sense of self. By doing so, pre-service teachers could begin to see how they exert their 

selfhood when navigating the various discourses that contribute to how they view themselves as 

teachers. Engaging in these forms of reflection can help teachers understand as they enter the 

field that they are not neutral actors presenting objective information. Rather, through working in 

group settings to analyze who they are, how they are reflected in and constructed by their own 

experiences and their curricular decision-making, teachers can better understand how elements of 

their self connect to their curriculum.  

 

 

 

159 

	

Conclusion 

While the above implications are framed in terms of practicing teachers, they also apply 

to thinking about teacher education. The results of this study can possibly be used to think about 

what discourses pre-service teachers draw upon when imagining themselves as future 

history/social studies educators. There is potential for thinking about the kinds of identity and 

memory work that need to be done to surface how pre-service teachers enter into conceptualizing 

the possibilities of the field and implicating themselves in the curricular decisions they make. 

Such a conception will help challenge the belief that teachers are objective enactors of pre-

determined knowledge and will highlight the complex ways a teacher’s self mediates what is 

made possible for students.  

Teaching is a complex process that is mediated through several different discourses. At 

the root of teaching, though, is the teacher. By engaging the teacher in terms of their personal 

relationship to and implication in the curriculum, the multifaceted ways in which teachers enter 

into the curriculum can be uncovered and explored in order to better understand how and why 

teachers make the curricular decisions they do. Whether thinking about this study’s implications 

for in-service or pre-service teachers, I am interested in raising ways in which the construction of 

a teacher’s self can be uncovered, examined, questioned, and implicated in the role it plays in 

what it makes possible and impossible in the classroom. Such work can advance our 

understanding of the relationship among teacher, content, and pedagogy and the way in which a 

teacher’s identity matters to their practice.   

 

 

 
 
 
 

160 

	

 

APPENDICES

161 

	

	

 

APPENDIX A 

 

Interview Protocols 

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

162 

	

The Self and the Curriculum: Interview 1 Protocol 

 
Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. As with any part of this study, you can 
withdraw your consent to participate at any time and you do not have to answer questions that 
you do not want to answer. Anything you say will not be connected with your name, the name of 
your school, or the name of your school district in any publications or presentations. 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “START 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
Our first interview will focus on elements related to your personal background, how you 
theoretically engage the field of history education and what you perceive as the allowances and 
limitations that impact your ability to enact your vision of history education.  
 
Section 1: Background Information 
 

1.  Tell me about yourself. What are three or four elements of your identity that you consider 

important? Why? 

2.  Why did you choose to become a teacher? 
3.  How did you enter into the field of teaching? Is this the first school where you’ve 

worked? Is teaching your first profession? 

4.  Think of a teacher who made a major impact on your life (this can be from any level of 
education). Can you tell me a story about this teacher that exemplifies why they were so 
impactful? 

5.  How did you feel about the way that you learned history? Can you share a memory or 

experience that you remember having about learning history in school? 

 
Section 2: The Field of History Education 
 

6.  Why should we (teachers, students, as a society) study the past? 
7.  What do you think the purpose of history education is? How did you form this purpose? 
8.  What do you want your students to gain from this course? How will you know that 

9.  What is your favorite unit/subject to teach in history? Why? Can you share a memory you 

students have met that goal? 

have of learning about this subject? 

10. What is your least favorite unite/subject to teach in history? Why? Can you share a 

memory you have of learning about this subject? 

 
Section 3: Allowances and Obstacles 
 

you have? 

(if applicable)? 

11. To what degree do you feel that you are able to enact the vision of history education that 

12. What do you think are the major obstacles keeping you from fully enacting your vision 

13. What are the reasons why you believe you are able to enact your vision of history 

education to the extent that you are able to? 

	

163 

	

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

	

14. Are there any other thoughts, questions, or comments you would like to share that you 

thought about during this interview? 

 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, NAME OF INTERVIEWER, AND “END 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 

164 

	

The Self and the Curriculum: Interview 2 Protocol 

 

Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. As with any part of this study, you can 
withdraw your consent to participate at any time and you do not have to answer questions that 
you do not want to answer. Anything you say will not be connected with your name, the name of 
your school, or the name of your school district in any publications or presentations. 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “START 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
Our second interview will focus on how you engage in planning the first unit I will observe. We 
will discuss how your thoughts about planning connect to the issues that we talked about in the 
first interview, as well as how you personally understand the material you are teaching.  
 

1.  Tell me about the unit that you are going to teach. Are you taking a specific focus? What 

material are you covering? 

history? 

2.  How do you see your approach to this unit connecting back to your purpose for teaching 

3.  How did you decide what to include and what not to include in this unit? 
4.  How did you learn about the content of this unit? Do you have any memories of learning 

about this content in school or as an adult? 

5.  Why are you taking the teaching approach that you are with this unit? 
6.  What are you most excited about teaching in this unit? Why? 
7.  What are you least excited about teaching in this unit? Why? 

 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, and “END 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

	

165 

	

The Self and the Curriculum: Interview 3 Protocol 

 

Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. As with any part of this study, you can 
withdraw your consent to participate at any time and you do not have to answer questions that 
you do not want to answer. Anything you say will not be connected with your name, the name of 
your school, or the name of your school district in any publications or presentations. 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “START 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
Our third interview will reflect on how you implemented the first unit I observed. We will 
discuss how your thoughts about planning connected to your practice, the issues that we talked 
about in previous interviews, and how you personally understand the material you taught/are 
teaching.  
 

1.  Overall, how did you feel your first unit went? 
2.  Describe an instance that positively stood out to you about this unit. How does this 

3.  Describe an instance that negatively stood out to you about this unit. How does this 

exemplify what went well? 

exemplify what did not go well? 

4.  If you could change one thing about the unit, what it would it be and why? 
5.  What factors allowed you to do the kinds of things you wanted to achieve in this unit?  
6.  What factors kept you from fully realizing your curricular vision? 

 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “END 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

	

166 

	

The Self and the Curriculum: Interview 4 Protocol 

 

Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. As with any part of this study, you can 
withdraw your consent to participate at any time and you do not have to answer questions that 
you do not want to answer. Anything you say will not be connected with your name, the name of 
your school, or the name of your school district in any publications or presentations. 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “START 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
Our fourth interview will focus on how you engage in planning the first unit I will observe. We 
will discuss how your thoughts about planning connect to the issues that we talked about in 
previous interviews, as well as how you personally understand the material you are teaching.  
 
 

1.  Tell me about the unit that you are going to teach. Are you taking a specific focus? What 

material are you covering? 

2.  Where are you in this unit? What are you not? Why are or aren’t you in those spaces? 
3.  How do you see your approach to this unit connecting back to your purpose for teaching 

4.  How did you decide what to include and what not to include in this unit? 
5.  You mentioned some changes, such as reading guides being switched to essential 

questions. Why did you make those decisions? 

6.   How did you learn about the content of this unit? Do you have any memories of learning 

about this content in school or as an adult? 

7.   Why are you taking the teaching approach that you are with this unit? 
8.   What are you most excited about teaching in this unit? Why? 
9.   What are you least excited about teaching in this unit? Why? 
10.  Are there any other thoughts, questions, or comments you would like to share? 

history? 

 

STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “END 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

	

167 

	

The Self and the Curriculum: Interview 5 Protocol 

 
Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. As with any part of this study, you can 
withdraw your consent to participate at any time and you do not have to answer questions that 
you do not want to answer. Anything you say will not be connected with your name, the name of 
your school, or the name of your school district in any publications or presentations. 
 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “START 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
Our fifth interview will reflect on the second unit I observed 
 

7.  Overall, how did you feel this unit went? 
8.  Describe an instance that positively stood out to you about this unit. How does this 

9.  Describe an instance that negatively stood out to you about this unit. How does this 

exemplify what went well? 

exemplify what did not go well? 

10. If you could change one thing about the unit, what it would it be and why? 
11. What factors allowed you to do the kinds of things you wanted to achieve in this unit?  
12. What factors kept you from fully realizing your curricular vision? 
13. How, if at all, did my presence impact how you engaged this unit? 
14. How does your classroom reflect who you are? Why do you have it set up the way you 

do, why is it decorated the way it is? 

15. You discussed that you don’t really remember your history/social studies education that 

clearly. Is there a subject you do remember? Why do you think you forgot? 

16. There’s often a claim that’s made that the curriculum should be relevant to and reflect 
students’ identities and lives. How do you model this or to what degree do you see the 
curriculum you develop and teach as an opportunity to work through your own identity? 

17. What parts of your identity are easy to talk about? What’s not? 
18. What do you think your students see when they look at your and interact with you? Your 

colleagues? What do you want them to see/think? 

19. Are there any other thoughts, questions, or comments you would like to share? 

 
STATE PARTICIPANT ID NUMBER, DATE, INTERVIEWER NAME, AND “END 
INTERVIEW” FOR RECORDING DEVICE 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

	

168 

	

 

	

APPENDIX B 

 

Unit and Lesson Topics 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

169 

	

Julie Matthews 

Unit 1 – The Progressive Era 

-  Progressive Era overview 
-  Key reforms 
-  Dubois and Washington/The New South 
-  Phases of the women’s movement 
-  Women’s Movement Textbook  

 
Unit 2 – World War II 

-  How the United States got involved in World War II 
-  Analysis of Dr. Seuss political cartoons about domestic issues 
- 
-  Homefront/Michigan World War II Memorial 
-  Atomic bomb 

Japanese Internment 

 
Rob Castillo 
 
Unit 1 – World War II 

-  New Deal Wrap-up, Discussion of State of the Union Address 
-  Challenges to U.S. Neutrality 
-  Rise of Germany and Japan 
-  Course of World War II 
- 
-  Atomic Bomb 

Japanese Internment 

 
Unit2 – The Civil Rights Movement 

-  Civil Rights Meaning Seminar 
-  Emmett Till 
-  Montgomery Bus Boycott 
-  Voting Rights Act 
-  SNCC/Freedom Rides/Selma 
-  Civil Rights Wrap-Up Seminar 
-  13th Documentary 

 
Paul Kacprzak 
 
Unit 1 – 1920s/Great Gatsby 

Jazz 

- 
-  Women’s Suffrage 
-  Prohibition 
-  The Great Gatsby 

 
Unit 2 – 1950s/1960s 

-  Grace Metalious 
-  1950s Experience 

	

170 

 
Elective 2 – Science Fiction Short Stories and Films 

-  Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics 
- 
- 
-  Afro-Futurism 

“Evidence” 
“Way Up in the Middle of the Air” 

 
Economics 

-  Settlers of Catan 
- 
-  Costs of production 

 

Intelligence Squared debates about current American economic policies 

	

-  1950s Experience Seminar  
- 
“Crisis in Levittown” 
- 
John F. Kennedy 
- 
Integration vs. Desegregation 
-  Letter from a Birmingham Jail 
-  Grace Lee Boggs 

 
Elective 1 – The Invisible Man 
Invisible People Project 

- 

	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	

	

171 

	

 

 

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172 

	

 

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