A JUST MEMORY: LEARNING TO TEACH A MORE JUST SOCIAL STUDIES THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF ITS MEMORIES By Brian Scott Durham 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 2021 ABSTRACT A JUST MEMORY: LEARNING TO TEACH A MORE JUST SOCIAL STUDIES THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF ITS MEMORIES By Brian Scott Durham This study investigated what is remembered about social studies education, how memories can be made useful in current classrooms, and how this knowledge can inform a social studies-to-be imagining future memories. Special attention was paid as well to issues of social justice and how they were engaged in in the past, how they have been taken up in the present, and how they might be re-imagined in the future. By doing so, this study enlivened the utility of memory and opened remembering up as a terrain of analysis to be included and considered in both social studies classrooms and teacher preparation institutions. Memories shared and analyzed in part 1 of this qualitative study were drawn from experiences over the past twenty years, both through surveys and semi-structured active interviews. In part 2, interviews with current practitioners and a thorough analysis of their units were combined with interviews of students who participated in those units to provide a fuller picture of how memories are formed, challenged, and/or reified in the process of learning to teach. Finally, in part 3 of the study, pre-service teachers, using data from other parts of the study, envisioned what memories their future classrooms might create and how they might better be realized. Embracing poststructural notions of time and memory expressed through the theorizing of Gilles Deleuze, the study seeks to trouble the notion of time and elucidate potential utility in both the past and future, or better put, the mingling of them in the present moment. By doing so, it demonstrates that the intentional consideration of what and how we remember social studies experiences may help in advancing the cause of developing a more just understanding of ourselves, the world we live in, and how we might experience it more justly. Copyright by BRIAN SCOTT DURHAM 2021 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this study and of my PhD program would not have been possible without the kindness of others. First and foremost, to my students over the last 25, my memories of you continue to energize and inspire me and I thank you for sharing your memories so generously for this study. I have had the pleasure of teaching alongside some incredible human beings who encouraged my work and supported my research whenever they could. Thanks Carrie, Jake, Leah, Cody, and Sheri. I also want to thank my former Superintendent, Dave Peterson, who saw my development as an educator in this program as a positive thing for me and for my students. His creative support and willingness to take a risk with me will not be forgotten. I must also thank Dee and Dora DeMaso for starting me on this journey through their International Teaching Fellowship. As educators themselves, they know that education can change lives. They certainly changed mine. Thanks to my brothers, Dennis, Mike, and Kelly, for treating me like you always have throughout this program and to Dad and Deb for your ever-apparent unconditional love and support. I must acknowledge my peers and colleagues in this program as well. Erin Bronstein, Rachel Lockart, Hannah Grisham, Lauren Johnson, Adam Schmitt, Scott Jarvie, Andrew Masarik, Justin Detmers and many more – without your friendship, this would not have been impossible. To my friend and co-author, Peter Nelson (and Lizzie) – if the only thing to come out of these past five years was your friendship, it would have been worth it. Thanks too to my non-Phd friends for keeping me grounded and connected to life outside of academia, especially to Evan for reading and listening to my ideas with fresh and honest eyes. v I could not have asked for a more supportive committee: Anne-Lise Halvorsen encouraged me to apply to the program and was there every step of the way. Working with her was a joy. Margaret Crocco treated me as a peer from day one and challenged my thinking in ways I didn’t know were possible. Kyle Greenwalt helped me become a better teacher and opened my eyes to ways of being in the world for which I am better. Finally, I cannot find the words to thank my advisor, Avner Segall, for all he was done for me. Learning involves changing – and I have changed a lot during the course of this program. Avner was there to prop me up when I needed and to make me wobble when I got too comfortable. His intellectual prowess is only outmatched by his kindness and generosity. This study is about memories. I will forever fondly remember these past five years. They were not entirely my own – nor is this study – so I humbly thank everyone who played even a minor part in making this possible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................................. ix LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................. x INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 1 Organization of the Study .......................................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER 1: The “stubbornly persistent illusion” of time .............................................................. 6 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 6 Goals of Social Studies................................................................................................................ 6 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................ 13 Psychoanalytic Theory & Poststructuralism ..................................................................... 16 Memory, Experience, and Identity ................................................................................... 22 The Faulty and Malleable Nature of Memory .................................................................. 26 Memory in the Present .................................................................................................... 28 The Usefulness and Utility of Memory ............................................................................. 31 Desired Memories ............................................................................................................ 37 Memories to Be ................................................................................................................ 38 Planes of Immanence ....................................................................................................... 40 Memory and History in Social Studies Research .............................................................. 42 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 44 CHAPTER 2: Methods and Methodology ...................................................................................... 46 Methodological Assemblage .................................................................................................... 49 Methods ................................................................................................................................... 53 Part I: Data Collection....................................................................................................... 55 Part II: Data Collection...................................................................................................... 59 Part III: Data Collection..................................................................................................... 61 Data Analysis .................................................................................................................... 63 Positionality .............................................................................................................................. 64 Interlude: An Orientation of the Findings Chapters ................................................................. 65 CHAPTER 3: The impact of social studies memories (1998-2018) ................................................ 67 Context of the Study ................................................................................................................ 70 Memories of Social Studies Education ..................................................................................... 71 Period I (1998-2002) ............................................................................................................. 71 Period II (2003-2011) ............................................................................................................ 81 Period III (2012-2018) ........................................................................................................... 86 The Utility of Memory .............................................................................................................. 93 Goals of Social Studies............................................................................................................ 103 vii Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 104 CHAPTER 4: Memory at work in today’s classrooms.................................................................. 106 Angela..................................................................................................................................... 109 Memories of Social Studies ................................................................................................ 109 Memories of Teacher Preparation ..................................................................................... 114 Memories of Teaching ........................................................................................................ 116 Student Created Memories ................................................................................................ 126 Adam ...................................................................................................................................... 134 Memories of Social Studies ................................................................................................ 134 Memories of Teacher Preparation ..................................................................................... 137 Memories of Teaching ........................................................................................................ 140 Student Created Memories ................................................................................................ 147 Goals of Social Studies............................................................................................................ 155 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 157 CHAPTER 5: Eventive Irrealis Memories ..................................................................................... 159 Memories-to-be ..................................................................................................................... 161 Memories of Social Studies .................................................................................................... 162 Connecting Past and Future Memories .................................................................................. 168 Goals of Social Studies............................................................................................................ 174 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 176 CHAPTER 6: Discussion: Bringing the past, present, and future together.................................. 178 Alignment with Goals of Social Studies .................................................................................. 178 Memory is Malleable.............................................................................................................. 181 Memories as the Terrain of Investigation .............................................................................. 184 A More Just Memory .............................................................................................................. 187 Social Studies Content ............................................................................................................ 190 A Memory for the Future ....................................................................................................... 194 Implications for the Future..................................................................................................... 197 Memory and Social Studies ................................................................................................ 198 Future Research ................................................................................................................. 200 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 202 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................... 205 APPENDIX A: Participant Pool I Instrument ............................................................................ 206 APPENDIX B: Participant Pool II Instrument ........................................................................... 207 APPENDIX C: Participant Pool III Instrument .......................................................................... 208 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................... 209 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Participant Pool 1 Year of Graduation ............................................................................ 57 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Equality versus Equity ................................................................................................. 125 x INTRODUCTION In her instructive blogpost entitled “3 Tips for Writing Time-Travel Stories,” Diane Callahan (2020) suggests these stories interest us because “we love imagining the different paths our lives could take” (para. 1). Imagining what our lives could be like is a common process for high school students too. As they complete college applications, get hired to their first jobs, are confronted with the pressures of adult life, they too consider what paths might be laid available to them. For many this is an exciting time, full of opportunity as unknown roads lead to imaginaries of prosperity and happiness. For others, there is a realization of systematic forces working against them, hurdles that must be confronted and conquered or for some succumbed. But still, even in those instances, there is a hope of something different, a new path forward towards a life and a being in the world that brings joy and even justice. This study is very much embedded in this hope for a future that imagines and offers different paths forward for social studies education and its teacher preparation. But as forward thinking the implications of this study are, they are still caught up with and entangled with the past through memories of social studies education and teacher preparation, asking what can be mined from those memories, even how they might be remembered differently – towards a more just conclusion. Much like how time-travel stories often go backwards in time to an event in the past that has been fixed in memory, shaping our present existence, in an attempt to fix a wrong or make amends, this study too investigates how we might remember differently, more intentionally, creating a future out of the past that might also fix a wrong by making amends. Instead of imagining different paths our lives could take, as suggested above, this study imagines the different paths our lives did take, and as we 1 remember differently continue to have taken, through analysis of the past. By remembering our pasts differently, through each and every iteration of them, we might learn about the many different paths we have already taken but were not able to map. In other words, through a more purposeful process of remembering, we can see the past paths we have taken differently through the application of new lenses of analysis. Thinking about student and teacher experience in this way troubles the hierarchy of importance we place on the present. In an attempt to design impactful educational experiences, teachers often seek to understand all they can about their students, including the challenges and strengths that may disrupt or empower learning. They may start this process by asking the question “Where is that student?” By answering this question, teachers mean to ascertain among other things, reading levels, writing skill, knowledge base, emotional health, basic needs fulfillment, etc. In short, where does the student meet the conditions identified as ideal for learning and where do they come up short. When a deficiency is identified, supports and scaffolds are put in place to make learning as effective and likely as possible. I ask another question in this study: When is that student? By this I mean to ascertain what memories are so powerful and influential that they overwhelm and define that student’s educational and lifeworld experience, either for better or for worse. These memories may manifest themselves as a lack of interest in anything not already confirmed by their previous experiences and understanding of the world. This may become evident when they are unable to accept that the experience of an another is valid. Influential memories may grab hold during a discussion of political ideology as students parrot the words they remember their parents extol. The memories may manifest in the questions like “Why do we have to learn this?” as students 2 find no relevant antecedents to connect content with their own memories. Determining when a student is may be just as important and may offer even more potential for development than where a student is. It centers student experience in ways not yet fully explored, recognizing the agentic power memory has in shaping identity, dispositions, and starting points of understanding and development that often are taken for granted. To this end, the same question can be asked of teachers, shaped by memories of social studies education of their youth, the influential internship experience, and by their own context in which they find themselves presently. How the memories of those experiences are engaged and manifested in their current practice offers avenues of interrogation that may not only help them see their pasts differently, but their presents and futures as well. By focusing on individual memories, this study seeks to bridge the bifurcation of experience between the classroom and the world, between past, present, and future, to imagine a more comprehensive and responsive social studies educational experience. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY Chapter 1: In the first chapter of this dissertation, I lay the theoretical foundation on which this memory work shall build. In a change from more historical or collective memory theorizing common in the field of social studies, this chapter instead focuses on the implications of memories and processes of remembering by individuals in and through social studies educational experiences themselves. Through this exploration, I seek to trouble the very conception of time by intermingling pasts, presents, and futures in an attempt to find the utility of each. 3 Chapter 2: In the second chapter I discuss the methodology and methods of this study by aligning these carefully with the theoretical frameworks on which the study is based. The three-part methodological assemblage presented takes care to respect the varied participant pools and intended goals of each section of the study. Chapter 3: Chapter 3 explores the memories of social studies by students who graduated from high school between 1998 and 2018. In addition, these memories are compared and contrasted with memories of intention by me, their teacher. In so doing, chapter 3 reveals not only what was remembered from social studies experiences, but also, how these memories were made useful in subsequent lifeworld experiences. Chapter 4: In chapter 4, I seek to more intentionally mingle the past and present by mapping how past memories of social studies experiences and of learning to teach it are manifested in the current daily practice of two social studies teachers. Following, through investigation of the memories created in their students, I seek to explore how teachers’ own memories of social studies are disrupted and/or reified in the memories of their students as a result of their often adjusted practice. Chapter 5: Chapter 5, while considering data from chapter 3, seeks to use the terrain of memories to construct a social studies-to-be. By imagining what memories they would like to create in their future students, pre-service teachers construct a conceptual framework that might drive their future teaching practice. Chapter 6: Because of the three varied and distinctive parts of this study analyzed in the previous three chapters, chapter 6 seeks to synthesize the findings across time and participant 4 pools. In this way, memories of the past, present, and future are considered together towards a better understanding of how memories of social studies education can be made useful. Chapter 7: Finally, in chapter 7, I outline the implications of this study to the field of social studies education for both current practitioners and for teacher educators. In this way, I not only seek to align the past, present, and future implications of the study but also explicitly explore what the study means for ongoing social studies education and research around the concept of memory. 5 CHAPTER 1: The “stubbornly persistent illusion” of time “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein (Flatow, 2013) INTRODUCTION As we begin to think about the concept of memory and how it might be made useful in the teaching and learning of social studies, it is first imperative to think about the passage of time and how memories are created. To be sure, while it may be difficult to break free from a linear conception of time, that one event leads to another and another, providing through experience greater understanding, this study challenges this thinking by invigorating memory with a greater potential through a process of remembering differently. In this way, memory becomes not a thing that simply represents the past, but more excitedly, a site from which different pasts – or utility from the past - can be imagined. GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES Before describing the theoretical framework on which this study is based, I would like to create a foundation within social studies education on which it can rest. Within this section, I intend to describe how memory work assists and can invigorate the process of teaching and learning of the discipline. The National Council for Social Studies suggests that “the primary purpose of social studies is to help young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” (NCSS, n.p.). The use of this aspirational and idyllic language, however, requires further inspection and interrogation as we unpack terms like public good, culturally diverse, and 6 interdependency. For example, in their book Teaching History for the Common Good, Barton and Levstik (2004) point out that: We cannot assume consensus around a preexisting ideal of the common good, but neither can we expect people to discard their prior ideas (or their group identities) to take part in a supposedly neutral and universal discourse. Instead, we must recognize that citizens enter the public sphere with deeply felt, potentially conflicting, conceptions of the collective future, and that the purpose of democratic politics is to develop shared interests and visions. (p. 34) In this way, Barton and Levstik unsettle these goals and purposes by pointing out that there is often no shared understanding of what the accomplishment of the goals would achieve, suggesting there are sociocultural components that not only shape our individual conceptions of these murky goals but what success would look like. It is important to note for this study that individual influences make it difficult to come to a consensus on what social studies education is supposed to accomplish. The central issue herein lies in our often myopic understandings of the various differentiated conceptions of what is, in fact, in the public/common good. One goal of social studies education then is to seek out these different conceptions so as to better understand how our own conceptions might compliment or conflict with those of others – in other words expanding our understanding of the expanse of the common/public interests that may at times compete with and at other times complement each other. In instances when they conflict, opportunities for investigation into the rationale for what has caused this difference becomes most informative and exciting – a site of enlivened social studies education. Parker (2003) describes how this kind of interaction creates public 7 squares where this kind of quest for understanding is centered, rather than merely a citizenship of self-interest: Idiots come to the public square, when they do, to advance their own interests, to get something. More typically they fail to argue at all, letting others go to the public square to listen and talk and reason and decide with others – to deliberate. It is citizens who walk the path to public squares, and by walking them, create them. There, struggling to absorb as well as express, to listen as well as to be heard, they struggle to communicate across their differences, recognizing them and joining them with deliberation. This is how publics come to be. Citizens, then, balance the need to enjoy private liberties with the obligation to create a public realm, specifically to create policy decisions about how we will be with one another and what problems we will solve together and how. (p. 11). Making this effort even more complex, especially with regard to citizenship education, Hawley (2012), cites over ten different researchers that note that “competing conceptions regarding the nature and purpose of democratic citizenship education abound” (p. 2). Many have tried to bring some structure to help us understand these various approaches to citizenship and social studies education. Parker (2001), seeks to “step beyond the territory most familiar to democratic citizenship educators and to set alongside it other kinds of influences on the developing citizen identity” (p. 6). Westheimer and Kahne (2004) write of developing “personally responsible,” “participatory,” and “justice-oriented” citizens (p. 240), all three, it is important to note, move beyond the mere transfer of discrete knowledge from teacher to student, instead, expects citizenship education to result in some new action and/or way of being in the world. This is all to say that a mere rote curriculum that seeks to transfer 8 information will most likely fail in developing good citizens. Indeed, Dewey (1897) suggests that “without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child’s activity it will get leverage; if it does not it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature” (p. 4). Similarly, in his description of a critical history education, Segall (1999), suggests that the value in studying history is “not only the study of the past itself, for ‘its own sake,’ but the understanding such a study might provide as to which particular pasts and ways of story-ing the past we have chosen to call our own, and how those choices have positioned us to act (or not act) in the world” (p. 366). In more stark terms, he distinguishes between two forms of history education: A history that poses as objective, scientific, and true and one that is aware of its limitations and admits its contingency and partiality; a history is about the past itself and one that is about how we make sense of that past from the present; a history that provides closure, and one that encourages the openness of possibilities. In short, the decision facing educators is between a history in which students are receivers of information or one in which they are its produces; a history education that provides students with what to think or one that encourages them to think. (pp. 366-7). To further explicate how memory can help social studies education accomplish these more action-oriented and liberating goals, I focus in this study on two specific purposes for social studies education: one that encourages students to think for themselves while opening up possibilities towards an awareness of and commitment to (even action regarding) greater 9 social justice. Beyond the mere transferal of knowledge, these ways of being with oneself and within the world, I suggest, can most help us achieve the lofty goals set forth by the NCSS as stated above, however imprecise they might be. Within this form of social studies education we strive for, “the kinds of question students can (and hopefully will) ask of history, of society, of their own education, of themselves,” might help us to “look back, to the past, to construct its texts, its stories, its narratives, its discourse, the kinds of questions it asks (and does not ask)” understanding they are “embedded in the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual milieu of the present” (Segall, 1999, p. 371). In so doing, teachers practicing this type of social studies “do not aim to impart a fixed set of truths or critiques regarding the structure of society. Rather, they work to engage students in informed analysis and discussion regarding social, political, and economic structures” that eventual result in the ability to “consider the evidence of experts,” “the ability to communicate with and learn from those who hold different perspectives,” and to “promote their goals as individuals and groups in sometimes contentious political arenas” (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004, p. 243). Look then throughout the analysis of this dissertation, evidence of these two aspects of social studies education surfacing through the memories of its students and teachers, for it is through the terrain of memories that these pedagogical approaches might prove most impactful and revealing. While the following theoretical framework will describe in more detail the peculiarities of memory that make this possible, there are some initial educational considerations of memory that will help set the stage. For as we think about the development of these more critical dispositions and justice-oriented aims, it should be clear that these cannot and will not be achieved through worksheets and lectures alone. Rather, as will be 10 explained in more detail below, the consideration, interrogation, and challenging of personal memory (and the understandings and biases which result from them), as suggested by Barton and Levstik, can lead to the development required to achieve these goals. Dewey (1938) too suggested that the “conscious articulation of facts and ideas” of “earlier experiences” is “essential” in this process of towards development of a greater understanding of the self and one’s relation to the world (pp. 74-75). In other words, attention paid to articulating “facts and ideas” of “earlier experiences” centers more personal understandings through memories examined through social studies content and pedagogy. Cochran-Smith’s (2000) investigation into the power of narrative (the stories we tell) during the process of un-learning racism is another example that exposes the power memories have. It is memories that make up the stories we tell ourselves and others and are “not only locally illuminating…but also…[have] the capacity to contain and entertain within it contradictions, nuances, tensions, and complexities that traditional academic discourse with its expository stance and more distanced personal voice cannot” (p. 158). Goodwin and Genor (2008) have found success in their teacher preparation classes by explicitly surfacing memories of their pre-service teachers: We intentional engage our students in a number of reflective, autobiographical assignments throughout their student teaching year; students are asked to continually consider their backgrounds and experiences in relation to issues raised by course readings and discussions…Therefore our work with new teachers is undergirded by two central assumptions: (1) that all aspects of one’s autobiography have rich potential for analysis; and (2) that regardless of individual background and identities, each person 11 comes to teaching with preconceptions that need to be consciously examined and deliberately disturbed. (p. 202) In this way, while the expository content related to teacher preparation is certainly engaged in and acts as a lens of analysis, their approach focuses not on some distance and/or future classroom, but rather, on the real and agentic understandings revealed through memory each pre-service teacher may harbor. The teacher preparation content then is enlivened by the present recollection of these memories in a new and oftentimes challenging context. This model, I suggest, can also be applied to students of social studies themselves as they engage in content that often seems settled and straightforward. Friere (1974) has explored the unique aspects of our temporal relationships as well. He suggests we “apprehend data of [our] reality (as well as the ties that link one datum to another) through reflection – not by reflex” (p. 3). By doing so, “in the act of critical perception, men (sic.) discover their own temporality. Transcending a single dimension, they reach back to yesterday, recognize today, and come upon tomorrow” (p. 3). But with this awareness comes consequences, perhaps including an awareness of (in)justice. “As men emerge from time, discover temporality, and free themselves from ‘today,’” Friere writes, “their relations with the world become impregnated with consequence” (p. 4). In other words, as we begin to contemplate the agency our pasts possess to contour our present and future understandings, an honest, more critical analysis of those pasts as they surface through memory can help us identify how we have come to our current understandings, how they might be in error, and what can be done to find a more just path forward. Friere suggests thinking of education in this way requires students to think about the world differently, to: 12 “enter into” it critically, taking the operation as a whole, their action, and that of others on it. It means “re-entering into” the world through the “entering into” of the previous understandings which may have been arrived at naively because reality was not examined as a whole. In “entering into” their own world, people become aware of their manner of acquiring knowledge and realize the need of knowing even more. (p. 137). I suggest as a conclusion to this introductory context of the goals and purposes of social studies, that one of the most effective and accessible terrains of analysis, one that might act as an easy and productive way in which to enter into consideration of who we are, why we are the way we are, and how we might be different and more socially just, is through the examination of memory. By doing so, we can move one step closer to the goals and purposes of social studies education, namely the ability to recognize how our pasts have not only made us who we are, but also how analysis of them can help us make more “informed and reasoned decisions for the public good” (NCSS, n.p). THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Guiding this study are three assertions about memory. First, we can and should take advantage of the malleable nature of memory by both recognizing is unreliability and its ability to be contoured by new lenses of analysis. This unique characteristic – memory’s malleability - offers opportunities to pry open memories, to remember them in new and different ways, perhaps in more just ways, to re-shape the understandings of our past selves as well as our present and future iterations. As will be explained in more detail below, by remembering more justly, I do not mean recollections that are more accurate or truthful. In fact, another characteristic of memory is its very likelihood that they are faulty and inaccurate. Instead, by 13 using a more critical lens through the process of remembering, I suggest it may be possible to remember more justly, towards a more equitable understanding in the future, one that first identifies systems of oppression in their real-world manifestations, and then subsequently seeks to dismantle them. Westheimer and Kahne (2004) suggest “justice-oriented” education “engage[s] students in informed analysis and discussion regarding social, political, and economic structures” (p. 243). This study expands and applies the type of education to how those structures and their consequences are revealed and challenged in and through memories. In this way, memory can be a powerful force for this dispositional growth. Second, memory is called forth only in the present, summoned to bring meaning to and aid in understanding our current experience. The present is, in short, the instigator of memory, the spark that re-enlivens the past, and brings it to our attention alongside and within the present. Finally, memories of the past can be used in a consideration for re-imagining the future. Through identification of memories of omission and commission, what is and is not remembered, and by imagining desired future memories that might be attained through action and reflection on the past, we can create opportunities in the present that may more likely lead to those desired outcomes. In this way, memories-to-be are pulled backwards alongside the present to trouble our current understanding and ways of being in the world. This re-examining of the nature of memory through the challenging of its linearity calls for the reconsideration of the particular cause and effect nature of social studies itself, leading to a more lively, vibrant exploration of meaning through a critical analysis of why we think what we think, why we are who we are, and how we can more intentionally become who we want to be. 14 The poststructural notions that trouble accepted understandings of time and memory, explored through the writings of Deleuze and Bergson as described below, encourage an investigation of memories in a new, more complex light. By recognizing that the map to our identities is bound up with and through the memories of all we have and will experience emboldens this investigation as we seek to develop not only knowledgeable students and teachers, but critical ones as well, committed to justice and equity. By actively engaging in a cartography of becoming, a process filled with edits and revisions of where we have come from and where we might go, memory becomes an invigorated terrain from which to work. Because of the amorphous nature of memory and its sometimes reluctance to be seen and investigated, hidden in the subconscious, I begin this theoretical framework by introducing some concepts borrowed from psychoanalytic theory and explain their applicability to education and particularly to memory work. At the same time, I explain how poststructural theory may help us respect the individual and collective forces that may shape not only experience, but the subsequent memories they leave behind. I then explore the role memory plays in identity development and how this consideration may be brought to bear in educational settings. I trouble the notion of the linearity of time next, placing the question of “Where is that student?” into an expanded discourse with poststructural notions of time and memory. Finally, I develop an argument asking us to consider the process of memory differently, seeking alternate paths it might offer for the future. In this way, I place social studies education and the preparation of its teachers in a most influential operational role, as the site for which memories of the past can be considered not only in the light of the present but in the imaginaries of the decades to come. This consideration of memories-to-be offers a potential area in which I 15 believe memory work in social studies classrooms and teacher preparation programs could most influence personal and individual dispositional growth. Psychoanalytic Theory & Poststructuralism I introduce psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralism at this point to do the work of laying the foundation for more memory-specific frameworks that follow their theoretical lineage. This study mingles the conscious and unconscious in ways that seek to bring meaning to an aspect of our experience that is oftentimes unknowable or not fully accurate and precise. In other words, we remember differently at different times for different reasons. Through psychoanalytic theory we can respect and revel in these differences. This lens of analysis conveniently accepts the faulty nature of memory but sees in that faultiness (or at least imperfect representation) an opportunity for investigation and analysis. One’s memories, or the testimony of one’s past, through a psychoanalytic lens accepts “that one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it” (Felman, 1987, p. xx). This understanding magnifies memory’s value, in all that is both shared and hidden in its recollection and articulation. Kennedy (2010) supports this complexity, accepting memory’s rather fluid and innocuous nature, characterizing it as being “marked by the activity of the unconscious without a complex and elusive structure” (p. 180). Considering this study in the context of psychoanalytic theory then allows for and encourages the investigation and analysis of the unconscious alongside the conscious, enabling aspects of memory that are shared and remain hidden, opening them up for analysis and investigation. One appealing aspect of psychoanalytic theory applicable to this study is the idea that we all “possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires and memories” leading to the 16 subsequent efforts to “make the unconscious conscious” (McLeod, 2007). This is the goal of this study. Or more precisely, making the process of remembering visible and useful through the analysis of the ways memory is constructed, brought forth, expressed, and utilized in the meaning making of ourselves and world. While some aspects of memories will be fully accessible, open to recollection and investigation while actively being used and made useful, other aspects of even those same memories might linger in the unconscious and may require additional lines of interrogation to bring to light. Still others may lie dormant, inaccessible for a variety of reasons. These dormant memories are no less informative when interpreting the causes of their concealment. While memories of the past can be “retrieved intact,” this is not usually what happens “because of unconscious wishes connected with elements of memory” (Bohleber, 2007, p. 331). It other words, there may be some resistance on behalf of those asked to remember that may prevent the recollection of more traumatic events, for example. It is when that “resistance has been overcome” (Freud, 1914, p. 155) that these memories can be more accessible and made more useful. In this way, there is also value in determining why that resistance exists in the first place, or why something is not remembered. Perhaps there are reasons instructive to social studies education that may be exposed through the common experience of not being able to remember events known to have occurred. It is imperative and instructive to think of memory (and the process of remembering) as informative regardless of the memory shared. Put another way, memory presupposes an event. The process of remembering that even event is contoured and shaped by forces that expose aspects of the memory that are visible and openly shared while hiding others, preventing revelation partially caused by psychoanalytic forces. The 17 articulation of the memory, in all one chooses to share or is unconsciously prevented from sharing, exposes a terrain for analysis. This study then seeks to disrupt the resistance that prevents a fuller articulation of a memory by asking participants to remember in a more intentional, explicit way through lenses heretofore not employed, namely, lenses of social justice (race, gender, and sexual identity). While there are physiological aspects of brain functions (Schacter et al., 2012; Nuthall, 2004) that impact how we remember that are beyond the purview of this study, a deeper awareness of the psychological aspects of memory assist in and must be considered when interpreting what and why we choose to remember and forget. First, we tend to remember things that make us happy, put ourselves in a good light, or make us feel that we accomplished something great. A recent study, for example, found that participants remembered major life events that were “intrinsically meaningful activities that enable the person to cultivate his or her skills and to develop his or her best potentials” (Sotgiu, 2016, p. 687). It is interesting to note that these events almost exclusively “referred to culturally sanctioned transitional events occurring in the second or third decades of life (e.g., first job, leaving home, high school)” (p. 696), supporting the notion that the socio-cultural milieu in which we live (most notably in the present) has a large influence in how and why we remember certain things, making it especially easy to remember the things that show we are living the life we are supposed to be living. However, we also seem to easily remember traumatic events as well. Another study found that “traumatic experiences persisted in subjects’ memories, remaining highly consistent years after their occurrence” (Porter & Peace, 2007, p. 439) indicating that traumatic events have more staying power in our memory while “positive emotional memories exhibited a 18 progressive deterioration” over time (p. 440). In the memories that are described and analyzed in the findings chapters that follow, attention will be paid to how these more traumatic events can be brought to life in a useful way, perhaps making them less traumatic and assisting in reducing the resistance inherent in their articulation. In short, being attuned to these psychoanalytic factors about what, why and how we remember can prove helpful in seeking ways to remember differently. If we can recognize that we remember our experiences in ways to bolster our identities, to make them more pleasing or more beneficial, then we might also be able to recognize how this process may be troubled and adjusted. Likewise, understanding the lingering nature of troubling experiences or life challenges may also help alleviate its impact and allow, through reflection and analysis, to remember differently. In other words, if the process itself enlivens traumatic memories with utility, then remembering in a useful way can act as a salve for their lasting and troubling connotations. To trouble this further, I call on various poststructuralist theorists to help break down what it means to understand our existence (and our memories of it), insisting rather that how and what we know, while often dependent on the unforeseen cultural, political, economic, and social forces in which we live, can never be fully ascertained. In fact, organized education, and social studies education in particular, can be considered as one of those organizing forces which is often unrecognized or remains hidden. Therefore, our memories of it, while seemingly objective, bare the mark of subjective influences that must be considered as we attempt to bring to light the effect of the system in which we practice. Susanne Gannon’s (2008) memory work through a “feminist poststructural paradigm,” for example, “attends to unravelling the ways in which discourses have become sedimented and inscribed into our bodies and everyday 19 practices” (p. 44). This intentional way of deconstructing the agentic influences that have shaped our experience and therefore our memories, give credence to structures that contour that experience. These influential structural forces can easily be identified in the everyday practices of social studies education and the issues it engages (including analysis of the influence of gender roles themselves). In this way, we might be able to “reassess our responsibility as critical educators to ask different questions about the intelligibility of the self, the individual in relation to others, and to the knowledge/power nexus that produced us?” (Kohli, 1998, p. 519). Some of these questions can be, I suggest, about what we remember, why we remember those things, and how a more critical lens applied to this process can help identify the “nexus that produced us” and to subsequently act in accordance to the injustices that may be surfaced, both systematic and structural as well as more personal and individualized. In a similar attempt to apprehend aspects of teacher identity and the forces that empower and constrict it, Zembylas’ (2003) investigation into the role of emotions can be informative here. He “conceives [emotions] not only as matters of personal (private) dispositions or psychological qualities, but also as social and political experiences…” (p. 216). In this way too, memory can be constituted in and through what can be considered private and personal ways but also unable to be distanced too far from the social, political, and cultural context in which they were both conceived and articulated. Through the use of a poststructural lens, the lack and/or strength of the agentic forces that shape(d) us, especially when first initially not articulated in descriptions of memories, allows for a robust investigation into not the accuracy, but rather, the scope of their influence. 20 In other words, as a more critical poststructural lens is applied to the process of remembering, it is interesting to note how the articulation of memories change and may include more awareness of and agency given to these more systematic forces. This requires an openness to what the malleable and faulty nature of memory might enliven, accepting that “the self both is and is not a fiction; is unified and transcendent and fragmented and always in the process of being constituted…” (Davis & Gannon, 2006, p. 95). The ever-evolving/changing nature of memory therefore plays an important role in the process of the constituted self and suggest a critical investigation of them may help “blow apart the fictions through which we have come to understand ourselves…” (Walkerdine, 1990, xiv). This form of memory work, which does not simply rely on the articulation and analysis of existing memories, but rather, on remembering more intentionally and therefore differently through additional lenses of analysis, requires energy and effort. In the process of remembering differently, where one did not see race and gender, for example, a newly acquired lens of systematic oppression and privilege might surface a past more authentically which may include a childhood of privilege and perhaps unearned benefit. This more just memory then allows for its productive use in the present and beyond. However, in this way, the recognition of as well as the ability and willingness to remember differently in more critical ways, to point out how one might not only have benefitted from what is/was/will be might also leave behind a burden of culpability of the ongoing systematic oppression that was/is/will be. This process then allows for memory – and the ability to take advantage of the malleable nature of memory – to become operational. Sara Ahmed (2020) talks about the energy and effort that is required when this newfound understanding of past experience is, in fact, operationalized. She calls “upon white 21 men not to keep reproducing white men; not to accept history as a good enough reason for your own reproduction.” In this I see her warning directly applicable to what, how and why we remember. If our memories are to be instructive and useful, they must be engaged in more open and critical ways, opened to analysis that disrupts our understandings of the past. “It takes a conscious willed and willful effort,” she continues, “not to reproduce an inheritance” (p. 9). Similarly, it takes a conscious willed and willful effort to remember differently, to accept both our challenging and pleasant pasts and to map a new path forward toward a more just memory. By doing so, we don’t change the memory itself, but rather what can be seen in it, what we glean from it, how it can be made useful in a myriad of different contexts and circumstances, exponentially expanding and invigorating its potential utility even in future unknown contexts. Memory, Experience, and Identity To begin this exploration into the potential opportunities re-remembering might offer, it is first important to recognize memory’s role in shaping how we experience(d) the world. The focus will be on episodic memories or those that “comprise a person’s unique recollection of experiences, events, and situations” (Perera, 2021). Episodic memories include more than concrete representations and recollections. Beyond the dates, those present, the weather, the actions taken, and the outcomes resulting from these episodes, they also include the “emotions associated with the event” (Perera, 2021) as part and parcel with the more definable characteristics of recollections to further elucidate the vastness of memory itself. In other words, the un-seeable and more difficult to elicit aspects of experience are just as much wrapped up within those episodic recollections of one’s life as the facts, places, dates, and 22 people that make up an episodic memory and which are more readily accessible. This expansion of what makes up memory is important. It requires that an examination of any memory is highly personalized and individual. While shared memories will, no doubt, include similar facts and descriptors, how one enters, experiences, and leaves the episode will vary greatly, and is highly contingent on structural forces and even previous individual memories that led up to a particular experience. It is therefore not only the difference in what is remembered but how it is remembered that influences our individual dispositions of being in the world, and no doubt, with ourselves (and our pasts). While it is indeed “the prevailing wisdom in cognitive and social psychology…that personal identity is the function of autobiographical memory, that memory itself is the glue that binds the self together across time ( p. 231), we also know that we are not the same person as we were in second grade, ten years ago, or perhaps even before reading this study. This seemingly contradiction of a binding narrative of the self across time that is also marked by difference and change is important to highlight here. It is in the difference, between individuals as well as our own pasts and futures, that provides opportunities to investigate the role memory – and of remembering – plays in the process of becoming. In fact, in Deleuzian terms, becoming and difference are one and the same with difference acting as the marker in the ever on-going process of becoming. Without difference, becoming is stifled; perceived becoming without difference is only repetition. In this way, memory (and how we remember) plays a valuable role in our process of becoming. Schratz and Walker (1995) suggest that “what is significant about memories is not their surface validity as true records, but their active role in the construction of identity” (p. 41). In fact, as I discuss in the next section, the malleable nature of memory is a characteristic 23 through which we can take advantage, using its ability to change (to remember differently) for an intentional purpose. Remembering differently empowers memory to be “active, always in the present, and a construction, transaction, and negotiation” (Roberts & Roberts, 1996, p. 29). This agentic capacity which is embodied in memory, especially during the identity and dispositional development process, unlocks potential previously heretofore untapped in educational contexts. To be more specific, memory presupposes an experience. Something had to have happened or at least thought to have happened for a memory of it to be conceived. But this experience, by varying degrees, is riddled with both cognitive and affective energies, or better put, by both what one sees and what one feels before, during, and as a result of the experience. The breadth of the defining characteristics of a singular memory therefore make them difficult to characterize in a comprehensive way. Yet the memories nonetheless persist and shape who we are and how we might interact with others and the world. Research on sexual identity (Savin-Williams & Diamond, 2000; Rust, 1993), racial identity (Crinchlow, 2013; Fordham, 1996), economic identity (Humlum, et al., 2012) for example, all describe how lifeworld experiences, shaped by external social, political, and economic agents, impact who we perceive ourselves to be. These forces shape the identities and dispositions of those who experience slights and oppression as well as love, integration, and privilege. In other words, identity is constituted in the context of the social, political, economic, and cultural environs which we experience (or remember) of the world. This is important to consider as we strive to think about social studies education and the formative memories it may create, challenge, or support. If the approach in an educational exploration into any content is marked by inquisitive, curious, and critical 24 questioning that seeks to reveal new ways of thinking, not only about the content but of our memories of it, then that investigation no doubt will reveal unique understandings. It cannot be overstated how much influence these worldly experiences and the subsequent recollections of them have on one’s identity. That is why the question “Where is that student?” is so appropriate. How and why an experience is remembered or forgotten can both be a result of the identity one seeks to intentionally forge as well as the result of the identity those experiences helped shape. The implication of this understanding to this study is clear: one’s process of remembering shapes identities and informs understanding of ourselves, of others, and of our relationship to each other and the world. Those memories that prove most powerful and are constructed to be prime identity markers must also be considered in this light: that there are other agentic forces that bring to mind the memories of those experiences at specific moments that then influence how we interact with the world. In a hopeful way, however, what and how we remember them is open for adjustment due to the very malleable nature of memory itself. In other words, we may be able to remember differently and perhaps more justly. For example, how and why we address traumatic events, both in our present moment and in our pasts, is an important aspect during the process of becoming. Wood (1999), drawing on Habermas, explains how “the individual…must first of all ‘take full responsibility for the outcome of the processes that shaped one’s identity and then discriminate those strands that one affirms and wants to continue from those to be rejected’” (p. 39). These more challenging memories are always there, “preserved in the remote planes of memory” or “on the lower planes” that can be found and revealed through “an exceptional effort” (Bergson, 1998, p. 171). 25 Again, building on Ahmed’s (2020) notion that it takes a “willed and willful effort” (p. 9) to overcome the trajectory the past has set us on, so it is true in this effort to more fully surface these “remote planes” of memory, providing an opportunity to “take responsibility for” and/or “reject” (Wood, 1999, p. 39) those pasts that no doubt directs our futures. This brings to mind Nietzsche’s concept of the power of forgetting. While this study focuses on what is actually surfaced through the process of remembering, it is worthwhile to note there is some power and productivity that can be achieved by not remembering. Nietzsche (1969) sees the ability “to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle…to make room for new things…that is the purpose of active forgetfulness” (pp.57- 58). What is important about this concept is that forgetting is not a passive or even an easy process. As Nietzsche’s words suggest, it is an “active” process, requiring a calculation that the memory itself prevents development and therefore holds no utility. This study is interested in the process of this determination and focuses on the memories that are both revealed and those which are lacking. This process, I argue, is an important aspect of becoming and recognizes how remembering differently (or even forgetting) might change who we think we were/are/will be. The Faulty and Malleable Nature of Memory One important foundational characteristics of memory on which this study rests is the fact that memory is not fully accurate and that memory can be re-shaped. The story of Hugo Munsterberg may help illustrate how the reliability of memory can be troubled. Munsterberg was an early leader in the field of psychoanalysis and was renowned for his memory. He had given over three thousand lectures on the subject in both Europe and the United States without 26 using a single note. In the summer of 1906, his seaside home was burgled. Under oath, he testified that the trespassers broke in through his cellar window, that they did the deed at night, and they only took a few items that Munsterberg catalogued in a report to police the next day. “Only a few days later,” he wrote, “I found out every one of these statements was wrong” (Munsterberg, 1908, p. 39). He surmised that “in a thousand courts at a thousand places all over the world, witnesses every day affirm by oath in exactly the same way much worse mixtures of truth and untruth, combinations of memory and of illusion, of knowledge and of suggestion, of experience and wrong conclusions” (p. 43). His final analysis: “Justice would less often miscarry if all who are to weigh evidence were more conscious of the treachery of human memory” (p. 44). In this case, Munsterberg recognized that the frailties of memory resulted in “treachery” and suggested we should be leery of them. Munsterberg’s account illuminates the “highly malleable and continuously evolving” nature of memories; how they “are forgotten, reconstructed, updated, and distorted” (Identifying, 2014). As described above, various walls of a psychoanalytic nature may block our memories from useful examination and the recognition and identification of those walls must first occur before we can dismantle them. Recognizing and accepting that memory is in fact faulty and malleable can at first be itself traumatic by asking us to question everything we think has happened to us. But it can also be liberating in the sense that remembering in a different light, and thereby opening up new ways to reconsider those memories, can enliven and energize them. In this way, memory can be considered as anything but stable and static, but rather as a fluid terrain from which enlightened understandings might be gleaned. Through poststructuralist thought, drawing on Derrida, memories can be considered “not inalterable in 27 advance, but can be changed” (Belsey, 2002, p. 89). It is this exciting possibility, that we can remember differently and perhaps more justly, that is the most powerful conjecture this study investigates. But not all memories are accessible at all times. It is important to understand how and when memories are triggered and brought to mind. I suggest that they are always surfaced in the context of the present, given life for/with/as a result of a problem, experience, or question that lies before us now. Memory in the Present It may be tempting to relegate our memories to a position of negligible unimportance, instead giving the present privilege in our attempts to understand our lived experience. But as Faulkner (1951) wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” instead it “is always with us, for it feeds the present” (Bond, 2016). In this way, the very concept of time can be troubled, suggesting that the past, present, and future may not, in fact, be linear in nature. In other words, it is in how we structure and bring meaning to and what we take from our pasts - through our memories – that inform our present encounters in the world. Others have theorized about this phenomenon – from Derrida’s (2012) hauntings to Freud’s deferred action (Freud & Breuer, 2001) and even Nietzsche’s (1974) eternal return – all speak to how our pasts can be (and are) made useful in and through our present experience. I draw here on the theorizing about time and memory by Bergson and Deleuze. They conceptualize memory’s role in present understandings of experience – at the point that it makes “itself useful” (Bergson, 1998, p. 140). Bergson describes how our flawed perception of memory is often one that views past and present clearly demarcated from each other: the 28 things that happened in the past are different from the things happening now. This way of thinking about memory provides us with a “psychological continuity” (Al-saji, 2004, p. 207) that may be easier to visualize and understand; a more linear cause and effect way to live. But Bergson troubles this distinction between past and present: Your perception, however instantaneous, consists…in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future. (Bergson, 1998, p. 150) In other words, according to Bergeson, memories are only realized in the present, summoned to life in response to some stimulation that calls forth their remembrance. At the moment of remembering, of perceiving, that fleeting moment itself has become past, as we move towards another futurity and another and another. Deleuze (1994) puts it more succinctly: the “present is only the entire past in its most contracted state” (p. 82 - italics added). For Deleuze, drawing on Bergson, memory is like two simultaneous jets taken up at the moment of the present, “one oriented and dilated toward the past, the other contracted, contracting toward the future” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 52). It is at the present moment, however, where “all of the past coexists with the new present” (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 81-82). All that has happened in the past, stored in our memory, is always occurring (or bound up) with each present moment, sometimes consciously and others unconsciously, becoming a memory the instant it is recognized. The past would never be constituted if it did not coexist with the present whose past it is. The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements 29 which coexist: One that is present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does cease to be but through which all presents pass. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 59). To summarize, the past is only called forth during the process of remembering in the present. It does not exist except for its relation to the present. “Subjectivity is always a condition of the ‘now,’” writes Sekimoto (2012), “pushed by the past and pulled by the future to create an ever-flowing present” (p. 237). The lock box of memories is waiting to be opened, rummaged through, and revealed. But that process requires a key (the present) and lens of analysis that encourages critical, perhaps new, understandings to be realized as a result. It is this potential of what memory can be used for, or what utility it possesses, that is most interesting and inspiring here. Derrida and de Man (1989) suggest that it is not memory’s (in)ability to bring the past to life, but in fact, to what use it can be called on in the future that is most intriguing. The power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a situation or a feeling that actually existed, but is a constitutive act of the mind bound to its own present and oriented toward the future of its own elaboration. (p. 59) In this way, through the examination of both the recollections of the past and a close attention to how and why those recollections are brought to mind – for what use and in what utility – can we begin to interrogate and reveal memory’s powerful potential to think about ourselves and our world anew, but more importantly, what we can learn from this “elaboration.” This process of elaboration can then influence social studies education and of the preparation of its teachers, taking advantage of memories that hold within them insightful guideposts for the future, whether they direct us to continue on the same path or push into unknown territory. 30 The Usefulness and Utility of Memory Memory’s insistence to be recognized and dealt with through our present experience combined with its malleable nature, offers opportunities, through its critical analysis, to be an avenue towards new understandings of our present and future experiences. The continuous re- ordering and re-shaping of our past(s) through remembering reveals an unavoidable cycle that is constantly occurring which can have a profound impact on teaching and learning social studies. In a discipline that is uniquely situated to consider memory, the acceptance of the mobility, flexibility, and amorphous nature of all that we call “history” re-enlivens its interrogation. However, it is the distinction between memory’s usefulness and utility that becomes important to differentiate here. In any history class, for example, historical memory is useful in that it is engaged for some practical purpose, namely the understanding of what happened, who did what, and to some extent, why what happened happened. The utility of more personal, individual memories is realized when they too are engaged in towards some other intentional function or benefit. In this way, useful memories can simply make us feel fond of a past event in our lives or leave us feeling anxious as a result of a traumatic experience. To be of utility, we engage in that useful memory in deeper, more intentional ways, attempting to excise what made the event pleasant or what caused the trauma. In this study, I seek out the critical utility of memory, or ways in which useful memories, and the process of remembering them, can be used in intentional ways to access what memories of social studies education and of preparing to teach it can tell us about ourselves and the practice at large. To this end, it is important to spend energy on the process of analysis of how and why we have the memories we have and remember them the way we do. Sekimoto (2011), drawing 31 on Merleau-Ponty (1962), suggests that “theorizing identity needs to pay attention to how we ‘look back’ at ourselves and how that act of looking back is a temporal, retrospective process” (p. 238 – emphasis added). It is therefore the analysis of the process of remembering that is open for investigation in this sense. To this end, we can draw on previous theorizing and research on collective memory to help inform our understandings of individual recollections. Many have suggested that collective memory cannot be considered as static and un-changing. In fact, “continually refashioned,” writes Lowenthal (2015), “the remade past continuously remoulds (sic) us” (p. 1). Instead of a “narrative of a national past to provide the thread of continuity between past, present, and future,” (Wood, 1999, p. 20) we would be better served with a history – and a process of remembering - more attuned to the experiences of the otherness of all, even our younger and future selves; allowing for an investigation of memories that is “unhinged by contact with other pasts,” through a memory that “creates different futures” (Al-saji, 2004, p. 230). Nowhere has this been more recently evident than in the debate over the removal of Confederate statues in American cities. The statues themselves were constructed in a climate of a past present moment marked by “Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, legalized and illegal terrorism of white against black and the rewriting of many state constitutions to effectively deny citizenship to African Americans” (Little, 2019, p. 633). In this sense, remembering the past differently resulted in physical symbols to be erected that, according to the Mayor of New Orleans, were meant to “send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge” (p. 633). But in the wake of more public examples of racist actions and an increased awareness of the structural racial violence, these collective memories – and how we remember them - has changed, resulting in a collective 32 reconsideration of the particular memories and memorials manifested in those earlier times. These “dialogues,” writes Little (2019), “involve confrontations between different social truths from different publics and counterpublics” (p. 636). This is to say that we have not arrived at an end point or solution to how Confederate leaders will be remembered – the process and dialogue is ever ongoing. This way of thinking about collective memory can be instructive when imagining how we might remember our individual pasts differently as well. How we remember today is no doubt influenced and contextualized by the present moment we are in. If we embrace the same “confrontations” as many purveyors of collective memory do on an ongoing basis, thereby engaging in our dialogue with our own memories, we too might enliven our understandings of ourselves and our place in the world, in the past, present, and into the future. In this way, justice does not escape scrutiny in this study. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Thinking about memory in a different, less linear way, troubles this conception. King’s quote insinuates the eventual triumph of justice, a future event that may not be as inevitable as we would hope. It also suggests that as we travel along this arc, the more likely a more just world is possible. On its face, we know this may not be the case. We do know, however, that the meaning of justice and injustice - and our ability to recognize each – has been as fluid and flexible as our interpretations of the historical past in which they occurred; that our ability to recognize injustice in the past is enhanced, even defined, by our present (and hopefully future) understandings and experiences even though the referent act, one that maintains the same 33 dates, places, and actants, is now somehow now perceived differently and therefore remembered differently – a new memory of the same event – a more just memory. But as Habermas stated above, for this to happen we must come to some reconciliation with those memories that challenge our identity. “Until the lion tells his side of the story,” explains an African proverb, “the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (Quinn, 2013). The investigation of memory then offers a unique opportunity to get the lion’s side of the story, however flawed and challenging it too may be. It may be difficult to ask what parts of our memory lie in the “lower planes” attached to more dominant memories of ourselves and our experience and accept “a kind of suspiciousness of memory” (Ricoeur, 2002, p. 6) that may, upon inspection, reveal that our memories are shaped in individualized, particular ways that may put ourselves and our experience in the best light. Ricoeur (2002) suggests that “it is always possible to tell in another way” (p. 9) – much like the story of the hunt from the lion’s perspective above. “This exercise of memory is here an exercise in telling otherwise” (p. 9), empowering and giving agency to memories that may lay uninvestigated. Learning to remember and tell our pasts differently, more critically, could enliven the process of remembering in more just ways. It is what the present demands be called forth from our memory that then results in what memories, or parts of memories, or versions of memories are put into use. If we assume that the entirety of our memory is always available to us, it is the present moment, and the actions the present moment requires that sparks recollection and application of past experiences. Bergson (1998) puts it this way: “the totality of our past, is continually pressing forward, so as to insert the largest possible part of itself into present action” (p. 168). Ricoeur 34 (2002) calls this “the duty to remember” (p. 10). He explicitly connects this ethical concern to teaching: “the duty to remember is a duty to teach,” and posits that this remembering and teaching should lead us to a “just memory” (p. 11). One attempt at using memory and employing its utility towards a just memory occurred in post-apartheid South Africa. The creation in 1995 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “opposed forgetting” (Todorov, 2009, p. 457) the atrocities committed during the ruthless implementation of apartheid. Instead, the mission of this commission was to allow individual to speak their truths. Victims who testified and whose later testimony was corroborated, received government compensation for the crimes against them. Perpetrators too, were asked to testify, making public the crimes they participated in and “if they had told the whole truth, they would be granted amnesty and could no longer be brought to court for these acts” (p. 457). In this structuralized and systematic attempt to reveal memories, the court was more concerned with the truth (or the most authentic version of the truth as could be attained) rather than individual judgement or contouring that could result because of the malleable nature of memory. The leader of the African National Congress, Bishop Desmond Tutu, drew on traditional African notions of the human experience to justify these efforts at non-punitive justice. “We are human because we belong,” he said, “We are made for community, for togetherness, for family, to exist in a delicate network of interdependence” (Todorov, 2009, p. 458). What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was able to do was first recognize that the purpose of revealing these memories was to break down the walls that separated the victims and perpetrators, instead fully understanding that our “inhuman dimension…is human” (p. 462); 35 “that inhumanity is a human thing” (p. 462). This helped them achieve a form of restorative justice (perhaps the purpose for just memory) “which uses other means and pursues the wellbeing of the community” (p. 458). This purpose for memory, I concede, borders on a transcendent conception of its ethical applications, one that “judges actions and thoughts by appealing to…universal values” (Smith, 2007, p. 66). In other words, finding utility in memory to better understand and perhaps alleviate systems of oppression can be deemed a better than or more righteous use. I place this investigation of memory’s utility in an ontological context not in one of transcendence, however, but rather one of immanence. I defer my discussion of immanence below, but suffice it to say, while a transcendent approach to remembering more justly would be almost prescriptive, asking how should memory be used, a more immanent approach more aligned with this Deleuzian approach asks only “What can we do with our memories?” (Frichot, 2011, p. 76). In this way, the re-thinking of memories, and of remembering them differently, becomes not a task of learning new information, but rather, a calling forth of what has happened in the past in a new light in the present, with an eye towards what is yet to come, or desired to come. If we can create a process of remembering that is more just, or remembering in a way that interrogates memories in an effort to make them critically useful, could a more just process of remembering be achieved? Could a process of remembering differently, especially for those with privilege, one that would ask what story would the lion tell, empower the process of remembering towards a loftier goal? Much like the Truth and Reconciliation 36 Commission, it may assist us in finding a more ever-elusive truth, so that we can, as Harbermas recommends, deal with and confront who we were, we who are, and who we want to be. Desired Memories Before we can conduct such an analysis, however, we must consider what might shape and even motivate our willingness to engage in these confrontations. There are, no doubt, issues of power and resistance bound up in memory. So much so, as stated above, that the breaking down of the psychoanalytic walls that may prevent the recollection of certain memories or the ability to remember in a more critical way must first be accomplished before further, more deliberate analysis can begin. In this way, while the analysis of power and the knowledge it can suppress or reveal is essential in this process, a desire to embark on the process is a pre-requisite. Deleuze (2006) explains it this way: “I emphasize the primacy of desire over power. Desire comes first and seems to be the element of micro-analysis” (p. 126). In the micro-analysis of the memories to follow, even though placed in the context of questions of power (namely racial, gendered, and sexually normative), it is the desire of those that remember to do so more inquisitively, towards a more just purpose, that makes the memories more useful. In other words, the intentional recalling of memories in light of a world in which one desires to live, now and in the future, focuses lenses of analysis that contour the past for a particular desired effect. This may lead to a realization that past experiences were problematic and change must occur to fulfill who we desire to be; OR, it may lead to a remembering of the past in such a desirable way to make our experience and our understanding of it more in line with who we thought we should have been. 37 In this way, these larger issues of power become folded into the assemblages that we each embody and therefore are brought under the same pressure and manipulation of the desires we hold. Our changing desires then are “constantly undoing, or at least opening up, forms of subjectivity and territorializations of power” (Biehle & Locke, 2010, p. 323). Desire then becomes an energizing force during the process of remembering. If social studies can, for example, plant a seed or at least fertilize a desire to be more aware of and attuned to issues of injustice, then the possibilities of the future and the past can be accessed. Thinking of desire in this way makes space for possibility, what could be, as a crucial dimension of what or what was. It brings crossroads – places where other choices might be made, other paths taken – out of the shadow of deterministic analytics. It brings alternatives within close reach. (p. 323) I suggest a desire to think about these more structural issues in a personal way can be accessed through memories of the past as well. Instead of asking what could be, we can now ask what could have been in the light of our new knowledge and desire to make a more just and less oppressive world. Memories to Be This leads to a consideration of how best might we shape who we want to be or what memories we want to first create to then remember in the years to come. As a foundation of this consideration, I draw on the linguistic concepts known as realis and irrealis moods. Realis moods in any form of writing are described through perceived statements of fact of events known to have happened. In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee, 2010) for example, we know 38 that Atticus Finch has two children, is a lawyer, and has the skill of a marksmen among other things. What we don’t know is what impact his empathy and openness will have on his community or his children. We might hope that the racism he witnessed and fought against would be dismantled in some way because of his efforts. This is an irrealis mood, “a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen” (Acimen, 2021, p. 3) I apply these concepts to memory in this theoretical framework, referring to memories of things that have already happened as realis moods. These will be explored in chapters 3 and 4 and include actual memories of social studies education and teacher preparation. But what can be accomplished in social studies education to insure or at least increase the likelihood that memories of social studies are useful and full of critical utility in the years long after students leave these educational spaces? To create episodic (or realis) memories that we want and think should be created, there is a need for some action to take place, perhaps even a disruption of memory. The utility of considering memories-to-be will be explored in chapter 5. This is how memory can be useful and full of utility. By considering what memories we desire to inspire as social studies educators and teacher preparers, we can then create the future antecedents that may make them more possible. Thinking about social studies education in this way expands the usefulness of memory beyond the present and into the future, connecting the past and future through our recognition of the gaps left through memories of past omissions and commissions, imagining what we want to embed in the identity shaping 39 memories of our students, and then working to fill the gaps today, in the present, that might prevent and therefore encourage their attainment in the future. Planes of Immanence The recognition that growth and understanding is, like time itself, not a linear process that leads us closer to a “truth” is important to consider at the outset of this study, especially as we think about memory’s usefulness in relation to social justice. I do not seek to inform a process of remembering that will result in a pre-set, pre-determined way of thinking. Rather, I suggest that remembering (or re-remembering) in a more critical way, by intentionally re- thinking what we thought were key learnings from past experiences, may allow for new thinking and understandings to be engaged in and developed. This process is on-going and never-ending. The potential paths forward are unknowable. But as each individual memory is re-examined by each individual, called forth for the purpose of making sense of the present, new opportunities to see aspects of our experience anew are made possible. This is not to say that the use of memory in this way leads to a transcendence, leading one to higher plane of understanding. As we begin to analyze memories and as the process of remembering is altered, new and unforeseen utilities of the same memory may be revealed and lead to a new and different plane of immanence from which one can henceforth understand the past, present, and future in a different light. In Deleuzian thought, a plane of immanence is the field where “all possible events are brought together, and new connections between them made and dissolved” (Stagoll, 1998, p. 204). It is on these planes of immanence where the process of becoming takes place. Transcendence refers to a process of negation or one that includes a hierarchy, an ascension to a higher state of being. Immanence, on the other hand, “emphasizes 40 connections over separations” and relies on being in a relation “with” others and “in” something (Williams, 2005, p. 126). I argue too, that the process of remembering differently can also lead one to be in relation to one’s previous self, being open to reconciling past transgressions, misunderstandings, and ignorance not in a judgmental way, but rather, as a process towards more meaningful and authentic comprehension. This aligns with a Deleuzian notion of ethics and how one can understand differently. Deleuze does not ask us to compare our understanding or our actions to some transcendent figure or axiom, rather, he sees growth in relation to the self, the difference in what one used to be, who one is now, and the potential in what one may be able to someday be. This is not a process to higher thinking or even better ways of thinking – simply different ways of being in the world. In this way, the key question is not how one should live bur rather “What can I do, what am I capable of doing…Given the degree of power, what are my capabilities and capacities? How can I come into active possession of my power? How can I go to the limit of what I ‘can do’?” (Smith, 2007, p. 67). Therefore, as we begin to analyze the process of remembering, we seek to reveal if and how this new attention to remembering and memory can reveal aspects of one’s power and capacities to act and understand that once were not accessible. This transfer to a different plane of immanence will not be identical for any two people and must therefore remain flexible and respective of each individual worldly context and experience in the world. 41 Memory and History in Social Studies Research While this study is not concerned with collective memory nor with different conceptual frameworks through which the subject of history itself may be considered, there is some value in reviewing the literature that takes up different ways of thinking about history and/or collective memory. Some have claimed history, for example, is the curated truth that tells the story of our shared path. Postmodern theorists have questioned this thinking by arguing that “historiography constructs as much as uncovers the ‘truths’ it pursues;” that it is “written by people in the present for particular purposes, and the selection and interpretation of ‘sources’ are always arbitrary” (Olick & Robbins, 1998, p. 110). This type of history “is drastically selective. Certain memories live on: the rest are winnowed out, repressed, or simply discarded by a process of natural selection which the historian, uninvited, disturbs and reverses” (Yerushalmi, 1982, p. 101). Could our individual memories too be called up in selective ways? Would a more aggressive, “exceptional effort” bring forth those memories that have been “winnowed out, repressed, or simply discarded?” In this way, the recognition that the past is not just “simply…another present” (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 66), but an interpretation of what we think happened, or what we wanted to have happen, from the vantage point of the present can encourage, even require, us to circle around those memories in more intentional ways. However, educational reformers like Dewey (1938) posited that “the notion that historical inquiry simply reinstates the events that once happened ‘as they happened’ is incredibly naïve” (p. 236). In other words, “all historical construction is necessarily selective” (p. 234). Hutton (1993) argues that “historians may feel beleaguered by the variety of traditions that vie for their favor, yet they are privileged in their capacity to survey the historiographical 42 scene as if it were a vast landscape of memory, whose topographical features highlight the many traditions that may be investigated” (p. 166). The challenge then today, through critical and postmodernist historical investigations, is to “replenish the sense of history as the recovery of lived experience” (p. xxiv) or to once again involve ourselves in an exploration of the topography of memories that requires more than a surface-level fly-over, but rather, a deeper expedition into the nooks and crannies that heretofore have yet to be accessed and availed. “Upon what grounds,” asks Dewey (1938) “are some judgements made about a course of past events more entitled to credence than are certain other ones?” (p. 230). The varied conscious and subconscious grounds on which historians build their curatorial gates that limit what is and is not allowed into the record of historical collective memory are too numerous to contemplate here. Nor are they germane to this study. It is simply important to recognize that “each age writes the history of the past anew” (Turner, 1939, p. 32). In this way, the primacy of the present in historical inquiry becomes clearer. Further, drawing on Foucault’s (1971) archaeology of knowledge, Bell and Colebrook (2009) state that “there can be no continuous historical narration precisely because the very notion of the narrator (‘man’ or ‘humanity’) alters and varies, as does the very experience of time and space that is narrated” (p. 3). If the context and the motivations of the creators of history consistently change and impact what is considered collective memory, it can be concluded that the foundation on which history sits is tenuous at best. As new information and individual memories are unearthed or engaged and as present times call for a recollection of a particular past event to help make sense of the contemporary, new collective memories are formed. Foucault (1971) describes how “historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present 43 state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves” (p. 5). It is in these breaks that this study is interested. This study then draws on parallel analytic and theoretical foundations as those described above that troubling the nature of a changing history and collective memory. As the present moments allows us to view our founding fathers, for example, in a new light, what might the same foci aimed at individual memory reveal in our own process of remembering our individual past experiences? What curatorial forces might we uncover within us that might alter our perceptions of our own pasts? How might a realization that we can never truly “know” our own individual pasts “as they happened” impact our understandings of ourselves and of our present/future experience? These questions open opportunities for individual memory work in the field of social studies education and teacher preparation. CONCLUSION Through this description of the theoretical framework of this study, I have explained how we can perceive memory not as something from or constituted in the past, but something that is called forth to make meaning in the present. In so doing, memory becomes an active energized terrain from which to consider and imagine the past, present and future simultaneously – seeking utility in each pass. In this way, through each new recollection from a different plane of immanence, one can reveal and surface ways in which they may want to and have been experiencing the world, sparking a desire to understand their ever-changing present experience in a more just light. This process aligns well with the goals of social studies education focused on in this study as well. If social studies seeks to enliven the past, to open it up not for the regurgitation of settled understandings, but rather, to disturb what we think we 44 know; to expand our notion of who and what makes up our shared experience, so too can the process of remembering differently accomplish similar and complimentary goals. In this way, the development of dispositions helpful to both endeavors can empower them, intermingling and authenticated not rote knowledge but ways of being in the world and more importantly, with yourself. 45 Chapter 2 – Methods and Methodology In this study, following the processes of memory itself, I seek to mingle together the past, present, and future of social studies education and explicate how memory informs its impact, its practice, and its potential. It spans individual memories of social studies students over the past twenty years, the practice of social studies education in the present moment through the memories of teachers and students today, and how its memories could surface twenty-five years from now as we envision future memories. It will use as its fulcrum, memories of experiences around the issues of power (however flawed they may be) that have had, will have, and currently have a powerful ability to contour what we think has happened to us and who we are/were and what we hope to be in the future. The research questions, therefore, of this study are: 1. In what ways does the memory of social studies education differ, support, and/or challenge its intended goals? 2. How do the memories of social studies teachers and students impact how issues of power are taken up in classrooms today? How do memories impact how that taking up is perceived and internalized in social studies classrooms? 3. How does the process of remembering impact how we conceive the present moment and envision the future? How can recognizing the process of remembering and intentionally remembering differently result in a more critical and just end? 4. How might memory be made useful and utilitarian in the process of social studies education and teacher preparation? 46 As described in chapter 1, this study seeks to explore, through the process of collecting and analyzing memories of social studied education, how they have been, are, and can be made useful and also explores how remembering them differently, in the present and for the future, might make those memories useful in different and more critical ways. In his analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Deleuze (1972) describes what this process might entail: “What is important is that the hero does not know certain things at the start, gradually learns them, and finally receives an ultimate revelation” (p. 26). We can replace the word hero in that sentence with participant and researcher and in some way succinctly encapsulate the process of data collection and analysis of this study. However, adding to the complexity of this endeavor is that instead of reaching a final conclusion, the methodology and methods described in this chapter return us to the beginning of that sentence in an endless circle, eliminating the word “ultimate,” requiring a constant circling back again and again. In other words, as we learn new things that lead to revelation, we realize that we don’t know others, requiring us to learn more things leading to additional revelations, and so on – a constant traversing of planes of immanence. To be more precise, think of a hermeneutic circle, where each new understanding, or in this case, each new memory triggers others, resulting in different recollections that result in still more understandings that then cause different understandings of perhaps the same memory (if it can be called the same memory any longer). This “circularity of understanding” (Risser, 2003, p. 41) is welcomed and engaged in the methodology and methods below. In full awareness that “we cannot have the same experience twice” (Gadamar, 1975, p. 317), there is a form of suspicion in the memories explored herein, recognizing that the “experiencer has become 47 aware of his experience” (p. 317) in order to retell them. Therefore, they have already attached to and through them, by what they choose to share and what they forget, considered meaning applicable to their own understanding of themselves and the world. This does not make them any less insightful. On the contrary, what is left unshared and un-remembered, what is left in the margins, just out of sight, is just as informative as what is full-throatedly expressed. This study relies on the memories of students and teachers of and through social studies content about experiences that occurred in the previous months, the previous years, and even previous decades. It seeks to consider them all as valid and consequential and taken together, reveal a tapestry of experience that sometimes stands alone and sometimes blur together, informing and contradicting along the way. In fact, in this three-part study, data from part 1 were used as subjects of inquiry in part 3, preserving a cohesiveness while reserving individual differentiations as well. As referenced in chapter 1, this study calls on poststructural frameworks to illuminate how teachers and students construct, call forth, interact with, and make use of memories about their social studies educational experience. Since memory—as a “thing” and as a process—is inherently a “buried” aspect of our psyche and one that needs to be surfaced, this study uses different methodologies to access these sometimes frustratingly hidden processes. To this point, Deleuzian theory, especially his conceptions of the virtual, actual, and the interactive relationship between the two, are particularly significant here. This seems altogether fitting and proper as Deleuze (2001) himself posited that ‘theory is an inquiry, which is to say, a practice: a practice of the seemingly fictive world that empiricism describes; a study of the conditions of legitimacy of practices that is in fact our own” (p. 36). In their exploration of Deleuzian research 48 methodologies, Coleman and Ringrose (2013), encourage Deleuzian-inspired methods in order “to shed light on other ways of knowing, relating to and creating the world, ‘noticing’ (Stewart, 2007; Blackman & Venn, 2010) different kinds of things that might be happening, or things that might be happening differently” (p. 4). Drawing on Law (2004), they suggest a “method assemblage” (p. 41) that crafts “the boundaries between what is present, what is manifestly absent, and what is Othered” (p. 5). Therefore, since “no single method can grasp the subtle variations in ongoing human experience” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, p. 12), I employ a variety of methods to provide a more comprehensive set of data to analyze. Considering the psychoanalytic and poststructural foundational theoretical framework described in chapter 1, I present such an assemblage below. Following, I provide a detailed description of the precise methods used to collect and analyze data, including a brief introduction of the participants, however, because of the number of participants and how their unique revelatory recollections are specific to various parts of the study, I reserve a more detailed introduction until a more useful moment within the findings chapters that follow. METHODOLOGICAL ASSEMBLAGE Any methodology of memory research, Radstone (2000) suggests, might be most informative if the “starting point is in the local, in the subjective, in the particularity of memory itself” (p. 12). She suggests that the “object of study,” in this case memories of social studies education, “is constituted between the individual and the social; subjectivity and objectivity; the inner world and the outer world,” maintaining a transitional or “liminal” nature (p. 12). This differentiation then requires a methodology that seeks to intentionally illuminate aspects of individual memory that may be easy to access (conscious) and more likely hidden 49 (unconscious). In addition, there is value in then comparing, contrasting, and putting in context these individual memories with those of others not ascertain truth, but rather, to identify similarities and differences realized in the memories themselves (the what is remembered) and in what way they are retold (the how it is remembered). Employing this lens requires attention to be paid to the systems of knowledge creation and meaning making present at the time the memory was formed and now at the time of this re-telling. In this way, suspicion is paid to the language used but simultaneously agency is given. The supposition is that the memory conveyed is exactly the memory the rememberer wanted to convey, leaving out aspects and details, either intentionally or not, while including others for a purpose. Language in this sense becomes not only a noun indicating the tool used to describe the memory, but also a verb recounting the way that it was. Austin (1975) believes that this way of looking at language, of including it as an agentic force in the process of experience is in line with Deleuzian theory. He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of language as “action, a way of doing things with words” (St. Pierre, 2017). In other words, the data collected in this study do not originate from a distant, uninterested third party. They are, rather, the result of active engagement with language to present a perspective, attitude, or purpose whether is in explicitly intentional or not. Participants use language to convey a memory they want to share and employ words, moods, and expressions to convey it in the way they desire. St. Pierre (2017) explains this flattened Deleuzian methodology that gives equal agency to the referent memory the words describe and the way in which it is re-told through this description: There is no hierarchy with human knowers at the top; a passive, static reality at the bottom; and language as a transparent medium between the two capable of producing 50 meaning…we find a different, flattened order of things that overturns the descriptions of human being and language that ground conventional qualitative methodology. (p. 1082) Methodologically then, the challenge addressed in the methods that follow, is how to capture, as accurately and respectively as possible, participants’ memories and descriptions of what constitutes their memory and then determine how that memory has been and is being utilized in their present state, paying close attention to the action of the language used. The language explicitly and implicitly describes aspects of memory that move beyond a memory itself, and speaks more to the process in which the memory is re-imagined at the moment of recollection. I use the word re-imagine with purpose and intention, letting the connotations of the word imagine (to form a mental image of something) to expressly respect and describe the notion that memory is not simply a recreation of an existing event, but rather, a supposition of what might have happened. The veracity of the memory is not of concern, but how and why it is re- imagined in the way that it was is. To further tease out aspects of Deleuzian theory and how it might impact the methodologies of this study, I reference the relationship between the actual and the virtual. The actual, in this sense, are the real descriptions and manifestations of memory that this study seeks to reveal. However, these actualities are always drawn from a pool of the virtual, the myriad of memories and multiple ways (and reasons) in which they may be recalled, which themselves do not come into existence until summoned. Within this theorizing, no memory will be actualized, drawn from the virtual, in the same way twice, respecting both the complexity of the human experience but also the nuanced realizations that become visible when 51 remembering the same event over and over again in different presents for different reasons, opening up the possibility of how circling around and into these memories in multiple ways and multiple times might be beneficial. In other words, the actual and virtual coexist, with the actual surrounding “itself with a cloud of virtual images” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 16). The process of drawing from the virtual and making it actual is one that constitutes the process of remembering. But it is important to note that the actualization of the virtual is not complete nor exact. Much of the virtual is left unactualized and even a singular actualization is itself “ephemeral” (p. 16), or short lived, indicating that a separate actualization at a different moment may both draw on different virtualities or the same ones differently. This study then “begins with singular experiences and traces the ways in which the virtual is actualized” (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, p. 11), and in a twist of complication, seeks to trace the process of how the virtual can become actual differently, in a more just way. In addition, the data collected through the multiple avenues described below were analyzed through the process of critical discourse analysis and Goodall’s (2000) verbal exchange coding. Goodall’s concept of a new ethnography based on talk and text is especially instructive since much of the data collected was through verbal interviews. He asks us to think about these exchanges as potentially revealing, for the purposes of this study’s analysis, rites of passage that “alters or changes our personal sense of self or our social or professional status or identity” (pp. 106-107). He also suggests the intertwining of “the personal experience of the researcher into meaning in ways that serve as analysis of cultures” (p. 127), which is especially cogent since my memories of experience are designed into and open to analysis below. In more critical ways, 52 analysis also attempted “to understand, expose, and ultimately to resist social inequality” (van Dijk, 2001, p. 466). Within critical discourse analysis, an effort is made to further understand why one thinks what they think, especially if that way of thinking is harmful or a cause of social inequality. “Episodic memory” (p. 474) and its investigation is one way to expand this understanding and is the focus of this study. Episodic memory is defined as “the specific knowledge and opinions people have accumulated during their lifetime” (p. 474). This analysis rejects “the possibility of a ‘value free’ science” and understands that this data (much like memory itself) is “inherently part of and influenced by social structure, and produced in social interaction” (van Dijk, 2001, p. 352). In this way, the analysis of the memories revealed in this study determine how and why these memories were formed, shared, and for what purpose. In addition, I seek to exculpate to what use the memory was brought to bear; why this memory was seized from the virtual and made actual and how it might inform, in a more general sense, the ability and potential of re-remembering in a more just way, remembering from a different plane of immanence. METHODS The study is divided into three parts, each corresponding with different aspects of memory and remembering. Part I investigates memories of social studies education that occurred over the past twenty years and how they have been made useful in the interim. It also intermixes and contrasts my memory of what I taught with the memories of those that learned. Part II focuses on two current social studies teachers, analyzing how their past memories of social studies education and teacher preparation impacted both the rationale for becoming social studies teachers and how they are made useful today. Also in Part II, I once again 53 intermingle memories of social studies as told by students of those two teachers, seeking to compare how and why they remember (or don’t) the intended purposes of the lesson. Also in Part II, I sought to mix memories that come from outside of social studies in an attempt to see how social studies (and the issues engaged therein) are made useful or brought to use in their lives. Finally, in Part III, using data from Part I as a beginning subject of inquiry, future social studies teachers were asked to consider what memories they would like to create in their future social studies classrooms. Below, I describe the methods of data collection I employed for each part of the study while also briefly introducing you to the participants. Following, I describe the data analysis process and methods employed to arrive at my findings. It is important at this point to discuss the role Covid19 and its required quarantines had on this study. As data collection was just beginning, schools around the country begin to cancel classes as did the schools in Part II of this study. Slowly, they implemented some form of virtual learning that while continued engagement in social studies content, did so at a much-limited level. In addition, it cannot be overstated that the swirling events of the day (the pandemic, a presidential campaign, racial unrest, etc.) must have triggered memories used by all participants to make sense of the current moment. I sought to include these events in my study, but also recognize that as no memory is recalled the same way twice, these events must be considered as contouring agents of the memories revealed here regardless of their direct reference to the events of the day. In that way, completing this study at this time offered exciting opportunities to engage in meaningful and contemporary dilemmas of understanding of the usefulness and utility of memory. However, the data collected below must also be considered in this light, recognizing that the vibrancy of this memorable moment itself was an 54 influencer on what and how memories were pulled from the virtual to be actualized in the confounding moment in which all participants lived through. Part I: Data Collection In Part I of the study I explicitly called on memories of the past, seeking to determine how and why they may be constituted in the present. To do this, I mingled my own memories of my social studies teaching experiences with memories of students who shared in those same experiences. In addition, I explored if and how the memories of high school social studies educational experiences were made useful long after their engagement and sought to identify the faultiness and malleability of these memories. Prior to collecting data from participants, I documented my memories of teaching social studies over the last twenty-five years and sought to identify moments that changed how I thought about my practice. The goal of this endeavor was to be able to determine if the memories of social studies experiences of my students were at all impacted by those changes. In other words, were there different student memories before and after those pre-identified moments of change by the teacher. Because this part of the study relied on a larger participant base, now scattered geographically, initial data was collected through qualitative survey methodology. This type of survey “does not aim at establishing frequencies, means or other parameters but at determining the diversity of some topic of interest within a given population” by revealing “meaningful variation (relevant dimensions and values) within that population” (Jansen, 2010, p. 2) and has been used in a variety of areas of research, including education (Sentius & Cunnington, 1972; Carter, 2002; Debski & Gruba, 1999; Kane, 2008). While there are limitations 55 to survey data, the goal here was to document the diversity of experience of memory and reveal commonalities across time. The participants of Part I were high school students of mine over the past 20 years, the youngest graduating high school in 2016, the oldest in 1999. The survey was meant, in part, to confirm the theoretical framework above: that memory is faulty and malleable, that it is constituted in the present, and that the process of remembering itself can be useful. I asked if and how individual recollections of curricular and pedagogical engagement in social studies still linger; what, how, and why various specific memories resulted from engagement in social studies classes; and how those memories were made useful, if at all, in students’ actual life experiences thereafter. Of the over 80 requests for survey responses that were sent via email and social media, 55 were returned. Among the participant pool, there were 37 males and 18 female participants, 37 were white while 8 were students of color. Figure 1 displays the year of graduation for these participants: 56 Table 1: Participant Pool 1 Year of Graduation Year of Number of Graduation Participants 1999 2 2000 1 2001 2 2002 9 2003 4 2004 4 2005 2 2006 2 2007 6 2008 1 2009 1 2010 5 2011 4 2013 3 2014 1 2015 4 2016 3 2018 1 The survey asked open-ended questions about what participants remembered about their social studies education and how they have put this knowledge/experience to use in their lives. It also asked how their subsequent life experiences may impact and shape how they remember their social studies educational experiences. Specifically, I asked if issues of power around race, gender, and sexual identity were explored adequately in their social studies classes, and if so how, if not, why not? Finally, taking advantage of the memorable moment we were in, I asked if there was anything about the current state of affairs in the world (i.e., Covid19, the Trump Presidency, racial unrest, etc.) might make you think about social studies education differently. Participants were also given space to add any additional thoughts the survey itself may have brought to life and made memorable. 57 I subsequently identified four participants from that pool for follow-up active semi- structured interviews. These interviews began with prepared lines of questions but allowed for additional lines of inquiry that reveal themselves during the course of the interviews. Active interview techniques (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995) require the interviewer to pay close attention to what is said, how it is said, and what is left unsaid while engaging in a joint effort of meaning- making. It engages both the interviewer and interviewee in the process of meaning-making. In this way too, the experiences shared and engaged in would be valid, according to Creswell and Miller (2000), in such a way because “participants’ realities of the social phenomenon” were considered accurate and complete by the rememberers themselves. It is important to note that all interviews were conducted electronically (Fontana & Frey, 2005, p. 721) meeting all IRB and CDC guidelines during COVID19 quarantines. Two of the interviewees were male, two were female; two were white, and two were persons of color. These 60-90 minute interviews took place in April and May 2020 through Zoom and were recorded and transcribed. These four participants will be known henceforth by the pseudonyms David, Susan, Lauryn, and Lance and will be further introduced in chapter 3. David is a white male who graduated from high school in 2002; Susan is a white female who graduated in 2010; Lauryn is an African American female who graduated in 2015; and Lance is an Indian American who graduated in 2001. As you see, care was taken to select these participants with respect to gender, race, and date of graduation. The questions asked of these participants were based on each participant’s survey results and sought to reveal more memories – or trigger other aspects of the virtual – to help better explain why these participants shared the memories they did and to more fully elaborate 58 on the memories they initially shared in their survey responses. In addition, care and attention was paid to their lives since these social studies experiences, seeking in a more authentic way to determine how these memories have been made useful in their lives since. Again, focus was placed on how issues of power and understandings of those issues have manifested in their lives and then what role their memories of similar experiences in social studies classrooms (or lack thereof) impacted their experience and was or was not made useful. Part II: Data Collection For the second part of the study, I built on the notion that memory can be useful when investigating its role in the teaching and learning of social studies education today. In this section, the goal was to analyze the role past memories play in the creation and implementation of social studies curriculum by teachers currently in the classroom. To reveal this, I interviewed two social studies teachers, one male, one female, both white, who have taught social studies 16 and 14 years respectively. Three active semi-structured interviews were conducted, each for 70 to 90 minutes over the course of March through May in 2020. These interviews were conducted over Zoom, recorded and transcribed. These participants will be known in this study by the pseudonyms Angela and Adam and will be introduced in more detail in chapter 4. These initial interviews focused first on their own memories of social studies education both at the K12 levels and in higher education. I then explored with them their memories of their teacher preparation, including their course work, their field experiences, and their internship. Following, as we investigated their own practice as social studies teachers, moments of significant teaching (events/activities/content) were identified and memories of points of change were explored. In this way, I was able to put into conversation their memories 59 of learning social studies as a student with their memories of teaching and learning to teach it. Finally, we explored their goals as social studies teachers with an emphasis on how and why they may explore issues of power and oppression in their classrooms today. In lieu of planned classrooms observations (prevented by COVID19 quarantines), one unit plan and accompanying classroom materials/resources were submitted by each teacher participant. These resources represented how these teachers approach their teaching of social studies and include aspects of the exploration of issues of power they engage with in their classrooms. In short, these written documents were the actualizations or artifacts of the memories they shared of their teaching. Then, through collaboration, the teacher participants and I identified a list of potential students currently in their classes for future interviews. I identified four (two in each class, all students of color, 3 females, 1 male). They will be known by the pseudonyms Aimee, Bethany, Thomas, and Heather and will be further introduced in chapter 5. I followed up with them with similar questions about their experience with social studies education in the past, their memories of taking up issues of power, and what they think they have learned in theses social studies classes. I also inquired how and/or if their own lifeworld memories were supported, challenged, taken up, or ignored in the space of social studies education. During these interviews, I referred to both the goals of the teacher participants, Angela and Adam, as well as the unit plans and activities they provided. The goal here was to see how memorable these educational experiences really were, even after the passage of just weeks. These interviews were of 60-90 minutes in length and took place in May and June 2020, were conducted through Zoom, and were recorded and transcribed. 60 Part III: Data Collection Finally, in part three of the study, I sought to analyze the potential for creating intentional future memories in social studies education, bringing together the two notions of memory above (distant memories in Part I and more recent memories in Part II). In collaboration with future teachers, we considered how memory can be made useful in social studies education and teacher preparation. This aspect of the study involved working with my own pre-service university students in a form of action research (Anderson et al., 2007). Action research is commonly implemented to study a teacher’s own practice, but this study did not center my practice, but rather, the insights, experiences, and thinking of future teachers. In other words, collaboratively with students I taught, we explored what was remembered from social studies experience and how we might conceive of social studies in the future to create similar and/or different memories that participants in Part I. Part III of this study took place over the course of April and May 2020. During this section of data collection, 17 pre-service teachers (10 males, 7 females, all white) were asked to complete a survey about their own memories of social studies education, what areas/content/concepts/skills were not adequately discussed or engaged in, and how a recognition that there may be things left out of their own memories of social studies education might impact their preparation to teach it. Following, a summary of the results of Part I of this study were shared with these participants and a class conversation was had about what we might learn from them. To follow-up, a post-conversation survey was completed by these participants asking what they learned about the impact of social studies education as a result of the summary, what memories from Part I they would like their own future students to have and 61 not have as a result of the teaching they will embark upon, and asking these future teachers how thinking about the future memories of their future students might impact how they consider what and how to engage in as teachers of social studies. In short, I asked what they wanted to have happen in their future classrooms, focusing on how issues of power should be taken up, why they will be taken up, and to what end, revealing a “future of the past, the unfulfilled potential of the past” (Ricoeur, 2002, p. 14). From the results of those written responses, I selected 5 participants (3 females, 2 males, all white) for in-depth active semi-structured interviews in which I sought to further delineate differences in their survey responses to develop a greater understanding of the underlying memories and process of remembering exhibited by this group of participants. I selected these participants with recognition to the depth of their survey responses (some were detailed others were terse) as well as the variety of experiences they shared from their own memories of social studies education. In these interviews, I asked questions that revealed more detail of the experiences they shared in their survey responses and further expanded on the value and impact they saw in their own memories, the memories shared in Part I of this study, and the future memories they hope to create in their own classrooms. In addition, I explored how the integration of memories of social studies education might impact teacher preparation. These participants will be known as the pseudonyms Michael, Rebecca, Taylor, Faith, and Matt and will be further introduced in chapter 5. These interviews were conducted through Zoom, recorded and transcribed. 62 Data Analysis Data analysis and initial coding occurred throughout and upon completion of data collection. This is in line with Maxell’s suggestion that good qualitative research “begins data analysis immediately after finishing the first interview or observation and continues to analyze the data as long as he or she is working on the research” (Miles & Huberman, 1984, p. 77). Since portions of the findings were used in other parts of the study, it was essential that the process of analyzing data be just as dynamic as the process of collecting it. Coding was used not simply categorize responses and experiences, but rather to “look for relationships that connect statements and events within a context into a coherent whole” (Maxwell, 1996, p. 79). During the analysis and reporting of findings, it was imperative to maintain interpretative validity (Maxwell, 1992), making sure the “account or explanation of a social situation…respect[ed] the perspectives of the actors in that situation” (p. 290). To that end, while coding may assist in organizing and analyzing data, effort was also made to preserve the description of the memories shared and the social context in which they were shared from each and every participant. All transcriptions of the interviews and survey data were coded, demarcating explicit memories of social studies education, areas in which there were no memories to be put to use, memories of the study of issues of social justice (race, gender, sexual identity), how memories were made useful, and how memories of the future might be imagined in a social studies-to-be. Categories were similar across the three parts of the study to better compare and consider the themes as they span across time, respecting the non-linear notion of time as explained in the theoretical framework in chapter 1. In this way, these codes were developed to ascertain both 63 the totality of the memory, the context of the memory, and the impact of the memory while still seeking to identify moments when the memory disrupted previous thinking and/or was made useful in a new situation. This allowed for analysis to be conducted as I circled back around these memories and asked participants to do the same. In this way, commonalities and differences were identified between within and across time periods. The broad intent of the study is in line with those other critical scholars, like Denzin (2017), who “are committed to showing how practices of critical qualitative research can help change the world in positive ways” (p. 12); “to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference, to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage in realistic utopian pedagogies of hope” (p. 15). Such an approach aligns itself with both the theoretical framework and the methods/methodology described above and, importantly, to a fruitful consideration of the study’s research questions. POSITIONALITY I come to this study first and foremost as a teacher of hundreds of students over the course of many years who values reflection and appreciates the power of focused critique that asks me to think about my practice in new ways. In fact, with the passage of time and perhaps confidence, I have been more brutal in those reflections (perhaps remembering differently), identifying times when perhaps my practice or the dispositions in which that practice was grounded was less than ideal. This is an example as to how one remembers can be constructive and instructive. Reflecting on my white male privilege in the space of academia, and my developing awareness of it, no doubt has had an impact on those re-conceptions of my memory as well 64 and has re-configured my memory accordingly. I now see how aspects of my teaching are fountains of experience from which this study stems; that the “mistakes” I may have made as a classroom teacher early in my career act as a foundation for the development of and transport to new planes of immanence. These memories, some which I did not unearth (nor even knew existed), were not made accessible nor did I seek access to them through my social studies education. It is at this point in my journey as a teacher, researcher, and human being that brings me to see the power of reflecting on my memories with a hope that this process will lead me to a different place, perhaps more just; to a better understanding of myself, others, history, the earth, and my relationship with them all. In other words, I am not sure I could have entered this study twenty years ago, before my own memories of social studies education, of privilege, and of teaching and learning were less developed. This study is just as much about me as it is about the participants, but their generosity could help us all and the discipline move forward. INTERLUDE: AN ORIENTATION OF THE FINDINGS CHAPTERS This study considers memory and the process of remembering as an always occurring, on-going process that is employed at the present moment to bring meaning to and understanding about the world in which we find ourselves. Thinking of memory in this way brings with it challenges in how it might be analyzed and described as an agentic force in shaping our experience. No two people fully remember the same aspects of an experience, the same details, the same nuances nor do they make their memories useful in the same way, at the same time, or for the same purpose. This rhizomatic (Deleuze, 1988) analysis of memory therefore requires at least the opportunity to read these findings in different ways. Each of the next three chapters will focus on a specific participant pool and confined aspect of memory. In 65 this chapter, I will use the memories of my former high school social studies students and my own memories of teaching them to investigate the malleable nature of memory, testing whether social studies education can leave lasting and useful memories; in chapter 4, I will unpack the memories of current social studies teachers, including those of their own social studies educational experiences, teacher preparation, and their own practice by analyzing one unit of instruction and the memories their students have of it to determine how memories are made useful; finally, in chapter 5, I will use the practice of envisioning future memories, what one might like students to remember, about social studies education through the experiences of pre-service teachers to investigate how memory can be intentionally and strategically engaged to inform our current and future understandings about the process of teaching and learning social studies. While these delineations might seem clear and precise, there is no doubt that the memories of social studies education focused on in chapter 3 also have explanatory power in the experiences of social studies teachers and teachers to be in chapters 4 and 5. Likewise, the usefulness of memories focused on in chapter 4 can be explored through the experiences of participants in chapters 3 and 5. While the focus of each chapter will be evident, it is important to know that memory knows no explicit boundaries. It is blurry and imprecise, in fact, called forth sometimes in the unlikeliest of moments for reasons we may not completely understand. With this in mind, these findings chapters will also appear a little blurry, infringing on aspects of memory outside the focus of each chapter, assisting in understanding the complex and amorphous nature of the phenomena of memory and the process of remembering. 66 Chapter 3: The impact of social studies memories (1999-2018) In this chapter, I focus on the impact of social studies education through the analysis of student memories and how those memories were made useful in subsequent lifeworld experiences. I also seek to discern and connect teacher intentions with those realized memories. The goal here is to see how social studies education is remembered and to ascertain how the intentional actions of a teacher can contribute to these memories. It may seem an oversimplification to state that social studies education, as with any life experience, will be remembered in some way, especially upon prompting. But what makes this data interesting and useful is how these memories can be tied to intention. In other words, if there are identifiable commonalities in the memories of students that align with teacher intention, it can be inferred that the actions of social studies teachers can have far-reaching consequences beyond the factual knowledge they are charged with investigating. In addition, if there were instances in their subsequent lifeworld experiences that participants identified unprepared to understand and address, then those too can inform our understanding of ways social studies education remained wanting. Taken together, these aspects of past social studies experiences – that they are memorable both because of what was remembered and what was not – will inform and lay a foundation for future consideration. It is not that there are differences and similarities between the shared memories of these experiences, but rather why those similarities and differences exist, how they unfold, with what purposes, and to what ends. I start by comparing and contrasting memories of social studies education across a time span of twenty years from both my perspective as a teacher and the memories of my students 67 over that time. In this analysis, I highlight the differences and commonalities of specific memories across three distinct periods of time. Using issues of power exercised through racial, gendered, and sexual orientation lenses, I show how memories have been and can be contoured, in some small way, by intentional and unintentional pedagogical foci, content and resource selection, and educational dispositions by social studies teachers. In this way, the realization that what we do in classrooms today and in the past, informs these understandings whether we intend them to or not. In so doing, this idea lays a heavy weight of responsibility upon the shoulders of social studies teachers, suggesting that our influence does not end at the ring of the bell or even at graduation. Finally, I briefly expound on how memories of social studies education have been and continue to be made useful, either through commission or omission, in the current and future lives of participants. This will be explored in more depth in the next chapter. In other words, memories of commission (remembering what I did as a teacher or they did as a student) as well as the identification of memories of omission (not being able to remember anything about a subject or event) are both teased out below. I have divided the memories of social studies education below into three precise periods that became apparent during data analysis. Upon my recollection of my teaching career and the memories of the students I taught during each period, common themes were revealed. In other words, my goals and objectives, sometimes flawed or sometimes enlightened, seem to shape and contour shared individual memories participants described. There were moments of clear demarcation that become identifiable and speak to the ability teachers have to create memories through social studies education, moments often unidentified before this analysis. 68 The first period (1995-2002) is characterized by finding my own voice as a teacher while working through the initial challenges any new teacher might face. The second period (2003- 2011) began after 9/11 when the teaching of social studies came into the spotlight and seemed more important than ever. The third period (2012-2018) began after my being challenged to consider issues surrounding privilege, my culpability in its ongoing oppressive reach, and my attempts to change my teaching practice to push back and tear down the structures that reify it. Through discussion of teacher/student memories during these periods, this chapter will elucidate three things: 1. Social studies education is, in fact, a memorable and impactful experience far beyond the temporal confines of its engagement; 2. What is remembered from social studies education can be attributed, to some extent, to the intentions and dispositions of its teachers; 3. Memories of teaching and learning social studies are malleable, changing with respect to new planes of immanence from which they are recalled. Through these understandings gleaned from the past, the memories of social studies become informative, especially to the teaching and preparing to teach the subject. In more specific terms, it can be said that students looked to social studies knowledge in subsequent points in their lives to help them bring meaning to new present moments. For some, memories were available and useful and for others they were not. Determining what made them accessible will assist in creating a social studies more pliable to unknown futures. What was remembered, content or experience, process or events, can also be informative in determining how teachers 69 can better craft the engagement with and through social studies. Finally, the acceptance of the malleable nature of memory might in turn open up students’ memories for investigation and interrogation leading to important avenues in the process of becoming. In other words, trafficking in the memories of students rather than those of a more historical nature (or better yet, a mingling of the two), might lead to powerful revelations of themselves and the world in which they live. CONTEXT OF THE STUDY The school and community in which Part I of this study took place is similar to many Midwestern cities. It’s population of about 60,000 was segregated along racial lines, first by policy and then by de facto practices that resulted in one school district populated by the majority of the non-white students of the city surrounded by suburban schools, like the one in this study, which remained more white, middle-class, and homogenous. In the mid-1990s, state law began to loosen up the previous requirements that students must live within the geographic borders of the school district to attend there. This schools of choice policy had little impact at its outset as it required school districts to opt into taking schools of choice. There was a loose agreement among schools in this area that none would participate, thereby protecting student populations within each school district. However, since school funding is appropriated by a foundation grant per-student, the allure of increased funding by accepting students from outside a district’s geographic borders became too much of an incentive to maintain this practice. Soon (and about the time of Period II below), more and more students of color were choosing to attend the more traditional white, suburban schools that surrounded the city. By the start of Period III, the student population of 70 the site of this study reflected the racial breakdown of the city at large. This influx of students of color laid bare for those willing to recognize it, the inequities of our educational system and then even exasperated it as the districts from where these students came lost revenue as a result. This process was not welcomed by all as there was a backlash into accepting “schools of choice” students, a euphemism used to describe students of color who were now populating this once homogenous student population. This context is important to recognize as both my memories as a teacher in this school and the memories of the students I taught are no doubt contoured by these social forces. With no one really demanding that I take up racial issues in my classes during Period I for example, there is a lack of memories of doing so. Likewise, drawing from a mostly white student population in Period I helps explain a lack of students’ interest in engaging in them, as problematic as that is. Conversely, as more and more students of color populated my classroom in Periods II and III, the issue of race (and other issues of social justice) became impossible to ignore. These memories then are a result of the changing social/political/economic forces that first prevented then provided opportunities to engage, reflect, analyze, and learn from the identified limitations of the past, the changing nature of the present, and realization that future needs required a different way of being in the world. MEMORIES OF SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it” (Marquez, 2003) Period I (1999-2002) The memories of my own high school social studies education and that of my early teaching of it are closely aligned mainly because I first taught in that same school. I remember with great fondness my experience in social studies classrooms, the first being in my sixth grade 71 Michigan History class. In this class, we embarked on a mock state legislature simulation. I do not recall any of the issues we took up, but I found myself enthralled in the process. I was a rather shy student, rarely speaking in class, but one of the debates in this class helped change this. The teacher would normally sit as the leader of the session but when he had something to say during the debate, he would switch seats with one of the “legislator” students and take a seat in a student desk. During one of these debates, he switched seats with a student in the row to my right, a few seats in front of me. After his comments, I had something to add to the debate and during my comments the teacher turned towards me and the look on his face, one of agreement, even astonishment that I was speaking, was clear. Upon completing my comments, he turned back to the front and said something supportive of my thoughts, agreeing with my statement. This confirmation, especially during the discussion of ideas in the context of an issue that confronted us at the time, allowed for, even welcomed my future engagement. I remember the taking up of current events in my government classes, the energy of my world history teacher, the encouragement to be active in political discourse outside of the classroom and within the school as well. I remember taking an Independent Study course where the teacher asked me to read a 700+ page history of the 20th century that sits still, now tattered and torn, on my bookshelf. These experiences and more, shaped my desire to become and my subsequent practice as a teacher. My social studies educational experience first inspired me to be involved in politics and public policy rather than teaching. I earned a degree in International Relations and started a job as a Legislative Assistant in a State Representative’s office one week before graduating from college. One aspect of working in this office, of which I was most proud was our aggressive 72 representation and constituent services. We took this role very seriously and I spent most of my days talking with people back in the district about their ideas concerning legislation and acting as a liaison between them and state agencies with which they may be struggling. Over the course of this work, I came to the conclusion, however erroneous, that many people did not think for themselves and called us to think for them, to solve their problems. There was one constituent who had a leaky gas tank on their pick-up truck and called us for help. I am not sure how I did it, but talking to the automobile company, I obtained for him a voucher for a replacement. It was because of this experience that I began to seriously consider becoming a teacher, not to pass on important knowledge, but to help students develop the confidence and skills to think for themselves. Over the next several years, I earned a Masters in the Art of Teaching degree while I worked full time in the state legislature. My first-year teaching at my old high school was exciting and thrilling. The first thing that comes to mind when I recall that first year is the space I was assigned. My room was, more or less, the worst room in the building. It was next door to the acting class separated by a temporary folding wall, letting sound waft quite easily between the two rooms. I was also assigned to teach World History, a topic that was not my forte. I found myself reading and relying on the textbook more than I wanted. I do not remember the content I taught or how I taught it. My only memory is that I survived and in the years that immediately followed, was assigned the government/civics classes, an area I was much more passionate about. From that point on, I never used a textbook. I was assigned a room that I would remain in for over a decade. I brought in couches and lamps and carpets. I created a space like no other room in the building and I also created participatory activities that asked students to think 73 about issues of the day in different ways. I was active in anything I could be at the school, developing relationships with students that have endured to this day. I was voted to be the commencement speaker by the senior class so many times, they had to make a rule that no teacher could be selected in back-to-back years. But through all of that success, the one thing that sticks out now as I remember those early days are two very specific things. First, my complete ignorance and lack of awareness of issues of race, gender, and sexual identity and therefore its lack of interrogation in my classes; and second, the one department meeting when one of my former social studies teachers, one of the inspiring forces that motivated me to become a teacher, here, in this place, in this community, had had enough of my questioning nature and called me “the downfall of public education.” The memories of students during this time period align in most cases with what I remembered I attempted to do, at least in general terms. Of the 15 participants who graduated during this time, six mentioned the engagement with current events as a memorable aspect of their studies. In addition, five characterized the class as fun, exciting, and/or enjoyable. Three mentioned particular activities as memorable, for example, working in small groups, a U.N. simulation, and classroom discussions. However, two did identify memories of social studies in less glowing ways, including “lots of reading textbooks” and “textbook work.” When it comes to addressing or taking up issues of power around race, gender, and sexual identity, there were three clear distinctions. First, most participants (8 out of the 14) recognized that these issues were never, rarely, or insufficiently addressed. Two said that they were adequately taken up, one commenting that I as a teacher was “ahead of my time.” These outliers might be explained by my continued relationship with these participants through their 74 college and professional lives. In other words, in our interactions in the years that followed, we have discussed these issues and therefore the memories may be mingled with experiences in my classroom, creating through the malleable nature of memories, a conglomeration of experience rather than concise memories of class. What I find most telling among this subset of participants are those who remembered that we did, in fact, adequately address these issues. The way they described these memories is anything but definitive, but rather, only hint at a belief (or perhaps a hope) that we did explore them. One replied that “I feel we touched on a lot” while another said “I think issues of power were explored.” The other two respondents in this category were both confident that we must have dealt with these issues but just were not sure how, one claiming, “I know we discussed those issues, but I don’t recall specifically,” while the other commented that “I believe we touched on the subjects well” without being able or willing to share any specifics. One can almost sense the desire by these participants to remember how we addressed issues of inequities and power. There is no detail shared, no specific moment of transformation revealed, no great new learning that seemed to take place. Rather, because these participants may have enjoyed me and my class, they subsequently remembered this aspect of their social studies experience in a positive way, almost willing this memory to fruition, unable to fathom that this aspect of our experience was, in fact, largely ignored. This is in line with Sotgui’s (2016) finding that we tend to remember aspects of experience that make us feel good about ourselves. This can also be attributed to Bohleber’s (2007) suggestion that “unconscious wishes” (p. 331) are connected with memory, the wish in the case being the desire to have always been open to and understanding of issues of oppression. 75 Perhaps the present moment that we are in, a moment of hyper-awareness around the issue of race in particular, almost requires these participants to see themselves as aware of these issues and to therefore trace this awareness to an earlier time, proving to me (and probably most importantly to themselves) they have always been interested in social justice. Deleuze (1994) and Bergson (1998) suggest that memories are only constituted in the present moment and therefore cannot escape its manipulating forces. This speaks to memory’s susceptibility and ability to be shaped – its malleability. We often remember what we would like to remember, fulfilling our desire to be and have been the person we want to be or lived how we were supposed to live. I interviewed two participants from this period in more detail, seeking to further reveal not only the memories of social studies education, but why these memories were and are important. Lance is of Indian descent and graduated from high school in 2001. He attended a major university, started medical school, and became a property developer. He lamented that he did not recall specific content from my class, as if apologizing for not remembering almost twenty years later. But one experience he wanted to share was around an elective class about World War II and the Holocaust, a class he said he “thinks about often.” He described this memory: I remember I came to you before our final exam and you had given us a study guide. Part of it included a timeline where you asked us to put things in order. I asked, “Mr. Durham, can you tell me the order they are in?” and you said to me “No. Don’t memorize it. Understand the chronology of events.” I was so embarrassed and I went back and tried to piecemeal everything back together. Eventually, I got it right. But I 76 remember that very vividly because I think the only time I really learned things was when people told me no and told me to figure it out on my own. It’s okay if I’m wrong and I screw up as long as there is that positive reinforcement that you can figure it out. (Lance, personal communication, June 21, 2020) To be honest, I do not recall any aspect of this moment and it is very likely that the reason I asked Lance to figure it out on his own was because I did not know the proper chronology without looking it up. But I think this memory highlights a few things that I was both trying to accomplish as an early teacher and perhaps, reveals some of the challenges I was trying to overcome. I cannot remember ever thinking putting events in the proper order was a viable and meaningful way to assess students, but I think the fact that I did speaks to the default setting to which I reverted and the power of the structural forces practiced in and through social studies education. I thought teachers were supposed to do that, a mindset I was susceptible to early in my career. But as I described above, the major reason I wanted to become a teacher was to help people think for themselves. Lance here wanted the answers rather than understanding why an answer was correct. Realizing that that aspect of learning was most important to me and that he could struggle and even be wrong without any judgment or shame is a shared memory of our social studies education experience. Encouraging students to think about rather than simply memorize and regurgitate content is one of the characteristics of a social studies that pushes students forward, as discussed in chapter 1. While this may not be the most powerful example of creative, critical thinking, it does reveal the beginnings of thinking about social studies teaching and learning that breaks from the more rigid conception that the discipline is meant to teach what to think. 77 Lance’s recollections of engaging in issues of race, gender, and sexual identity was almost non-existent. He said he was aware of having only one teacher of color in this school district because he came from a school district in New York City where he only remembered one white teacher. This distinction is important. Lance thought it was normal to have racially diverse teachers, so when he came to this school, the lack of diversity was evident to him. For most of the white students, however, because they didn’t have memories of teachers in any discipline who looked different from them, this manifestation of privilege was not apparent to them. In fact, no other participant (of any race) made this observation. This memory of Lance’s highlights the fact that even in my teaching during this period, I brought to this public square (if one can characterize a classroom as such) potentially discordant memories of experience that, I suspect at the time, I thought were “neutral and universal” (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 34). Lance’s experience with diverse teachers seemed the norm before attending such a homogenous school as ours. But on my end, at least during this period, there was no consideration of the impact my racial identity may be having on those of my students. My understanding of the public which I was serving (my students) was definitely limited and confined by my myopic conceptions of worldly experience. For David, a white male who graduated early from high school in 2002, there too was no specific content that seemed to spring to mind when I asked him to recall his social studies experiences. However, he spoke of his memories of 9/11 in some detail. He was working in the school library and the librarian wheeled out two TVs on metal stands. He said that everybody was just completely silent, staring at the TV. There was just a surreal image and I remember at the time not even knowing what the World Trade Center was 78 because I had never been to New York. I had no idea really what the significance was, I just knew something really bad had happened. I remember thinking, this is really bad, but it seems so far away. (David, personal communication, June 10, 2020) In this way, David could not recognize the eventual impact the memory of the event would have on him because it seemed so distant. In the pre-Covid19 world, David had traveled to New York City twice a month for work and sees now how he may have reacted differently at the time had he been more aware or at least conscious of the world outside of his bubble. This was never a goal of mine as his teacher, to bring into the classroom more of the outside world. In fact, I seemed just as safe and happy being in the bubble I shared with David. That might help explain our lack of engagement in this perhaps more traumatic content. When it came to issues of race, gender, and sexual identity, David said that he remembered a “fairly minimal” investigation of them. He remembers discussing facts about things like the first woman to do something but does not recall how power was involved nor discussing the issue of sexual identity at all. He said that he grew up in a fairly conservative household with archaic gender roles and that’s what I left high school generally thinking the world looked like. As far as I knew, I had never met a LGBTQ person before graduating (in retrospect, that was wrong). My lack of exposure to or knowledge about issues of power involving race, gender, or sexual identity led me to formulate political opinions about the world that were just plain wrong. (David, personal communication, June 10, 2020) David was an exceptional student. He was a leader in the school. And yet, while not knowing it at the time, it appears that this lack of challenging his conceptions of the world left 79 him unaware. This will become an important aspect of David’s development after high school. I suggest his lack of memories of exploring and challenging his own understandings of race, gender, and sexual identity can be linked directly to the same lack of knowledge and pedagogical skill of his teachers, including me. We had so entrenched the lack of engagement in these issues and created such a homogeneous culture that the expectation of leaders like David was to not question or challenge and in this regard, we taught him well. This is exactly what Ahmed’s (2020) warned us of: “not to accept history as a good enough reason for your own reproduction” (p. 9). But this is exactly what was done and there was no desire at this point to change anything. We were teaching him that the world ahead of him was built for him and people like him. Any consideration of another experience or different understanding about the forces and relations of power were not only ignored – but worse than that - they were not even conceived as possible. David also identified in his memories of high school social studies that there was a harmful American-centric perspective propagated. He remembered talking about other countries in some detail in the classes he had with me about WWII and the Holocaust, but other than that, he couldn’t remember ever investigating any other way of thinking outside of the United States. As I will talk about how these memories were made useful in the second part of this chapter, I think it important to identify that David’s memories are brought forth through a unique lens. He studied abroad for three years in college in Syria and Jordan and learned to speak Arabic. I suspect that it was this subsequent experience that shaped David’s memory of social studies curriculum again in a unique way, making his memory of his engagement with the same social studies curriculum as the other participants from this period, different and more 80 critical than that of other students. In other words, those that remain confined to an American centric understanding of the world do not see (nor remember) this deficiency. It is here that the malleable nature of memory is apparent, showing how it is, in fact, able to be changed and be used to understand our current and past experiences in a more useful light. The more we learn and experience, the more apparent our past shortcomings may be or the more glorious our successes become. As David mentioned, 9/11 was a memorable day for him and indeed for all of us. I chose to include those that graduated during the 2001-02 school year in Period I because not only did the shock of the day last for weeks, it wasn’t until later, perhaps even the next school year, when I could identify changes in my teaching as a result. Period II begins not on 9/11 but rather when the effects of the experience began to take effect and change how I approached my social studies teaching. Period II (2003-2011) At 9:00 am on the morning of September 11, a secretary from the office stopped by my classroom to give a message to a student and suggested I turn on a TV because something was going on in New York City. As class ended at 9:10 am, I thought it fine to spend the last few minutes watching the news. I turned the TV on just as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. For the rest of the morning, we left the TV on and watched what was happening live. I vividly remember being in my little office in the back my classroom, looking through the glass wall out onto my class, and the face of disbelief of one particular student as he watched the first tower fall. Later that day, several teachers rolled their metal TV carts down to the cafeteria so more students could be together as we watched the events unfold. I remember thinking that we, 81 as teachers, should do something, say something, take the lead - but felt completely unequipped to do so. The rest of that week, we watched the news all hour every hour and just talked. Students would ask questions, express their fear or their confusion. Others would spout false bravado about “AMERICA!” and what our response would be. While I recognized the historic nature of the event, I am sure I did not recognize how the event, and my experiences surrounding my failed attempt to teach through it, would impact my classroom and my teaching. I wanted so much to better understand what was happening and I think the curiosity I modeled for and with my students may be the defining characteristic in how my teaching changed. My personal confusion made me less concerned about right and wrong answers, but rather, made me consider what are we not understanding that may have led to these events. In the months that followed, there was a focus on the effectiveness of social studies education as news reports would highlight that most students did not know where Afghanistan was on the map, nor could they speak intelligently about Islam. This focus on social studies education resulted in the passage of and funding for the Teaching American History (TAH) grants by the federal government that has resulted in over $1 billion being spent on efforts to improve the teaching of American History. I was a part of and team leader in one such TAH project that lasted three years, involved several school districts and a major university. That experience changed how I considered not necessarily how I taught, but rather, how I thought about how to improve my practice. While I identify this period of my teaching around issues of understanding rather than knowing, and giving more consideration to student voice, I still must admit that I did not 82 understand the implications of whose voices were left out of this conglomeration and what role I played in the racial, gendered, and sexual orientation oppression that remained. There were 32 participants who graduated from high school during this time. There were six students who recalled specific content (e.g. three branches of government, rise and fall of Rome, presentations on wars, how a bill becomes a law, etc.). Several re-iterated aspects of the class that made it fun or exciting and two mentioned current events as a memorable experience in their social studies classes. But, surprisingly, there was a change in the tone of the responses of students in this period. This may reflect my own confusion or lack of understanding of the world and a subsequent emphasis on admitting that we don’t know why things happen and then using that awareness as a spark or trigger for further examination. The memories of participants from this period reflect an expansion and emphasis on seeking to understand rather than to simply know the facts of the content. First, there is a recollection of an “open and collaborative environment” that “allowed students to share constructive feedback and opposing views safely without fear of retaliation.” There was a “willingness to talk about politics” and “an encouragement to think for ourselves…and formulate our own opinions.” This resulted in “a sense of ownership over the classroom” that seemed to empower students to see things and think about them in a deeper, more personal way. One student said “I actually understood what was happening in the real world,” while another recognized that “we were challenged to understand the reasons behind things.” This transformation from a classroom bogged down in the factual, textbook generated regurgitation of facts to one that prized inquiry and was open to where questions of the present seems to be the most drastic difference between Period I and Period II. One student 83 saw the importance of this work in other aspects of his schooling and life, stating “it was a meta-subject for the rest of the things we learned in different classes.” When it comes to issues of power through the lens of race, gender, and sexual identity, 4 of the 32 students found their experience adequate, 11 thought the investigation into race was adequate but they all recognize that issues of sexual identity were not explored. And 17 students suggested these issues were not adequately addressed or explored. I think important at this time to give voice to an African American student who said these issues were not taught at all and a Mexican American student who said that he “generally identified as a person of non-color,” during this time. This reveals that even during a time when an emphasis was placed on student voice and understanding different perspectives, when it is done without intentional engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation further damage can occur. In other words, by not engaging in these issues intentionally, the result could still be the feeling of one being a non-person, one whose experience is not valued, supported, or engaged. Beyond race, though, there were other areas outside the bubble that also were ignored. Susan graduated from high school in 2010 and is a white female. She went to school at a major university in the southern United States after high school to “find my own place in the world and kind of explore myself and be independent.” Susan’s father was in combat in the Middle East during her time as a student. She mentioned that “when you have parents in the military…they try to almost dehumanize the other side,” but in her social studies classes, Susan remembers that I “tried to get [her] to see kind of where they [terrorists] were coming from.” She said this was the most impactful memory she has of her social studies education. “It made me question,” she said, “and this was so pivotal for me, that these people were human too and 84 they have wants and needs and feelings just like anyone else. It was in the moment that I felt like I just had an epiphany, realizing that I couldn’t believe that I had never thought of that.” In this way, Susan, through her own interrogation of memories of the Other, made use of her memories (or in the analysis of them) by remembering them through a different lens. When considering then “what can we do with our memories?” (Frichot, 2011, p. 76), Susan by example used her own memories to come to a different conclusion, a new understanding about the world in which she and her father were so intimately engaged. This is an example of Susan using her memory and experience alongside social studies content to become a producer of new knowledge. In fact, as we consider one goal of social studies education being developing dispositions that help students see the public interests are influenced by those having much different experiences than you, Susan’s curiosity about the motivations of terrorists and their consideration during her meaning making efforts goes a long way in helping to achieve the goals of social studies education. What Susan’s memories and those of her peers during Period II revealed is that their social studies education tried to break them free from preconceived, and perhaps dominant, notions of the world and how it worked, at least to some extent. These memories show, however unintentionally, how dispositions and mindsets of a social studies teacher can impact and shape not only the experiences in the moment, but the longitudal implications of social studies education. However short on content specifics these memories revealed, it was the approach to the content, and to learning in general, that most lives on in the memories of these participants. While this should elucidate hope for and leave us with some satisfaction that social studies can be impactful in the lives of students following their departure from our 85 classes, this data also reveals that the unwillingness to take up issues of power that might diminish those most vulnerable amongst us, leaving a gaping hole of mis- or non- understandings of some of the most important aspects that challenged our shared worldly experience, namely race, gender, and sexual identity. This aspect of social studies education is finally engaged in Period III. Period III (2012-2019) It made me a little uncomfortable seeing the sign that read “Welcome White Men & Their Allies.” So read the marquee in front of a conference center where I would be attending a 4-day, 3-night intensive retreat about race and other issues that divide people. As a community leader, I was asked to attend with other community-minded people, of all races, genders, and creeds. This experience changed everything I thought about my place as a white man in the fight against inequities and my role as a teacher in both reifying the structures and practices, even in our own school, that contributed to those inequities. It revealed to me the potential power I had, through my teaching, to help dismantle them. One of the “homework” assignments we were tasked with upon completion of the conference was to share our new thoughts, learnings, and plans with other people within our professional circle. I scheduled meetings with my principal and superintendent. I was incredibly nervous before these meetings. Both of them were white men as well who, in my experience, had never expressed an interest in digging into issues of privilege or structural systemic oppression. I was going to go into these meetings sharing my experience but then also identifying aspects of our school system that may be contributing to these inequities. What I found in these two colleagues though was an open mind and a willingness to move forward 86 thinking about these issues together. In the larger sense, we ended up hiring consultants to take our staff through professional development work around the issue of equity. On a personal note, every time I could talk about an issue of equity in my existing curriculum, I did. I transformed one class that was simply about learning about 20th century cultural icons of movies, books, television, sports, and music to one now that used those resources as a way to investigation issues of race, gender, and sexual identity. I started a new class that exclusively explored these issues, finally allowing for deep, personal, and collective reflection and action. One memory during this time stands out. It was the last class of the day, one like other end of the day classes, was particularly rambunctious and active. One African American male was the energy in the class and liked to stand by my podium whenever he got the chance. One afternoon, a white male student said something to the effect, referring to the African American student who was particularly energetic on this day, that he has hopping around like a monkey. This caused the African American student to go into rage, a rage I had not seen in him. I had had this student in several of my classes. We had a good relationship. But I could not calm him down. He wanted to do some harm on this white student. I had to call on other teachers to help me calm the situation down. But finally, the bell rang, the end of the day was here. I immediately went down to talk to our Assistant Principal and told him of the situation and the conclusion was we will see what happens. But I knew that tomorrow these two students would be in my class again. I could not hope the situation would work itself out. But I knew I could neither allow for the white student to continue to not know why his comments hurt so bad or let the African American student feel as if his experience was not important. So, I called on one of 87 the African American participants at the conference above, a leader in civil rights efforts in our community. His response amazed me. He first asked me what time school started in the morning. I told him 7:40 a.m. He told me he would be there at 7:00 a.m. and as soon as the two students arrived at school, he would like to talk to them. The next day, my friend arrived and I stood by the front door to gather the two students as they arrived. Once they did we all went into a conference room in the main office. The skillful de-escalation of the situation as well as the heartfelt words sharing his own experience with hate and bigotry seemed to be making a difference – or at least the two students were listening. Then, my friend asked if they both had lunch at the same time. They said yes. My friend then said I want you both to eat lunch in here together, without any adult, to just talk things over. I was not prepared for this. When lunch came, I was lurking around the office, hoping to see what was happening and being ready to step in if I heard shouting. But I heard none. When lunch ended, the two students walked out of the conference room laughing. The African American student patted the white student on his back as they went their separate ways. When they arrived in my class that afternoon, they talked to each other and seemed that they understood each other much better. Years later, in my Youth Empowerment class, one day as class began, one African American male student was being asked about something that happened over the weekend. He was clearly perturbed. A mixed-race girl said something to him that made him angry and he said something like “I should slap you up.” To me, it was said off the cuff, with no intention of acting on this as this African American student was certainly a gentle soul. Later that day, the principal called me in and asked if this event happened. I said yes. He said he had received a call from a 88 white parent of a student in the class who was scared because nothing really was done to punish this student for his words. I was told I should’ve written a referral for him. In the following hours, the African American student was suspended. He came to me with tears in his eyes apologizing. The principal came into our Youth Empowerment class and explained the situation and why what happened happened. While he was talking, it became clear to me what was really happening. I had lost this class. There would be no more honest, open, and meaningful conversations. The event had shown, more or less, that we, as a school, were more concerned with the feelings of white students and parents than about the damage we did through our implementation of a system of discipline that demonized students of color as agents of fear rather than the human beings they were. By the way, the event from the weekend the African American student did not want to talk about was his getting pulled over by the police. When reviewing the 13 participant responses during this time, three things became apparent about their memories of social studies. One was the interesting choice of words used to answer the question “What do you remember from your social studies education?” As you might remember from the previous periods, there was always a handful that used words like “fun” or “exciting” or “enjoyable” in fact, more than a third of the responses in Periods I and II included such descriptors. These 13 participants, however, never used these words. I had to re- check their responses several times to make sure that was indeed true because I didn’t believe it. I still remembered having fun as a teacher, but the fact that this was no longer a defining characteristic in students’ memories made me realize that perhaps there was a new seriousness in my approach to teaching. 89 First, the three respondents that graduated in 2013 all said the issues were addressed and taken up adequately, though we could have gone into gender and sexual identity a bit more. This aligns with many of the responses from previous periods as well. None of these students though, for the first time in this study, claimed that our investigation was inadequate. As I analyzed the responses of the graduates of 2014 through 2016, a marked change in their comments appears. One student said that these “were some of the main topics” of the class. Another said that the classes were “devoted to these issues.” Finally, a third mentioned that the issues were “covered thoroughly but sexual identity was seen as taboo” parroting previous memories of the deficiencies in this area. But four students of color responded with their recollections as well that prove insightful and representative of this transformation in the approach to these issues. One said “we were asked how we felt about certain issues and why” while another commented that “we had open discussions about power issues in class. It was a safe place to explore ideas…” As to the implications of this change, one student of color revealed that “for once, I felt heard.” This is no doubt a result of my personal transformation as a person and as a teacher. One student suggested that I “went the extra mile to explore these topics and you can tell the difference between teachers who actually care about these topics.” This marked change in the recognition that these issues were taken up and addressed in a much more meaningful way during this period was gratifying, though clearly, more work needs to be done. This was made clear from a student of color who graduated in 2018 who said “They were kind of explored, but not really in-depth.” 90 I interviewed Lauryn, an African American female who graduated in 2015. As the theoretical foundation of this study suggests, the context in which a memory is recalled can prove important to understand its revelation. Lauryn had spent many days prior to the interview protesting for equity in the wake of the George Floyd murder. In that regard, her reflection on her high school social studies experience was deeper and more focused on these issues perhaps because of the current moment. I will dig into how her memories have been made useful in that context below, but suffice it to say that Lauryn felt different about her social studies experience than the Mexican American above who identified as a “non-color” in previous periods. Lauryn took the Youth Empowerment class I mentioned above and said: “that was the first time anyone ever really asked about how I felt about being black. I never even thought about saying anything about it because nobody ever asked.” She told a story of sitting with a group of students when another student wanted to take their picture. The photographer said, “Lauryn, you’re too black, you can’t be in it.” But because of her experience in her social studies classes, she said she “had to tell somebody about this because I can’t let people talk to me like this.” She felt that her voice was valued and important and that she would be listened to, finally. These nuanced memories reveal to some extent the role which memory plays in identity development (Schratz & Walker, 1995) both from my perspective as a teacher and its manifestation in the students in my classes. There is a clear alignment with the memories of my own dispositional development and those of Lauryn. My increase desire to see and understand issues of oppression, especially around issues of race, and this subsequent implication on what 91 and how I taught revealed in Lauryn’s memories a moment when she first felt heard and recognized. To conclude this section of this chapter, I raise two specific items for consideration. First, even after many years have passed, memories of social studies education are in fact present and are, in some ways, reflective of the disposition, mindsets, and goal of the teacher. We see this in the positive relationships and use of current events that grounded my practice in period 1 as I struggled to find my voice and presence, the expansion of curricular goals to include understanding and discourse rather than mere rote memorization and regurgitation of facts in period 2, to a recollection that issues of power and oppression were addressed more adequately in period 3. I must make it clear though that none of these changes in my teaching practice, except perhaps the third one, were at the time intentional. The purpose of exploring them here is to simply show that the actions and dispositions of what and how a teacher engages in social studies content does, in fact, have an impact, or does create memories that become available for use when called upon. I will explore the usefulness of social studies memories in detail in chapter 4 and the possibilities of intentionally creating useful memories chapter 5. However, as stated in the beginning of this chapter, the complexity of memory work is too imprecise to ignore aspects of the memories of these participants beyond that of its malleable nature. At the risk of obfuscating this chapter’s findings, I now examine how memories of social studies education of these participants were made useful in their lives after departing the confines of my classroom. Here, as these participants moved on with their lives, there were times when they needed to understand and bring meaning to a present moment and to help with that, they 92 called forth memories of social studies. Sometimes there were memories to answer that call, sometimes there were not. THE UTILITY OF MEMORY In their explanations on how social studies education has been useful to this particular pool of participants, I found initial extremes for how participants use memories of social studies education in their lives. Four participants said there was “nothing” they learned in social studies classes that is used in their daily lives. One said, “To be honest, I’m a mechanic now so social studies hasn’t really been a big factor in my current life.” On the other extreme, four participants recognized, although without specificity, that what they learned in social studies classes is applied on a daily basis, one explaining “I feel there is no way social studies can’t impact everyone’s life, in some way, every single day. If taught right, you start to learn that it’s not just about the past but also about the present and the things you might have to face every day.” These two extremes assist in revealing the malleable nature of memories. By that I mean that neither is probably completely true or false. We know that even in the life of a mechanic, the machinations of government impact their daily routine through taxation, environmental regulations, safety requirements, etc. We also know that historical antecedents will inform every daily decision we confront. What is useful about these perceptions of the usefulness of social studies education, however, is the fact that different people apply (and perceive to apply) their memories of social studies experiences in much different ways, mostly, I contend, because of what their lifeworld experiences ask them to address. In addition, social studies education and memories of it cannot be exculpated, for example, from overall dissatisfaction with 93 schooling in general and conversely from positive notions of school, me as their teacher, and the current state of affairs in which this question was posed. Because of the unsurprising variations of the worldly experiences of these 55 participants, I was not able to clearly define similarities that would be helpful and allow me to claim that here are specific ways that social studies education and the memories of them are made useful. There were more common responses that did reveal that social studies education encouraged participants to read and learn more on their own and through subsequent college courses about history and politics. For some, this has continued to even inform where they travel and vacation. The other most common response had to do with college majors and career choices/skills. Several participants majored or minored in some discipline they attributed to their social studies education (economics, politics, and journalism were explicitly listed). Three went into teaching, but only one into social studies education. Four participants said they apply social studies education to be an informed voter, three others said they can speak in a constructive way with others based on the content they learned in social studies classes. But beyond that, individual responses ranged from attributing to their social studies education the skill of being able to think for oneself, the willingness to listen to both sides, and the realization that we are too partisan to accomplish great things. But more strikingly, as I turn now to our four participants who were interviewed in more depth, what is revealed in their memories are moments when social studies education should have been useful in their lives, but wasn’t. These are memories of omission. In other words, during key and even transformative events in these four participants’ lives, social studies 94 education could have been more useful, if I had considered their futures more than their current experience. Lauryn, an African American female 2015 high school graduate, talked of her political activism since high school and how she is committed to having her voice heard. If you remember from her earlier memories of social studies education, she explained that the class Youth Empowerment was the first time she felt anyone was interested in what she had to say about being black. She has now been an active protester in the wake of the George Floyd murder and admits she never saw herself taking on this role. She explains how activism wasn’t really a priority for her as she “never saw anything coming. I never saw Donald Trump becoming president. But as we keep going it continues to get more and more unbelievable. It’s really hard to believe that things like this are going on every day.” In this way, Lauryn reveals the strength of the bubble in which her social studies education took place, preventing the investigation into issues of inequities so that, perhaps, not only could she have seen “this” coming, but would have been able to recognize and identify that it was already here even during her time in high school. Lauryn was able to speak to her social studies experience and how it might have looked different looking back at it now for this more passionate perspective: I think putting things side by side and comparing them and being like, this is what happened at the Boston Tea Party, and all of what’s happening now and saying, “what’s the difference here?” Why are people upset about this one and not this one? That’s a good way to do it, or just comparing two similar things, like the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King to what is happening now so that it’s relevant information. 95 History means nothing unless it means something in the moment we are in. It’s important to know history, but it’s important to know what’s going on in the world too. I think it’s kind of more important to know what’s going on in the world and then back it with history. (Lauryn, personal communication June 9, 2020) During this conversation, Lauryn was able to reference specific social studies content. But it was the process in how it was recalled, in the moment, for the purpose of understanding the current context, that was most telling. For her, it was not the content itself that was most important, rather, what was important was how it could be used by her, and others, to think about, investigate, and challenge the current moment. Lauryn’s application of her memories suggests there may be a way to engage in social studies content, perhaps one that included the re-remembering of social studies content and of lifeworld experiences in a united, purposeful, intentional process that respects and takes advantage of the role memory places in the development of one’s identity and understanding of the world. Similarly, for Susan, a white female 2010 high school graduate, her memories of social studies education were made useful in two very disparate ways. Susan’s father was in the 101st Airborne division of the U.S. Army during most of her schooling career. He was assigned combat duty in Iraq. She mentioned that she did not really know what he did in the armed services, but assumed he did desk duty as he never talked about his experience. It was only later, when she learned more about what his duties were (he was jumping out of planes into combat zones), did she begin to make connections to things we had talked about in class, developing parallels with people far away and in different times. Through this process of re-remembering years after leaving my class, Susan developed a better respect for her father and what he was all 96 about while drawing more from the content we studied. Susan remembered that in elementary school she would not say the pledge of allegiance. “I would get in trouble,” she said, “because I didn’t think it was fair that my dad had to go to war and no one else’s dad had to be there. So, I would sit down.” While I am pleased that Susan was able to learn more about her father’s experience and develop a deeper sense of respect for him through some of the content we explored together, it would be a mistake to say this was the intention. What Susan shared here is evidence that memories can be made useful but in her experience, this occurred without thought or intentionality from my perspective as the teacher. Susan spoke of another way that her lifeworld experience revealed an additional gap in her social studies education. After growing up in an “upper middle class” family, she struggled after college. “I really tried to educate myself on what wealth in America was like because you’re made to believe this American dream, where you can really achieve anything; you can be as rich as you want to be if you work hard every day. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.” I can’t help but think that perhaps I helped reify this idea of the American dream she referred to. But she explained some harsh realities that woke her up to another way of experiencing the world: I have a chronic illness and I took for granted the health insurance I had [under my parents]. When I had to pay for it myself and was costing me thousands of dollars a year, I realized it wasn’t free. I internalized it and asked “oh my gosh, why is this happening to me?” But it’s not just me. Millions of people in America also deal with this. So, when I got really sick last year, I remember having to choose between the medicine that I could get and anything else. I couldn’t pay rent. It became so personal because it 97 was like, my life is worth as much to these people as much as I can pay. (Susan, personal communication, June 9, 2020) She now says that she wishes she would have learned more about “inequality and poverty and how wealth in America really worked. I feel like a lot of us are fighting a losing battle.” She suggested her social studies education could have been better if we would have included learning about the “climate and the culture that creates” this type of inequity. She said, “We have racial tension in America, everybody’s at home because we are scared of the virus, nobody can pay rent, millions of people are unemployed, and they’re surprised that we are protesting and burning stuff down. We’re fighting against the system that’s kind of screwing us right now. I think that’s important to see – the lead up to it because things don’t just happen overnight.” What Susan’s application of memories here highlights are the holes in the narrative her social studies education tried to spackle over. There was little to no investigation in her recollection into the struggles of people that might not be living a life of comfort or success. There was no validity or value placed on bringing to the fore the voices of those who were not living anything but the American dream as she envisioned and as many teachers may reify. As a teacher who might rely on platitudes to describe what I want for the future of my students (e.g., I just want them to be happy), there was no realization that there was a likelihood that some might get caught up in a health care system, for example, that places profit above all else. I could not conceive that some would be victims of violence and poverty too overpowering to offer paths of escape. To think that all our students will go on to live happy, profitable, and comfortable lives was such an obvious oversimplification to me during my conversation with 98 Susan, I began to think how else have we not at least opened the eyes of social studies students to first identify that not everyone has or will live successful lives, but secondly, that we all play a part in the operation and ongoing success of systems and structures that do harm, that trap some in an endless cycles of poverty, racism, sexism, etc. that may prove too difficult from which to escape. Identifying that event as a teacher, I was imagining only future happy memories is in line with research that supports memories that makes us feel good about ourselves (Sotgui, 2016). But the impact of this conversation, a decade after I had Susan in class, seemed to open my eyes to this false perception I did not know I had until now. It was perhaps the passage of time or more likely the real memories of someone I cared for that either eased the resistance to enter into this fact I must have known was always true – that not all of my students would be happy and successful. It did, in fact, “blow apart the fictions” (Walkerdine, 1990, xiv) of happily ever after that I had constructed for the futures of my students. David, a white male 2002 high school graduate, experienced something similar. He was such an excellent student in high school that he graduated early. He went on to attend college at an elite university and was “struck by the diversity” of the school. He remembered walking through campus and not seeing someone “who looked like me.” While he “thought it was cool that people from so many different countries and ethnic backgrounds” were all in one place, his inability or lack of recognition of the depth of the experiences and beliefs of others quickly caused problems. “When I arrived on campus,” he said, “I didn’t know anything about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. I thought I had never met a person that was Jewish. I certainly had never 99 met a person who was Muslim.” In retrospect, he now knows this was wrong as he worked closely for several years with the Jewish librarian who had been his mentor in his independent study projects. He continued: I had no sensitivity toward the issue at all. But there was this cute girl in my Great Books class. She was a freshman and it was a big lecture class. She was, “Do you want to go to this rally today?” I had never been to a rally before and it sounded cool. It was a pretty intense, right-wing APAC support of Israel rally. They were handing out t-shirts so I got one. It said, “wherever we stand, we stand with Israel.” I had to leave the rally a little early to go to my Arabic class. The teacher was like, “Can you take that off? I’m from Palestine. I grew up in Jenin.” And I was like, “What’s wrong?” I went up to her after class and was like, “Hey. I just went to this thing today and they had some really loud arguments and some jarring pictures of people who been attacked.” She was, “There are ways to educate yourself better. I am not going to tell you what position to take on this, but here are some books. (David, personal communication, June 10, 2020) “There are ways to educate yourself better.” I can’t help but focus on this phrase in relation to David’s experience. By all accounts, David learned at the highest possible level exactly what we wanted him to learn in high school. His grades were outstanding and he achieved far beyond our expectations. Beyond the content of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, how did we not teach David a curiosity for and understanding that others may be experiencing, interpreting, and remembering the past differently? Instead, it seems, David learned there was a truth to be discovered and that there were no repercussions for taking positions or supporting movements that might prove difficult to defend. While not addressing 100 the merits of the rally he attended, it was the surprise and shock - the “visceral reaction” of his professor - that so stunned David. Once again, there were aspects of how to engage with others and the world that David’s social studies education did not address, leaving him surprised and confounded by the situations in which he found himself. Once again, the bubble we created, while seemingly strong at the time, came crashing down around David at its first challenge. This willingness to ignore the aspects of our lived experiences also confronted Lance on several occasions. Lance, an Indian American who graduated from high school in 2001, began to experience discriminatory events for which he was unprepared and because we did such a good job constructing the bubble, he didn’t think existed. The first occurred while he was in college at an elite university. It is a story he says will “never forget in my life.” He and three medical school friends were flying to Miami for spring break. He is Indian American, his friends were all Muslim. Lance was wearing a shirt of the university he was attending and carried numerous schoolbooks on the plane as he “had to take a test when I got back.” His friends had no carry-on baggage. They were all assigned random seats, all on the aisle. We were actually stopped. We were stopped and asked what the purpose of our trip was. Actual officers came on our plane and asked us. We were just in utter disbelief why the plane was delayed and we find out that somebody was uncomfortable with us four in our totally randomly assigned aisle seats. We said we were going on spring break. They asked, “Can you prove where you are staying?” I was like, “Is it any of your business?” They wanted to confirm that we were students and that we were active students. We all just complied. The sad part is that was the first time that happened to me. The other three weren’t as bothered. They felt like that was par for the course 101 because they were Muslim guys and they had beards and that it’s happened more than once. To me, that was pretty humiliating. Can you imagine that flight down there – three and half hours and everyone’s staring at you. I grew up in this privileged life, you know, everyone knows me. And then you step out of that cocoon and the world just hits you. (Lance, personal communication, June 21, 2020) This was not the only time that Lance was confronted with and unequipped to deal with racial discrimination. He told of another time when he drove his father’s Mercedes home from college. I stopped to get gas and was just really tired. So, I took a quick 10-minute nap in the parking lot of the gas station. Then I went inside and I was just looking for coffee and some gummy worms. This lady thought I was suspicious and that the vehicle didn’t belong to me. She called the police. So, the police actually pulled me over. I said, “Sir, what did I do wrong?” They said she thought that the vehicle didn’t belong to you and that you were acting suspicious and that you had walked around the gas station excessively. I could tell he was bothered by it. We had such a polite conversation. I said, “I live not even a mile away from here.” Just because of my skin color and probably the fancy car, I got pulled over. There’s no reason for that to happen and that was humiliating. (Lance, personal communication, June 21, 2020) Lance described the sheltered life he lived and that I, no doubt, helped to create: “I felt growing up here that I lived in a bubble. We didn’t really have any issues. I wasn’t bothered by it. I felt like I wasn’t discriminated against. When I left that cocoon is when I was kind of exposed to the real-world issues.” In this sense, I am glad Lance did not feel any discrimination 102 in his schooling experience, however, I am concerned that we never addressed the possibility that it existed and that some would not only be the victims of it, but also the cause of it as well, through explicit and implicit bias, silence, and active participation in racist movements and policies. GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES Throughout this section of the study, we see some very stark differences about whether or not my practice accomplished the goals of social studies education discussed in chapter 1. In other words, did my practice ask students to interrogate social studies in critical ways, encouraging them to ask questions not only about the content but why this content, learned in this way, from this perspective through a lens of social justice. It is clear in Period I that I failed at accomplishing either of these goals. First and foremost, I did not think to even include these aspects of learning into my teaching practice. This was reflected in what my students remembered, noting that there was a lot of textbook work (and no interrogation of the textbook). In addition, there was no inclusion or analysis of social justice issues like race, gender, and sexual identity. We see this most starkly by David’s and Lance’s confrontation with these issues later in their lives, fully unprepared to come to terms with them as they appeared in the world. During Period II, there are some advances made in the interest in asking more important questions about the content, more importantly, what was left out. After 9/11, it was clear that there was something I did not know, an ignorance of the world that made the live viewing of the attacks with students to be a shocking experience. For the first time, I could not explain why something was happening and was unable to simply give my students answers. Following this, 103 there was a marked seriousness in our engagement with social studies and students remembered being encourage to “think for ourselves…and form our own opinions.” Still, there was little to no taking up of issues of justice. This too was reflected in one Mexican American student remembering he identified as a “non-color” during this time, seeing no recognition that race might be an important and defining characteristic of his identity. Finally, in Period III, there was a continuation of a critical analysis of the content which was engaged and an embrace of justice-oriented issues. This was reflected in my intentional teaching practice and revealed through student memories. Lauryn, an African American student, remembered this being “the first time anyone ever really asked about I felt about being black.” This acknowledgement that there were aspects of students’ experience in and with the world (and even themselves) that were intentionally surfaced in the classroom and through social studies is a far cry from where I was as a teacher during Period I and even how I engaged these issues during Period II. It is evidence of a progression of understanding aligned with Barton and Levstik’s (2004) conclusion that “we cannot assume consensus” (p. 34) around issues such as these and therefore must “struggle to absorb as well as express; to listen as well as to be heard…communicat[ing] across their differences” (Parker, 2003, p. 11) if we are to respect and respond to the “culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” (NCSS, n.p.) within which we find ourselves. CONCLUSION In conclusion of this chapter, I have shown, through the help of the memories of my students, that social studies education can and is memorable, far more than perhaps teachers consider when planning their daily lessons and activities. I also have shown by disclosing the 104 moments when social studies education could have been useful, but wasn’t, that there are opportunities to consider new and different ways with which to engage in and through social studies content that could assist students in understanding the challenging world in which they go forth in a more just and comprehensive way. I do this in hope of providing a path forward, one that respects and recognizes individual experience and how trafficking in the memories of those experiences has the potential of creating long-lasting dispositions that would be more useful in accomplishing the goals of social studies education. The world is fraught with challenges and pitfalls that our students will no doubt find themselves and need to confront. Perhaps social studies education can assist in not only helping them understand and identify them, but develop dispositions of being in the world and with their past selves that will prove productive when the memories of social studies are called forth once again to help explain a moment in the future. Finally, I have provided examples when remembering more intentionally, especially through lenses of justice, can, in fact, make memories useful to the project of social studies education. Chapter 4 will further explore those possibilities not in the past, but through the lens of social studies teachers and students today as we continue to investigate how memories of social studies education can be made useful. 105 Chapter 4: Memory at work in today’s classrooms In chapter 3, social studies education proved the generator of lasting and influential memories including memories of omission, instances when new challenges revealed the limitations and/or failings of social studies education or at least the absence of memories that could have been useful. It is here that the investigation continues. What was lacking in the data of chapter 3 was the exploration in any significant depth of how those memories were made useful in the process and practice of teaching and learning. In this chapter, I examine the usefulness of memories of social studies education and teacher preparation by current social studies teachers, seeking to identify ways in which those memories play a role in their teaching practice. In that, I seek to identify how memories and their surfacing have impacted current teachers’ understandings of their practice in precise and intentional ways and how memories have contoured their practice, sometimes without even them realizing it. Much like the memories of the participants in chapter 3 proved, it was often the gaps, now laid bare through this process of recollection of memories of social studies education, analyzed through more critical and pedagogical lenses, that illuminated a different way forward for these teachers. In other words, memories of social studies education and of learning to teach social studies were utilized by these participants on one hand by their continued use of an instructional strategy, inclusion of a particular resource or content, or employment of classroom management strategy. Conversely, participants identified ways in which their social studies education did not prepare them for the life and career they have chosen. In this way, content and questions these participants wanted to address but were never asked to in their own experiences as students suddenly become essential in their current teaching. The creation and nurturing of safe 106 classroom environments allowing students to question and challenge their own and others’ understandings replaced the more rote, top-down classrooms in their past experience. In short, memories are made useful by these participants in both acts of commission and repetition as well as omission and rejection. In this way, “looking back” became a “retrospective process” (Sekimoto, 2012, p. 238) that led to “refashioned” (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 1) understandings. Memories of experience no doubt play a role in determining what teachers include and leave out of their practice and the process of re-remembering their social studies experience offer opportunities to determine that a particular aspect of their practice, which seemed completely adequate at the time, is no longer applicable. It is also important to recognize that as I analyze these teachers’ memories of social studies education, there is a difference in the complexity and criticality of their memories for two reasons. First, we are living through a particularly challenging time that has called forth issues of racial justice and of public discourse central to the functioning of democracy. Second, these participants also now possess lenses that allow them to see pedagogy, content, and teaching moments through more nuanced and perhaps critical ways. It is these acquired and developed lenses through which their memories must now be brought. In short, they remember differently from participants in chapter 3 precisely because they possess different skills and dispositions, namely about teaching and learning, through which they remember. You will note a sophistication of memory here that was lacking in the participants in chapter 3, and rightly so. This is not to fault the participants in chapter 3 as they simply do not possess the skills and lenses with which to remember in this way. But the fact that these teacher participants do remember differently is an indication that memories can be made useful with 107 particular intention and purpose. In other words, these teacher participants cannot help but remember their social studies experience differently from participants in chapter 3 or even perhaps their previous selves, though I would have had to interview them before they began their teacher preparation program to ascertain that evidence of change. This would indicate remembering from a different plane of immanence, where “new connections” are “made and dissolved” (Stagoll, p. 204). In fact, we will see below elucidation of different planes of immanence from which participants remember “conditions of real experience, and not only of possible experience” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 285) as best as can be recalled. Suffice it to say, it would be impossible for them to remember without their teacher lenses at work. It is important to also recognize that each of these participants graduated from high school during the same era of the participants in chapter 3. In other words, I ask you, the reader, to not only pay close attention to what these participants remembered from their social studies experience, but also how they remembered. What descriptors do they use? How do they insert issues of equity, even without prompting? How do pedagogical goals and strategies find their way into their memories? How often do they make connections to their current practice while remembering their past experiences? All of these questions will be important as we investigate how these memories helped to inform the decisions these teachers made while engaging in the practice of teaching social studies. I will begin by describing the memories of social studies education of two teachers and their subsequent memories of their teacher preparation. Following each, I will explore how these memories have informed their teaching, the goals and objectives they seek to accomplish, and how the teaching towards these goals are manifested in their classrooms. 108 Finally, I will, through the memories of students who participated in lessons and activities planned by Angela and Adam, analyze how memories of social studies education are disrupted and/or perpetuated from one generation of learners to another, illustrating how a different plane of immanence can impact social studies teaching. ANGELA Oh, I'm just a girl, living in captivity Your rule of thumb makes me worrisome Oh, I'm just a girl, what's my destiny? What I've succumbed to is making me numb (Stefani & Dumont, 1995) Memories of Social Studies Angela is a white female social studies teacher of 12 years who has been teaching at the same high school her entire career and attended a high school less than 10 miles from the one which she teaches. Angela’s memories of social studies education must be placed within the context of her commitment to and confidence in addressing issues of social justice, namely the gendered oppression she had experienced. While not aware of it at the time of the experience, Angela traces through her memories of education as a student and early teacher of social studies, ways in which these forces were at play in, around, and through her experience. She tells of her first impactful memories of social studies content in the context of a unit engaging the Holocaust. In a project assigned during this unit, Angela was given an assignment asking her to identify something wrong she recognized in the world that she would like to see changed. She described how she “did a presentation with the song ‘Just a Girl’ by Gwen Stefani. I played the song for the class and had this big poster of all these women in power. That was in seventh grade.” It is interesting here that Angela did not connect her wanting to change 109 something about women’s rights or gender equity to anything structural or systematic. In fact, her deeper understanding of the issue of gender equity and its ramifications didn’t come until much later. But, the fact that a seventh grader felt instinctively that something needed to be changed in this area is instructive in the sense that these issues were not really engaged in during her middle and high school social studies experiences, or if they were, they were not memorable at her moment of recollection. In other words, this desire (Deleuze, 2006) preceded her understandings of the power structures at work. During middle school, Angela started becoming involved in student government, an interest of hers that remains to this day. During this time, Angela saw powerful women leading things in her school as her role models. When telling her memories, rarely did Angela speak of a male teacher as an inspirational force. Conversely, she recognized that the teachers leading student government, for example, were all women and had such an impact on her that Angela selected one of them as her most influential teacher. Her identity and desire to be a strong female leader seemed inherent in her but also supported by educators, however implicitly, she chose with which to engage. Angela did not recollect any memories of discussing any controversial issues, like gender equity, in great detail or depth in her high school social studies classes. She does, however, remember doing a lot of rote, more traditional forms of social studies education, especially with maps and geography. Angela recalls now that “they never talked about social justice. They never talked about protesting.” This, I suspect, is evidence of a similar notion and disposition that I shared with Angela’s teachers in my earlier periods of my teaching career as explored in chapter 3. Teachers having a privileged perspective, unaware of our own culpability and 110 responsibility in reifying structures of oppression never saw the need to explore these issues. Our vision of the common good was couched in the world which we knew and while we may have been able and even willing to explore the oft ignored experiences of those not like us, we either lacked the skills and dispositions to do so, or simply were unaware of our limited understanding of such a foundational concept to social studies education. When engagement in critical and controversial issues did appear in her high school government class, it seemed taboo and dangerous; as something in which one was not supposed to engage. Angela remembered one such moment with one of the few male teachers she enjoyed learning from: The teacher was known in the community for being very outside the box. He was much more outgoing in terms of talking about topics we never thought we were going to talk about. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me questions about controversial topics. He asked us about abortion and we were just shocked. I just remember being like, “oh man, he’s talking about this.” We were all looking around like nobody knew what to do. That was my senior year and we were like, “he’s getting fired for sure. This guy is going to be in so much trouble.” (Angela, personal communication, March 28, 2020) It was during this recollection that she realized no one, neither a teacher or parent or peer, had talked with her about sensitive issues like these. “That was not something we talked about,” she said. “No one ever explained to me the Bush/Gore election. Nobody ever talked about what Bill Clinton did. And that was happening during my high school experience. I don’t ever remember anyone sharing current events with me for four years of high school.” This gap 111 or lack of engagement is in line with what my own students, the participants in chapter 3, identified with respect to issues of social justice. It was something that just wasn’t talked about, either because of its potential negative consequences for the teacher, but more likely, because her teachers did not know how to or to what end those discussions and activities would lead. Because of her academic and extracurricular achievements, Angela was awarded a Leadership Scholarship that made her college studies possible. My parents never talked to me about college. Then one day my mom said “You’re valedictorian. If you want to try to go to a four-year school, I’ll support you.” I did not know that was even a possibility until she said that. (Angela, personal communication, March 28, 2020) In college, she was named Freshman of the Year and eventual class president. But still, there was little to no emphasis on issues of social justice in her coursework. Rather, her cohort of honor students was encouraged to do “good things” in and around the university community. “Structural, systemic racism was never addressed. Heck no,” Angela said. What makes these memories more important and calls for our close attention is Angela’s current understanding of systemic and structural oppression. As you will see below, this understanding of the world – the concern and attention to issues of social justice – have become central to Angela’s life and teaching practice. It would be impossible to ascertain if Angela’s memories would be different without this subsequent awareness, knowledge, and experience. In other words, if she had not had the experiences described below, would she focus on particular moments from the past noted above? Or would other moments be called forth and different language used to recall them more in-line with those revealed in chapter 3? 112 I suggest that her lifeworld experiences both inside and outside the world of education have focused her memory on aspects that are important and central to her now, and even further magnified by the current social moment we find ourselves. This is to say that her process of remembering has been altered by new knowledge and experience; that she is now on a different plane of immanence from which she can see her past in a deeper more critical way; and that then in every current and future experience, a potential to do the same is possible. This understanding might offer opportunities for social studies educators, who intentionally craft learning experiences every day, asking them to consider that any day’s lesson might not simply result in a well-crafted essay or a high score on a summative assessment, but rather, a reconsideration of individual memories that no doubt have shaped each students’ identity and understanding. This is not to say we know what memories social studies education will create, but rather, that the practice of re-remembering and reconsidering what meaning we can extract from memories, is a practice that could illuminate the utility of memory in the years that followed, especially for future and current teachers. In short, social studies educators can remember differently and can help students remember differently, hopefully with an eye towards issues of equity through which they have benefitted and perhaps heretofore left unchallenged and disrupted. It is clear that while Angela’s (and all our) memories change, they are not wrong. How can they be (apart from issues of fact)? It does suggest though that experience and knowledge can impact what and how we remember and therefore open up, in an exciting pedagogical way, the possibility that memories and remembering can be useful over and over again. In this way, the process of remembering might be altered intentionally and pedagogically, making memory 113 a place where constructive, critical analysis and dispositional development can take place by both social studies teachers and their students, offering new answers to “What can we do with our memories?” (Frichot, 2011, p. 76). Memories of Teacher Preparation Angela did talk very positively about her memories of her teacher preparation classes, stating that she learned about how to “take students where they are” and make content “understandable” for them. Angela identified many activities and instructional strategies that she was taught in her methods courses and practiced in her field experiences that she now employs in her own classroom. Her internship was one semester in duration and took place at a rural high school. Her mentor observed her for a week or so then he asked me if I was ready. And I was like, ‘yeah.’ He was working on his masters’ thesis and told me I was doing great. He said ‘if you need anything let me know.’ Of course, I wasn’t going to need anything from this guy because I was trying to impress him. (Angela, personal communication, March 28, 2020) This suggests her further desire and expectation that she had to prove her value, especially as a female, and that any sense of weakness might be perceived as incompetence or inadequacy. Through all her teacher preparation experiences, still issues of social justice were “absolutely not” taken up; not in her college courses, not in her methods courses, not in the schools and classrooms during her field experiences. She remembers it this way: Those teachers were never teaching me about social justice. They were always about teaching the whole child. It’s your responsibility when a kid fails. Those social things were not taught as the reason the child was failing – no talk of systemic oppression. I 114 never had that conversation ever. They told us you are going to have poor kids; you are going to have kids who aren’t very smart; they are getting abused by their parents – and it is your job to teach them. There was never any talk that it was my job to undo these things. It was my job to teach the child, not change society. (Angela, personal communication, April 13, 2020) It wasn’t until after several years of teaching that she began to realize what really was, and what had been, important and influencing her experience. But she now learned the language to describe what she had experienced; and she had the support of allies and a new- found confidence that drove her further exploration into her practice and what she was actually doing to and with her students, either by reifying systems of oppression or by challenging them by recognizing the culpability of the systems in which she now worked and in some ways led. While this might sound like a typical way teachers speak of their education, through memories of omission, by engaging these gaps through the lens of memory adds value in the efficacy of this growth and development. In other words, these experiences cannot be remembered by someone else the same as Angela. Her reflection and analysis of them, therefore, changes her dispositions, her process of becoming, in more powerful and efficient ways. As she describes how there were no memories of social justice in her past and her recognition that there were very real personal consequences for that, her culpability in continuing this omission can no longer be ignored. In short, the lens of memory, I would argue, empowers and motivates her to be a different memory than those that left these gaps in hers. 115 Memories of Teaching As I attempted to surface Angela’s memories of how and when she began to think and act upon these larger, more societal issues, Angela circled back to previous memories to help put her thinking in context. This is, in and of itself, an example of how memories can be made useful. In her attempt to bring some clarity to these experiences, Angela intermingles memories from different time periods of her life to help explain and come to an understanding (mostly in her own mind I suggest) of how and what she thought, acted, and moved forward. She told of the interview for her first teaching job and how the principal “scared the bejesus out of me then and every day thereafter. I could never feel comfortable. I just felt…that you could not be totally honest, that you always had to prove yourself to him.” She mentioned that in her first few years of teaching and going back to her internship, she did not want to “rock the boat.” She said: there was this strong push to be good – to be a good girl. I think I identified with that. The most recent Hillary Clinton documentary talks about that. She felt this big pressure to be a good girl and do the right thing. I very much did that all of my childhood, all of elementary, high school, all the way through. It was like do the right thing to get a job then do the right thing to get your evaluator to think you’re good at your job and do whatever they say so you get to keep your job. I feel like that’s kind of where I started off. (Angela, personal communication, April 13, 2020) Angela’s story is marked by the sense that she had a predetermined place and she should stay in it; that she should not disrupt or challenge what or who has instituted this order of things; and that she should make do in the position she is in because she is lucky to have it. 116 It wasn’t until Angela volunteered to participate in school-sponsored equity training that she began to feel comfortable in taking more risks to bring these issues to light in her school and in her classroom. She said that the training “…empowered me to do all these things, all these risky things that I wasn’t doing before, that were actually not really risky at all. I felt like I was liberated to talk about things and I could really go there.” This risk taking has resulted in Angela feeling comfortable in doing things in her classroom, even in the face of perceived potential pushback from parents and administrators, that help her open up these issues of contention for investigation in her classroom. She began to teach students the proper vocabulary they should use in their interactions with police which resulted in a police officer parent and a building administrator questioning the content. She has pushed back when colleagues were concerned with how much time she spends on the Holocaust or how much she uses the Women’s Rights movement in her US history assessment. She has changed her teaching as well, focusing not only on how, for example, discrimination might appear, but on what to do when it does. “Those are pretty powerful, empowering conversations,” she remembered. One defining moment for Angela as a teacher revolved around her now supervision of student government of which she was so active as a student herself. She told the story of how her and a white male colleague, as now supervisors of the student government, were asked to help the principal remove the student body president because he organized and participated in a sexually suggestive dance in front of the student body. She tells the story this way: The principal wanted to make the first openly gay student body president not the president anymore. I’m the one who was ‘first off, he’s our first openly gay student body 117 president, and second of all, is there any other thing that you could suggest because that one (removal) is not on the table for us. (Angela, personal communication, April 13, 2020) In this experience, we no longer see fear paralyzing Angela’s practice, though she still feels like should be the foundation of all her teaching. But the positive results she experienced kept multiplying the more she did this work, so much so that she can never go back. She told of a mock government simulation that she has done for years in her classes. She said “this is what happens during those mock governments, though. It’s where the controversial [issues] come up. The inequities come up because they get to pick the bills to work on.” Earlier in the interview, Angela referred to participating in a similar simulation in her high school government class as a student. She remembered that: the male students were given the important roles in the government simulation. I remember feeling at that moment how unfair that was. I actually was class president and involved in student government, but all the top-tiered positions [were assigned] to people who weren’t brave enough to take on a real position. (Angela, personal communication, April 13, 2020) I can’t help but think that this memory is never far afield from Angela’s mind every time she leads her own students through this government simulation. Nor should it be. In her actions displayed through her pedagogical skill, Angela centered difference and sought to disrupt the safe and comfortable place which had previously marked her teacher preparation and her first few years in her own classroom. 118 She now sees her classroom as a place where students are “allowed to say that women should get to do this. That gay people should get to get married. They’re allowed to talk about abortion and stand and say the side they’re on. They get to say that people who are transgender should get whatever, you know, they finally get to talk about these things.” Angela’s demeanor during this recollection was not one of fear. Rather, her excitement and passion came through when sharing her efforts to give students this opportunity. Through her practice, she has been able to adapt her teaching to make up for the deficiencies she now can identify in the memories of her social studies education. In so doing, she has made attempts to include in her classroom investigative experiences of and consideration for groups and individuals whose experiences have for too long been ignored. Contrary to many participant memories in the last chapter, students who moved on through life without the memories of these considerations, Angela’s students at least have been exposed to the reality that there are others experiencing the world in different ways and from a variety of perspectives that may therefore challenge and disrupt conceptions of who is to be included in the deliberations in a “culturally diverse, democratic society” (NCSS, n.p.). To see how these memories have been used and manifest themselves in Angela’s teaching in a more precise way, I analyzed a unit of study about civil rights in her 10th grade U.S. History class. I will explain the unit in some detail and end with reflections and recollections of students who experienced it. I include the detail in the description of the unit to allow for the investigation of what sticks with students and what they do and do not remember from it. In this way, I seek to make some connections between Angela’s memories described above, how they were made useful in her planning and teaching this unit, and identify the cyclical aspect of 119 remembering, building on the notion raised in chapter 3 that social studies education leaves lasting memories. Can Angela’s analysis and use of her memories of social studies education impact her current (and future) teaching of it and therefore create memories in her students that advance a more just and equitable society than her own? First, the design of the unit itself is a far cry from Angela’s own social studies experience and takes into account, intentionally or not, the slights, the inconsistencies, and the gaps between her real-world experience and what she experienced both as a student of social studies, a student learning how to teach, and a beginning teacher. It lays out, now with intention, unit goals that include seeking out differentiation of experience: Students will learn about empathy and how history has impacted multiple diverse groups. We will think about what it would be like to put ourselves in their shoes. Students will connect empathy to the American Core Values and explore the quest to protect these values for all Americans (no matter their faith, political party or view, or ethnicity or race). We will explore the past and take notice of the lessons Americans should take away from these events. (Angela, personal communication, April 13, 2020) Three things important to this study are noteworthy about these prescribed goals. First, notice how the emphasis of this unit is not centered on the civil rights struggle and its historical antecedents, but rather, on the dispositions and skills needed to identify and act in response to violations of those rights. In this unit, students are asked to think about how to change things and act in the face of oppression, something Angela never had the opportunity to do in her classes. There is also a clear value placed on the experience of others, especially those outside of the more traditional white Anglo-Saxon male Angela remembered from high school and in 120 her teacher preparation field experiences. Particularly important to this study, though, is the lack of emphasis placed on student experience (or memory). While student voice is clearly appreciated and supported, it is not the main focus of this investigation. This will prove important as we analyze student reactions and memories built as a result of experiencing this unit. The unit Angela has crafted is also very interesting and certainly not in-line with the more traditional, chronological aspects of teaching civil rights through a U.S. History lens. The goals here are not concerned with the factual information of any particular era of American history; they are about developing specific skills and dispositions that then more naturally relies on specific content to achieve. In other words, a more traditional process of planning begins with the content at hand and then asks what we can learn from it. Angela has turned this process upside down, asking first what issues do we want to address and explore and then she found the history through which to accomplish this. In this way, Angela has expanded the notion of civil rights to include not what happened in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but instead, an experience that has occurred at all times in many places. In the first activity of this unit, Angela shows a video of a public exhibit provided by the Empathy Museum in London. In the video, strangers walk into a sidewalk kiosk, more similar to a shipping container, and are matched with an accurately sized pair of shoes unseen. The participants then put the shoes on and walk around the sidewalks of London while listening to an audio recording of that person’s life experiences. This bold move on Angela’s part to preface this unit with an empathetic emphasis does not stop with this video. Her students are then asked to “create” a pair of shoes using a particular set of supplies, some are limited to sticky 121 notes and white colored pencils. Others are given a full set of markers, construction paper, staplers, and tape. Obviously, the quality of shoe varies greatly based on the variety of resources one has, which Angela uses to support this statement that is shared with students: “History is often created by the people with the resources (time, money, and energy) to record what happens.” In this way, Angela is helping students to come to terms with the fact that the experiences of people in the world are greatly influenced by the resources they have and that the telling of history is often focused on the stories of one group of people (or those that have one kind of shoe). Angela does not explicitly follow up to reveal and consider the memories of students in similar situations or to explore how the scarcity of resources may be, at that moment (and in the past), impacting students in different ways. I refer back to the participants in chapter 3 who felt as if they were taught in a bubble of sorts, saved from the consideration of the challenging aspects of the world that do not align with the mantra of hard work results in success and happiness. However, the emphases on empathy here at least begins this consideration. Angela asks her classes two important questions during the discussion and debrief of these exercises. First, Angela asks her students “What events will you be the historian for in your lifetime?” Later near the end of this series of activities, she asks, “How does empathy fit into America’s Core Values? What words would you use to describe you? And your experiences?” This effort to center students’ self-reflection is an important aspect to this study. While not directly and intentionally revealing student memory and experience, these lines of inquiry do, in fact, place student experience central, or at least parallel, to the investigation of the content that is to follow. In addition, these types of questions do not provide students what 122 to think, but rather, invite students to use social studies content to produce knowledge about the world in which they live and, more importantly, about their own experience in it. In this introductory part of the unit, Angela interjects a historical image that connects to the imagery of the shoe and begins to explore the potential learnings unveiled through the employment of empathy. The image is a pile of shoes collected from victims at the Belzec extermination camp during the Holocaust. This leads into an explanation of American Core Values, some listed explicitly were “common good, truth, equality, freedom of religion, liberty (freedom of press/speech), justice…” Angela then explains that in this unit, they will investigate times when America’s values have been tested. She asserts that in those times “people need to stand up for those whose values are denied.” It is interesting here that there is always someone other who needs defending or that requires empathy, not any of us. In this way, memory may require our development of self-empathy, or a recognition of our past selves as just as valid as our current selves. That the motivating factors of our past experiences and actions require simultaneous critical analysis and ongoing reminders that they were, at the time, valid is an important understanding when seeking to include self-empathy as a disposition worthy of development, especially during the process of remembering more justly. Sherman (2014) suggests that “if a notion of self-empathy is to be part of a model of emotional and moral growth, something more than stimulating and re-experiencing traumatic events and emotions…is required” (p. 228). In other words, it is not enough to simply allow for the remembering of such challenging aspects of our pasts, but rather, to find a value and usefulness of them. This aspect of memory will be investigated in more detail in chapter 6. 123 The unit then begins with the Holocaust, including a brief history of the events, including the use of propaganda, the Einsatzgruppen, the Final Solution, etc. but focuses on the U.S. reaction to it, asking the question “What should have been the United States reaction to the Holocaust during WWII?” Angela continues this investigation into those who stood up against the Nazis during the Holocaust, the trial (and non-trials) of war criminals after the war, and the occurrence of Holocaust denial today. She ends this section of the unit by repeating the adage that we learn about the Holocaust so that it will never happened again. But then, on the same slide, shares this: “We learn about America’s systematic racism so it does not happen again. We learn about civil rights so you know the methods to use if/when yours are taken.” While there may be some problems with the oversimplification that we have “solved” the issues that led to the Holocaust, I find it intriguing here that Angela does not start her discussion of racial civil rights by asking the question “does systematic racism exist?” but rather begins the discussion by simply recognizing and identifying its existence. However, the placement of America’s systematic racism in the past (unintentionally I suggest) removes any responsibility of those culpable in its ongoing existence and indicates to those still victimized by its ever-present reach that they are freed from its tentacles. From that point, Angela introduces the concepts of equality, equity, and justice, and explicitly states that justice means “everyone helps to ensure there are no barriers to freedom.” This is a far cry from another, more neutral explicit definitions of what equality is. The difference here is stark. Angela emphasizes not the outcomes but the process, making it clear that justice is achieved by doing – it is a verb not a noun. She shared a cartoon that depicts the differences between these terms: 124 Figure 1: Equality versus Equity As the unit continues, Angela explores with her students why people might be racist, including an investigation into the science of race. She uses historical examples such as the KKK, the Tulsa massacre, Supreme Court cases, the Little Rock Nine, civil rights leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X, Emmett Till, and Selma among others to show how this struggle for justice manifested throughout history and brings into the discussion more current events around the issue, including police brutality. She ends the unit with a broader exploration of stereotypes and bias (explicit and implicit) and consequences of hate by including examples such as Matthew Shepard. The final assignment is a document based question that asks students to 125 answer these questions: To what extent have the goals of the Civil Rights movement been realized? What methods were used to accomplish the goals? Student Created Memories I interviewed two students who participated in this unit with Angela to ascertain what they learned and remembered from the unit. Their memories of social studies before Angela’s class were similar. Bethany is an African American female and junior in high school and Thomas is an African American male sophomore. Thomas was able to remember the names of several specific teachers he had, both for social studies and other disciplines, and felt that in one particular teacher’s class “we were able to talk about our stories and personal moments. That’s what made me like that class the most.” Thomas expresses fond memories of when his own identity, experience and perspective were considered valid and valuable by his teachers. Bethany had very few recollections from social studies classes before Angela’s class, but described often feeling uncomfortable in these classes stating that “I would be the only race student in class. You come to class and everybody’s staring at you. It’s like, ‘I’m human too!’ That’s something that made me feel uncomfortable.” She said the issue of race was not “a subject that was touched on whatsoever” in her elementary and middle school classes. She said she felt different than other students “many times actually,” and even in Angela’s class, in the unit of study described above, Bethany was reluctant to talk and voice her opinions. She said: For anyone of my race, it’s hard to talk about – the killing, lynchings of your own people –just like it would be for any race. So, when topics like that came up, I would rather just be quiet and hear what others had to say. I’m not comfortable enough to speak out and say what I would feel like saying. (Bethany, personal communication, May 13, 2020) 126 It’s interesting to note, however, that Bethany was not averse to talking about these issues, just talking about them at school. She said “not only am I more comfortable talking about it with … people of my race, but more specifically, people of my family.” She shared a memory of an incident in middle school that may explain Bethany’s reticence. Here is how Bethany remembered it: One time I was on the bus and I live in a predominantly white neighborhood, so mostly white kids on the bus. These two guys, I’m guessing sophomores in high school, were calling me the only black girl on the bus. Why are you on the bus? Throwing paper at me. At the time, I didn’t understand because I never really thought about the issue of race. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I just wondered why would they treat me different? It is because of the color of my skin? I talked about that to my family and my brothers. My dad and mom were upset about it. (Bethany, personal communication, May 13, 2020) Neither Bethany nor her parents talked about the incident with anyone at the school. This reluctance to bring their personal experiences to school is troubling and further calls for ways in which individual experience should, in fact, be included and used in social studies classrooms. This is not to say that Angela does not attempt to do this. In fact, Bethany commented that Angela’s class was “more hands on…helping you instead of just sitting back and watching you work. I like teachers like that because it’s easier to talk to them if you have other issues that isn’t regarding social studies.” In this way, Angela has created an environment that is open to student voice and supportive of them. Still, Bethany was reluctant. She did acknowledge, however, that an on-going fear of hers is “saying something and then the teacher 127 shoots me down. I would rather not have that happen at all. So, I just tend to be quiet.” As we consider if and how we are accomplishing the goals of social studies education, it is important for teachers to consider what might be occurring through their investigation of content and pedagogical approaches that confine the inclusion of any student memory or experience. Angela’s classes seem to welcome them but because of forces that have clouded Bethany’s social studies experiences, for example, she still feels reluctant. Cochran-Smith (2000) warned about the “expository stance and more distanced personal voice” (p. 158) more traditional pedagogical approaches result in and suggest that more autobiographical references “have rich potential for analysis” (p. 202). For example, while Thomas did not share Bethany’s fear of sharing his views, he did also note that he talked about these issues more with his family than at school as well, highlighting on ongoing challenge for social studies education: We always talk about what’s going on, like news and stuff. I don’t really talk to my friends. I say that because I know me and my family we all believe the same thing. So, it’s easier to just go over and talk as opposed to my friends. Like we don’t…have the same beliefs. It’s more like a dispute. (Thomas, personal communication, May 12, 2020) Thomas did appreciate though the differences in Angela’s class from other classes he has taken. He remembered that “she made learning fun. We were able to work with our friends. We had a good connection with her and she was super cool. And she was always helpful. She was always walking around the classroom making sure we knew what we were doing and looking over our work. When I felt like I needed help, she never made me feel like I was bothering her.” This development of community was important to Thomas and an 128 intentional goal of Angela’s. On several occasions, Thomas remembered opportunities “to make new friends and learn new things about people” or “building our relationships and we would become more like friends.” When I asked Bethany about the memories of the unit described above, she first talked about the concept of shoes and understanding “other people and how their life may be different from you.” She mentioned that during the section on the Holocaust she learned about how “a lot of people got their lives taken away from them, stripped away from them for the simple fact of believing in…just the different race that they were. It was even hard for me, though I’m not Jewish. That topic is tough.” There is, no doubt, evidence of some levels of empathy on display here by Bethany. As the unit transitioned into an investigation of race, Bethany remembered specific content, including the concept of equity and told of the cartoon Angela showed representing the difference between equality and equity. She described it this way: “There were like smaller people standing on higher boxes and then taller people standing on the ground just to show how we may have equity. It made it a lot easier to see.” Thomas remembered the shoe activity as a chance to see “what [others] are going through…you get to listen to someone else’s struggles.” He remembered the cartoon about equality and equity too, describing it as “three people. And for equality they were all on the same sized barrel. But it didn’t work because all the people were different sizes, so the kid was not able to see.” Through both of these activities, both Bethany and Thomas reveal very similar takeaways including the importance of understanding others through a willingness to consider another perspective and a recognition of that different circumstances might result in different 129 outcomes. Neither Bethany or Thomas though could place themselves in the cartoon nor identify what supports and or impediments may have or are currently impacting their experience in the world, but the realization that others benefit and/or struggle with the realities of the world goes a long way in opening up a realization of the variety of experience, a key aspect of social studies education. Bethany’s memories of the unit became more detailed when she talked about the issue of race. When discussing lynching, for example, Bethany said that it stuck out to her because “the majority of people getting lynched were people of my race.” In her analysis of an artifact of hate from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, a resource used by the other teacher participant (described below) in his class as well, Bethany described a banner she analyzed equating African Americans and Jews to dogs. They were comparing Jewish people, black people to being animals and it was hurting. But I understood that it’s a lot different today than it was back in the day. But at the same time, we still have racial issues where we black people, …are considered animal, like gorillas and monkeys. (Bethany, personal communication, May 13, 2020) This recollection of the class is very interesting as Bethany struggles with the notion that racial hate seemed something in the past yet she still struggled with it in her own life (remember the bus incident). While Angela attempts to connect the past to the present, it was difficult for Bethany to make that connection from her memories to this portion of the unit. Thomas too remembered his analysis of an artifact from the Jim Crow Museum as “a learning moment” and that “it was just crazy to see the things that they had.” He did not remember the specific artifact he analyzed but did recall that the totality of the exhibit was impactful. 130 But Thomas did remember other more specific aspects of Angela’s unit, including the “difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X” and that Malcolm “was willing to get his way in an aggressive way while Martin Luther King was more of a peaceful type.” He was most impacted by Emmett Till’s story. The reason he stuck out the most was because he was such a young kid. It was horrible how someone could lose a life over something like whistling because of a girl. I know the pictures that they showed us is probably something I would never forget because…it was so horrible. (Thomas, personal communication, May 12, 2020) I asked if perhaps these pictures should not have been shown to people because there were so horrible. Thomas said that “I feel like it’s important for us to see actually what was happening and not hold back because you have a better realization of what was actually going on.” As you recall, later in the unit, Angela attempts to explicitly make these connections to more contemporary events, i.e., the shooting at the Emmanuel AME church, the killing of Matthew Shepard, and police brutality. Bethany mentioned that something that stuck out to her during this portion was police brutality “because it is happening today.” She expanded by stating that “for me, it’s the race thing…The majority of people being beaten by white police officers [are] black people. A lot of stuff goes back and it relates to race for me. Like I see something and if it’s about my people and them being hurt or harmed in any way, it automatically sticks out more.” It should be no surprise Bethany sees these memories as more important because of the personal connection she has made with them. She says she thinks about police brutality “a lot, but not as much as my older brothers and my younger brothers. I 131 fear for them more. And my dad, I fear for them more than myself because they are black males.” In totality, Bethany’s and Thomas’ memories of their experience in Angela’s class were closely aligned and connected to Angela’s own experience. As Angela identifies the gaps in her own social studies memories (i.e., lack of engagement in controversial issues, rote instructional strategies, patriarchal biases, aversion or unawareness of social justice, etc.), she has begun filling in those gaps in her own teaching and therefore providing different memories of social studies education for her students. We see the central focus of Angela’s teaching issues of social justice which she intentionally asks students to engage. She uses content, resources, and pedagogy to accomplish this goal. While students were able to recollect content that made them think about these issues, there still seemed to be a disconnect to what was and what is, especially in the lives of these two students. In other words, what they experience now, in their worlds outside of class, seemed still distant from the classroom, though certainly not as far as Angela’s own experience. For example, in Bethany’s case, issues of comfortability, of being seen as a “race student,” of being fearful for her own male family members (even now!) indicate that while she was engaged in the content of the unit, her life experiences were still disconnected from explicit interrogation or exploration within and through the content. In other words, while the content and instructional strategies used by Angela caused Bethany to think about issues of equity in deeper, real ways, those connections were made outside of Bethany’s classroom. In Thomas’ case, he made connections to the plight of Emmett Till partly because, I suggest, of his proximity in age to the fallen child. While this connection is important and can be useful, it was 132 not explicitly extracted within the unit of study itself. Thomas recognized the value of being able to discuss these important issues in class and was comfortable in doing so, but was not able to elucidate any occasion in which his own experience, perhaps even his own fears of being a young African American male, were explored in his social studies classroom. In this way, we continue to see a hurdle, a roadblock preventing this social studies education from taking advantage of the potential power that an investigation of memory and experience could tap. Much like Angela’s own memories revealed about her own experience as a student, there seems to be something instinctively wrong about the world in which we live now, but it was difficult for Angela to integrate that sense into the curriculum at hand. Angela does provide a climate for such interrogation but perhaps not all the tools nor the opportunities to use these individual memories of experience in intentional ways, or better put, as the terrain in which to bring meaning to and response for them. Progress has been made, no doubt, in Angela’s practice from the limitations she remembers of her own experience, but more can be done to further integrate memories and experiences of students themselves into and through the content at hand. The content remained to some extent in a different place and a different time while what Bethany and Thomas were experiencing in their current experience was removed, something to think about and consider outside of their social studies classes. Our second participant offers insight into what it might look like if student experience was a driving force in curriculum development itself. 133 ADAM Memories of Social Studies Adam is a white male who has been teaching 16 years. He went to high school in a small rural district where he was one of 95 that graduated in his class. It was predominantly a bedroom community with a somewhat wealthy, all-white student body. Adam’s memories of his high school social studies education were very stereotypical and traditional: To be honest, we read this book section and answered those questions in the book. We did word searches and colored maps. The thing I remember the most is that we had a requirement for graduation at the high school – a research paper – and it was done in government class. So, we had to write a 10-page research paper in our government class. That was the only real current thing we ever did because it seemed like in all my history classes nothing happened after WWII. That’s all we ever got to. We never discussed current events, even in my government and economics class. It was all very kind of abstract. So, social studies felt like it was a world beyond you that you never really got to go and see or touch it or interact with it very much. (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) This concept of the world beyond the classroom is similar to what participants in chapter 3 experienced and even to some degree Angela’s students. But Adam sees now that students in this small bedroom community fully expected to move out and go beyond this small town into a world for which the social studies curriculum was not preparing them. “There definitely was a sense that students couldn’t wait to get out and go beyond our town,” he said. This makes his description as social studies being removed from his current and future 134 experience even more troubling. The notion that these students would leave this tight-knit protected bubble and go out into the world should itself be a motivating force to include those outside experiences, to make the world beyond, with all its opportunities and challenges, one important for investigation when considering the future success of these students. Adam recalled his social studies experiences as anything but memorable. He remembers taking up some controversial topics in his government class: but nothing that I felt was meaningful. There would be like a 10-minute discussion of a controversial issue. But I didn’t feel the curriculum as a whole or the class as a whole was really trying to change people’s minds. It was never really transformative. (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) This becomes even more surprising in the light that some very transformational events occurred in the country during his high school education, namely the Columbine shooting and the Clinton Impeachment. The day after Columbine, Adam remembers that: kids talked about it. Of course, there were rumors about who would that be at our school and rumors of policies at the school would change. I do remember kids talking about how we were going to have metal detectors and all this stuff that never happened. (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) This fear of well-being and safety seemed very real and was memorable to Adam, but the lack of opening these fears for consideration was also memorable, indicating that his high school social studies experience was focused not on what was in front of students at the time, but rather, about pre-determined goals and objectives so entrenched in the curriculum that not even a traumatic and challenging event as a school shooting could challenge. 135 The one controversy Adam remembers addressing in high school was whether or not Truman should have ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb. This event, while interesting to consider, occurred more than 60 years before Adam and his peers were asked to take it up and had little to do with the current moment. Even when answering this question, Adam identified how the context of the school and community did little to encourage the challenging of American historical actions. He remembered that: a lot of our staff…were vets. And a lot of our students. There’s a wall right next to the gymnasium, right up for the whole community to see. It’s a huge wall of all the graduates that are currently serving in the military and there was 200-300 people up there. So, it was never overtly American exceptionalism but it’s a very pro-military town. I remember even in elementary school, the yellow ribbons on all the trees during the Gulf War and us making cookies and sending care boxes. (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) This memory of the daily reminder in his school of the righteousness and sanctity of the American military, while noble on its face, no doubt contributed to a narrow understanding of not only what to think, but how to think about American presence and actions in the world. This is one of the challenges identified by Barton and Levstik (2004), that we “enter the public sphere with deeply felt” (p. 34) beliefs that are too often, as in this case, reified by the systems and structures of public education, particularly social studies education. I want to make it clear that Adam saw and still sees these aspects of the school in which he attended as an enriching part of growing up. But it was when he went to college that he began to understand what and how he was taught social studies in high school was limiting and 136 perhaps damaging. “I was very upset and even angry,” he said, “about what I had learned [in high school] and how I learned it. That was the first time I really realized that there was a politics of education.” There was nothing of Adam’s experience when he identified any shortcomings of his high school social studies experience while he was experiencing it. But again, we see here the ability of our memories to change, to remember differently, when new information or new lenses are developed and considered. It was one particular class in college that made him think differently and remember differently. Adam had a Native American professor who presented the content from a much different perspective, one that was the exact opposite of European culture. So, learning the history through a different lens, in different novels, basically just flipping the viewpoint. Instead of Westward expansion, it was Eastern invasion. That was the first professor that did that for me and then others built on top of that. (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) In this way, Adam was presented with a different way to think about social studies in a new light, realizing that there was not a single narrative that acted as the authority of our shared experience. This challenge to his conventional conception of our history, one that had been cultivated in both explicit and implicit ways during his high school experience, began to unravel. Memories of Teacher Preparation It was following this challenge to his historical understandings as well as his subsequent teacher preparation classes that Adam “realized education was a political decision made by an individual teacher or as society as a whole.” While he did find some value in his first teaching methods course, learning skills that he still draws on today, specifically the “rule of thirds” and 137 “love and logic” type of discipline, there was little instruction on how to challenge the historical narrative that Adam was now interested in doing. During his first social studies methods course, Adam remembers observing a 10th grade US history class that was taught by a “really good teacher,” but it remained a “traditional history class;” there “wasn’t really questioning. It was definitely more interesting than the classes I had – very engaging instruction. It was not to disrupt the system or not even overtly political in that sense. But it was an engaging class for sure.” Adam had not yet had a similar professor of education who challenged his thinking about teaching social studies like the Native American professor did about his understanding of history content. This would come during his full-year student-teaching internship. Adam’s internship mentor was exciting and open to changing her curriculum when a “new, cool curriculum” came out. At the time of Adam’s internship, the curriculum of choice was History Alive! “It had all these activities,” recalled Adam, “timed down to the minute. It made things engaging and there was a function to it. There wasn’t really any discussion on why we were using it, it was just cool and engaging.” Adam used some of these activities in the History Alive! curriculum during his internship experience. But there was one activity he did not use that another intern did that then became a moment of clarity for Adam. The other intern was excited to share the experience during that week’s intern seminar/methods course. Adam explained what happened this way: The activity simulated trench warfare. You turn the lights off, make them flicker, and you have the kids build and use desks to build trenches and then they throw pieces of paper at each other. You have this tape you can play that has all these war sounds to have kids understand what it’s like to be in trench warfare. So, one of the interns talked 138 about how great it was. I didn’t think anything of it. But the professor was like, ‘What are you doing?!? You’re teaching kids that war is fun. Have you served in the military? I have. Why don’t you do a project on peace and simulate a peace negotiation? (Adam, personal communication, March 27, 2020) It was this moment in Adam’s teacher preparation when he began to see an integration between how to engage and challenge content while simultaneously using instructional strategies that may best accomplish that, or rather, how not to engage in it. It was in the months that followed that Adam began to really “think about those things,” about “what you’re teaching and how you are teaching it.” In this way, Adam was using his own memories as the terrain on which to reflect on his current and future teaching practice. It was rare that Adam used language of derision in his reflections and recollections. Instead, Adam used his experiences and the analysis of his memories to move forward, to improve his understanding and application of his content knowledge and his instructional practice. In other words, there was never a feeling that his teachers knew better and should not have been teaching the way they were. Rather, Adam saw these experiences as opportunities to, when reflected upon, consider how he might do things differently based on what he had learned through the almost simultaneous challenge of his understanding of history and the teaching of it. This change in practice progressed later in his internship year and is encapsulated in his memories of showing the movie Glory to his class. His mentor teacher had always shown the movie and Adam was going to as well. But because his mentor gave him “free rein” to do what he wanted to do, something he found “comforting, but also scary sometimes,” Adam taught the movie a different way. He based his approach on what he learned in an African American 139 History class in college. Adam remembered what his professor had said about the movie, that none of the characters were real except for the white Colonel. The only movie we have about black veterans is taught through the letters of a white Colonel to his mom. This was all a white male perspective. He said, ‘Frederick Douglass’ son served in the 54th. He’s not in the movie. The first African American to get the Congressional Medal of Honor was in the 54th carrying the flag of Fort Wagner. He’s not in the movie. Most of the 54th were Northern African Americans, they were not freed slaves, like the movie makes you think.’ So, when I played the movie and brought these things up, the kids, half of them being African American, were like, ‘What?!?!’ My mentor was really supportive of it. She was like, ‘I really never thought of that stuff.’ (Adam, personal communication, April 16, 2020) In this way, we see two streams of new understandings combine in Adam’s teaching of the movie. First, his experience in historical coursework that challenged accepted versions of historic events and second, his development of a teaching disposition that desired also to challenge those narratives in his classes were brought to bear through the teaching of this movie. It is important to point out that Adam did not simply see the deficiencies in the movie and therefore sought out a different resource through which to tell a different story, rather, he chose instructional strategies that would challenge the resource itself, modeling how he (and his students) can go about challenging what they think and/or have been taught about our past. Memories of Teaching While this was the only memorable lesson Adam identified that he attempted during his internship year, we see the development of his commitment to digging into the motivations of 140 the unheard voices in his social studies classroom, making space for them and offering his students different perspectives on history and issues of the day. This carried into his teaching career as well. But there was an experience he had as a teacher, while still integrating all that he had learned in college and in his teacher preparation, still recognizing the inadequacies of his social studies education, still trying to be on the cutting edge of the profession, that shook him awake. He was participating in another university study about perspective-taking and how controversial issues are engaged in high school social studies classes. He had distributed 21 pieces of evidence which took different positions on the issue of immigration. He took two days to go over these arguments in class before students would have a class debate about the issue in his AP Government class – “the best and brightest” – as Adam called them. What happened next became a defining moment for Adam: We had the debate and none of the kids used anything from the 21 sources I gave them. They all came in with their personal stuff. It was the angriest shouting match I have seen among students – just yelling irrational thought all over the place about the issue of immigration. And I was like, ‘What am I doing? This is not what I wanted to do.’ I was just a wreck. And it was funny – this was like my 10th year teaching and I’m like, ‘What have I been doing for 10 years?’ So, it was at that moment that I was just, I have to do something totally different. (Adam, personal communication, April 16, 2020) Adam confronted his students the next day about what had happened. “They laughed and thought I was funny,” he said. “But then they did say that…we don’t really do this a lot. We came to a mutual conclusion that…it’s really nobody’s fault.” It is important that this attitude 141 and disposition towards aspects of teaching and learning can be traced from Adam’s own social studies education through his teacher preparation courses in college to his actual teaching practice. He was not taught how to do this in his social studies experiences. He had no memories to bring alongside to bring meaning or illicit meaning in this moment. Moving forward, Adam used this experience not to make judgements or simply ignore things that went wrong in his teaching, he used them to learn, to reflect on, to help shape a new, different experience. This is an example of Adam traveling to a new plane of immanence. All along, he thought what he was learning in high school was fine, until he learned that it wasn’t. He thought that he was a better teacher, both in regards to what content he engaged in and how he engaged in it. With this new knowledge that the reason his students were incapable of having the quality of discussion he had hoped was because they had never been taught how to, required Adam to think differently about his instruction – both past and present – and took Adam to a different plane of immanence. Before this experience and the reflection that followed, he thought all he had to do was give students some well selected resources and make sure they understood what the resources were saying. From there, he thought, they could then discuss the merits of the arguments made. But what was missing was the students’ beliefs that had been developed outside the curriculum, through observation of the world, through their own media consumption, through their own cultural and familial influences – in short, through their own memories. While thinking he was doing everything right, this one incident acted as a line of flight to a new plane, asking Adam to reconsider everything he had been doing for the past ten years. This new plane called for a new approach, some different disposition he wanted to develop within his students and within himself; a disposition not concerned with being right 142 or proving one’s position correct simply by “cherry-picking the resources that agree with you,” but rather one marked by openness, inquiry, and different/alternative perspective seeking and understanding. In this way, Adam recognized that the process of deliberating public issues such as these is often characterized by the limitations of experience. In his students Adam saw a lack of curiosity to see things differently, to expand their notion of the common good, to “’enter into’ their own world” (Friere, 1974, p. 137) in critical and analytical ways. He decide he need to do something different and embarked on his journey through Project Based Learning (PBL). I chose one unit that Adam teaches through the PBL model to analyze in this study. It was a unit on African American culture taught in his African American History class. One interesting aspect of the process Adam used to put together this unit was its unintentional reliance on memory to dictate what was and was not included in the unit. First, he was told by his students that they had had enough of learning about African American culture through a focus on slavery and civil rights. “Kids didn’t want to learn about civil rights or slavery,” he said. “Teach us something else,” they demanded. Adam struggled with this as he recalled teaching in a chronological way in that past that focused precisely on slavery, civil rights, and Jim Crow. “It took me a while,” he remembered, “to get this.” Adam also relied on the memories and the reflection on those memories of former students of color who not only helped him craft this unit (and class), but participated in it through videoconferencing. These former students of color shared their memories of helping to develop the curriculum of the class with the current students, which helped, according to Adam, students buy into the class. “I tell them that this curriculum is not something I bought somewhere. It’s something that kind of organically comes from students and community members.” “Now, when I have a class of African American kids,” 143 Adam said, “they realize they can ask anything they want about their own history, and they’re controlling it. It’s not a white teacher. It’s not a white textbook.” In this way, Adam considers memory in two very important ways. First, he shatters the notion there is a single shared memory of experience that is American – one that is all-encompassing and correct. He accepts that there are other lived experiences that might help explain why things are the way they are and that might, when exposed, help create a classroom experience not about what was but rather about what is. This pedagogical adjustment helps to achieve the goals of social studies education as outlined in chapter 1 by intentionally identifying the limitations of one’s experience while creating a classroom environment open to challenges and disruptions of that experience. Second, by allowing students to bring their own interests, curiosity, and lines of inquiry to their work, he centers the memories of these students’ experiences in the curricular investigations. As you will see, while some lines of inquiry students develop Adam can predict, others are new to him, requiring him to learn, reflect, and support original investigations. This unit of instruction, entitled “Black-ish” is Adam’s second in his African American history class. The unit follows an introductory unit that asks students to practice analyzing history from a different perspective. Adam recognized early on that this is something “they struggle with. They don’t know how to do history through a different viewpoint. So, that’s hard for them.” To practice this, Adam and his class explored the history of Christopher Columbus through the eyes of Native Americans. This sounds very similar to the Native American history professor that Adam had that referred to Western Expansion as the Eastern Invasion. Once this introductory activity is completed, the first full unit of this class is entitled “Black History Matters” and sets the foundational understanding with his students that Adam is not the expert 144 here, but simply a resource. He even engages his students in a class discussion on the question “What do I need to know about African Americans to teach African American History?” While this question may seem a good way to get students to interact on a more authentic level, it is an indication of Adam’s newfound understanding that students have had, are having, and will continue to have different experiences in his classroom and in the world that he might not be familiar. Additionally, I find this such a powerful question that can be adapted as an introductory conversation to have with any student while digging into individual memories. Why not ask, what do I need to know about you to teach you history? In this way, memory and individual student identities become the terrain for any investigation, centering the process of individual becoming. In this first unit, students practice the process of PBL by being given the outlines for an end of unit project. They then identify what they already know about the topic and then develop questions, called what I need to know questions. These questions, fully student-created, are designed to help students complete the project. Adam then creates (or usually already possesses the material and resources) to answer the need to know questions students create. That instruction usually leads to more need to know questions until students determine on their own that they are ready to work on their self-identified projects which answer a main, overarching question. In the Black-ish unit, the main question is “How can you honor a culture?” and is described this way: Within this unit we are studying the controversy of African American culture being exploited in our society. For example, we have looked at current examples of cultural 145 appropriation of African Americans. You are being asked to address this problem by studying African American history and educate society on this issue. Products of student learning included research where students identify how African American culture is “emulated, integrated, or rejected” in the areas of art, music, film, fashion, politics, etc., while identifying how these examples have been appropriated. Students then are asked to explain how African American history has confronted and/or challenged that appropriation. Students are also asked to create a 90 second public service announcement about combatting cultural appropriation that will be shared with individuals in the school and community. As mentioned above, Adam has developed several lessons/activities in preparation for anticipated students’ need to know questions. They include one on what cultural appropriation is, what are the characteristics of African American culture around food, art, music, sports, religion, fashion, and even language, including how aspects of these have been integrated and/or appropriated into the general culture. One example of a prepared lesson is on African American cuisine. In the planning of this activity, Adam relied on the input from previous students to help him approach it in a productive way. Adam wanted to explore how a traditional soul food diet of “fried chicken, collard greens, southern cuisine with a lot of butter” was not healthy. After conferring with his former students of color, they told him that “you can’t go and tell kids who are bombarded that their culture is bad that this is bad too. It needs to be refined.” Instead, recognizing and respecting the memories of these former students, who knew what it is like to suffer the focus on deficiency of people like them and the culture in which they are/were embedded, they 146 developed an investigation into how things like cuisine were culturally appropriated and used in efforts to stereotype. Through this lens, Adam explains that “the kids learn that laws were passed that…newly freed slaves could not own pigs or cattle. They were only allowed to own chickens. So that is why chicken is such a big part of the African American cuisine.” In addition, Adam helps students see other historical antecedents to aspects of African American culture today. For example, in his discussion on fashion, he talks about how one thread of a different color could help individualize slaves’ clothing; that the intersection of religion made Sunday Dress an important aspect of African American culture; that fashion and hair style became an ideological statement during the “Black is Beautiful” movement; and that the wearing of hoodies became an important act of solidarity after the Trayvon Martin murder. Through all of this, Adam is intentionally seeking to inform his students about why things are the way they are for them, today, fully integrating and counting on students to bring their own experiences, their own memories, to the investigation at hand, allowing for their lives outside of school to be used in their experience inside his classroom. In this way, it is important to pay close attention not to specific content that students remember, but rather, how they bring meaning to their own experience and how the class itself impacts students’ understandings of their past experiences as well as informs their future. Student Created Memories Heather is an African American female and a junior in high school. Unlike most participants, Heather has some clear memories about content in social studies classrooms before high school. She remembers learning about the different branches of government in fourth grade because “it was a really interesting part of history for me.” She remembers 147 learning about different aspects of world history from sixth grade, especially the Aztecs and how “these other civilizations and all these other countries and…culture was different from ours. That was really interesting.” She also remembered learning about Zeus’ rock baby in seventh grade. Heather mentioned that she thinks she remembers these specific things because she found them all personally interesting. But then Heather talks about how her own identity became an important aspect and context for her learning. “As I have gotten older,” she said: as I started learning more about history, as our history lessons got deeper, I took an interest in African American history. How we developed, how we got to where we are now. That really took a huge role in my life because I’m African American. So, I did enjoy learning about my heritage. But I also liked going a little bit deeper and learning how certain things came to be and how certain ideas came to be. (Heather, personal communication, June 2, 2020) Heather clearly describes here how and why specific social studies content can be interesting and memorable by connecting it to the lives of students. Beyond her natural curiosity, what was clear to her was her own interest in understanding not only the what of her heritage, but the forces shaping her own culture and identity were formed that were too often ignored in her early social studies education. Jada’s experience in Adam’s classes and in social studies in general was very similar to that of Heather’s. Jada is an African American female and is a senior in high school. Jada has memories about race that go back to her elementary years. She remembers changing schools and recognizing there were others who looked like her. “I’ve done this throughout, since I was 148 little up until now – whenever I step into anywhere I count how many people [of color] are in the room.” Jada did have memories of content though. She told of learning about Thanksgiving in her elementary classes. Jada’s grandmother was part Native American from the Blackfoot tribe so when in first grade students were told to make a pilgrim or Native American hat, Jada said that: I remember I wanted to be an Indian so badly – and my teacher told me I couldn’t. I remember making the pilgrim hat and I hated it completely. I think we ran out of materials or whatever. So, I started crying. I don’t even think at the time I knew why I didn’t want to make that hat. (Jada, personal communication, May 29, 2020) This missed opportunity to take advantage of Jada’s personal experience, her individual memories, and her own process of becoming and identity formation, which left a mark on her. She saw, much like Heather, that there was a disconnect between what she experienced inside and outside of her classroom. In this case, it was extreme by asking Jada to reject her own heritage or at least not celebrate it. In Adam’s class, Heather’s identity development continued. Much like Adam’s own disruptive experience (which took place in college), we see Heather’s questioning of social studies content taking place much sooner under the direction of Adam. She talked about how in Adam’s class “we learned about so many other people, people I didn’t even know existed. We learned about events that I didn’t even know happened. It definitely made me think of why we didn’t learn about these people way back in sixth grade and seventh grade.” In this way, Heather begins to use her memories as targets for her analysis, trying to make sense of not the 149 what of her social studies education, but why she was taught this and not that. She mentioned that most of her teachers were white males and maybe “just don’t know” about these things. She mentioned talking about things like lynching in her U.S. History classes but that, “to be honest, I do feel a little uncomfortable” when talking about these things in class. She said she felt uncomfortable “because in my mind I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, are they looking at me?’ Like are they staring at me? It was just a little uncomfortable to talk about what my ancestors had to go through. I just fell out of place at that moment.” Jada quickly connected her past social studies experiences to Adam’s class as well: “We did a lesson about Christopher Columbus and how he really was, the part they don’t show in textbooks, and we had a discussion about how should we show the trauma he caused the Indians.” This interrogation of her past educational experiences is another example of how Adam uses memory as a place of investigation, as the location through which we can make meaning of things in our lives today; to help understand why we are the way we are now. We see in this case Jada using new information she learned in Adam’s class to interrogate her memories of her elementary socials studies to inform each other. This circling around, from past to present and back again, reveals how memory can be a powerful tool and context through which to do this work. Heather did remember talking about current events in classes, but she characterized their investigation as very superficial. She described how she talked about these events differently inside and outside of classrooms. “I definitely talk about [them] outside of school,” she said, “I talk to my friends about it because a lot of my friends, they’re just like me, they’re really passionate about this kind of stuff.” A clear disconnect is apparent in how Heather talks 150 about what she learned and discussed at school and what she talked about at home. “For example,” she said: When we talked about lynching of African Americans, we always were taught the reason behind it was because they weren’t doing their job correctly. But when I got home, it was – I’m not saying that the teachers were wrong – but my father and my parents, they really went deeper with it. It wasn’t because they were doing their job wrong, it was merely, just simply the person, the master, they didn’t like them or different reasons. And they talked about that the lynching was a private event. But come to find out, it was done in front of families, their friends, it was done in front of everyone, the people, the town. So, it was definitely a difference in what they told us and what we were not taught. [I’m] not saying they were lying to us, but they didn’t really go in as deep as I thought they should. (Heather, personal communication, June 2, 2020) The first initial response that any history teacher might make here is a defense of Heather’s teachers and they might doubt her characterization of how her teachers took up lynching. But that would miss the point. The fact is that Heather has this memory of the experience, and that she quite clearly understands a difference in how this topic is discussed in class and how it is discussed at home. This becomes even more apparent in Heather’s memories of Black History Month celebrations at her school and church. Heather shared her concern about the lack of awareness in her school about Black History Month by describing it as “kind of normal, you know, when they don’t talk about black rights, when they don’t talk about Black History Month. It’s kind of normal. I expect them not to. I feel if you have black students, then black activism and justice…needs to be talk about it.” I 151 noticed a complete sea change of Heather’s demeanor when I asked her about other, perhaps more supportive efforts to celebrate Black History Month. She talked of what her church does as “amazing. I love it. We do a lot of things. We actually have a whole black history program. This year our black history program was huge. It was incredible.” She talked of dance performances, of doing a skit, of a living wax museum where members of the church dress up as historic figures and tell the story of their character when prompted. It does not take much of an imagination to see these same activities taking place in a high school history class, but in Heather’s experience, the contrast between her life outside of school and what occurs in her school is stark. Her memories of Adam’s class were a little different. While most of her high school social studies classes were predominantly white, her African American History class was mostly black, with only 5 or 6 white students. Heather “definitely” said there was a difference in the class just because of this demographic change. “I felt more freedom to express my ideas about black history or black culture,” she said. “In most of my other classes, I was kind of afraid to share my ideas because I didn’t want to offend anyone. I didn’t want the teacher to yell at me and say ‘you can’t talk.’ I didn’t want to make people feel uncomfortable with my ideas so I just really didn’t say anything.” This recollection of fear is similar to that of Bethany in Angela’s class above. Not only fear of being wrong, but a fear of being scolded, censored, and shunned. It was unclear where this fear came from and Heather was unable to express any specific memories of this occurring, but yet, the memory persists. But Heather’s fear was assuaged in Adam’s class, “I just felt free to share my ideas. And most of the time, people agreed with me, so that was a huge pick me up.” 152 She noticed this in her fellow students as well, remembering one of her friends would “share a lot of things about what she thought about black history and black culture. She’s really quiet in our other class so when we got to African American History class, I was like, ‘wow! You talk a lot.’” In contrast, she remembers the few white students in the class being “extremely quiet. They never really said anything. The white students sat in a corner all by themselves and they never said anything at all actually.” I can’t help but remember my own experience and the experiences of many teachers who were concerned that the opposite took place, where a group of students of color would sit together and not participate in class. Heather was able to express and show great empathy as to what these white students may have been thinking and feeling. She said, “when we were talking about how white people treated black people, I did catch some of their faces sometimes and they did look like they were uncomfortable. I kind of feel bad for them because I know how it feels to be in a room with people who do not look like you and they’re talking about something that your people did or your people’s experience. I definitely knew how they felt.” Jada recognized the similar dynamic at play in Adam’s class. “It seemed like everybody in the class was a lot more comfortable,” she said. “It was kind of funny because on other classes a lot of the white kids speak and then the black kids just set off to the side. It’s like the black kids would kind of like cower or not be as comfortable to speak their opinions. In [Adam’s] class, all of the African American students were talking all the time and then like the two or three white kids that were in the classroom were just like silent or you barely noticed them when they were there.” Jada showed some empathy while trying to explain this: “I think they might have been a little bit scared to voice their opinion. I think they wanted to learn, but 153 they didn’t want to be vocal about their learning because they didn’t want to seem like they were stepping out of line or they were trying to speak on African American experiences.” Jada recognized the impact of this different dynamic by observing that her fellow students “were engaging more and they were more inclined to do work” for Adam’s class while in other classes “they didn’t really pay attention or they didn’t really try.” Jada attributes this to the content being “our identity” and therefore naturally enlivened engagement. In Adam’s class, Heather remember two specific aspects of the curriculum described above that stuck with her. First, her memories of cultural appropriation and her understandings of language and fashion. What is different in these cases, however, and most strikingly with her exploration of language and Ebonics, was how her experiences and memories outside of class were informed by and considered through the lens of her in-class experience. “I didn’t really know about Ebonics,” she said, “and the different dialects we use. I did bring it up to [my dad’s] attention” asking “when you’re talking to me and the church he talked different, but when you go pay a bill or when you talk to a consumer, you sound like a different person.” This connection to and seeking understanding of those around her and the lives she actually lives has helped Heather “more aware of things around me and just different black issues. It was just a whole new experience for me.” One of the biggest impact’s Adam’s class had on Jada concerned her future. Before Adam’s class, Jada was going to go to college at a state university. But in Adam’s class, she learned about “how HBCUs gave them the groundwork to do great things” and this new exposure convinced Jada to commit to attend an HBCU the following year. She also mentioned how the discussion about African American dress and fashion impact her. “When we were 154 talking about Christianity and Sunday’s best dress, everybody was super engaged. They’re like ‘Oh, my granny wears that.’” In a broader sense, Jada said that “everything we see on a daily basis was brought into the classroom and we could relate to it more.” Such is the case and the very purpose of memory. It is called forth to bring and illicit meaning. Anything outside of this is artificial. GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES It is interesting to look at both how these teacher participants’ own social studies experiences may or may not have accomplished the goals of social studies examined in this study: the ability to interrogate content in critical ways, asking questions about why this content and how its engagement confines and discloses understandings that may inform or reify understandings and dispositions regarding issues of social justice. To be sure, in both the cases of Angela and Adam, they shared no memories of their K12 social studies experience that could be construed to show these goals were addressed during their time as students. In fact, through their more informed memories recalled via the acquired lenses of analysis through teacher preparation and teaching experience, it is clear that they both now find things lacking from that experience. For example, Angela did not recall engagement in areas of justice even during her teacher preparation while in contrast, in Adam’s case, he began to see during his teacher preparation there were deficiencies not only in what he knew about social studies content, but how he thought about it, revealing that those limited understandings had real consequences. What was most striking about Angela’s and Adam’s memories and their description of them is that they highlighted how new understandings and experiences led them to a different 155 plane of immanence from which they could reflect and remember their once fondly thought of pasts in more critical ways. They began to interrogate the content which they engaged and the content which was omitted, both coming to conclusions that what they experienced was not adequate to fully accomplish the goals of social studies, namely, to “make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” (NCSS, n.p.). This process of interrogation resulted in an opening up of their content caused by this recognition. It is interesting that Adam’s moment of realization came when his students did not practice a social studies committed to expanding notions of what and who comprises the common/public and therefore how the common/public good can be better served. Instead, his students displayed narrow, close-minded, and personal understandings of which Barton and Levstik (2004) warned us. The resulting units and lessons analyzed above revealed moments when, as Segall (1999) suggests, students helped “produce” (p. 366) knowledge rather than simply acting as receivers of new information. From the start, Adam relied on student input to inform him on what he needed to know to teach them the content of African American history. Angela too sought out ways to incorporate student experience in developing conceptions of empathy and equity. In these ways, both Angela and Adam sought to expand even their own notions of who and what are welcomed into the “public squares” (Parker, 2003, p. 11), even into their own classrooms, thereby modeling how this might process might be used by students in the present and future. In addition, both Angela and Adam welcomed students’ recollections of personal experience, helping students bring to their present moment some foundational understandings, 156 created in the past, that might help them understand why they are the way they are and why they experience the world the way they do. By “’entering into’ their own world” (Friere, 1974, p. 137) in this way, student memories (of their grandma or of Sunday church) became the site of analysis. Using newly acquired social studies content, students themselves entered a new plane of immanence from which they could remember differently and in the process make sense of their pasts and presents. CONCLUSION It is clear that both Angela and Adam bring not only everything they see on a daily basis, but what they have seen and experienced in their past social studies experiences to their classroom and curriculum. Angela has attempted to fill the gap she has recognized through her own personal development that her social studies experience as a student did little to address issues of social justice and even contributed to her internalizing her perceptions of what a girl and woman should be and act like. The changes she has made to her teaching practice has resulted in the creation of new memories bringing issues of race and racial experience to the fore, however, these practices still left room for students to center their own experience in conjunction with the content. In Adam’s case, his recognition that he did not learn nor did he teach dispositions he now finds essential to the study of social studies (i.e., questioning, discussion) propelled a change in his practice, one that now centers students’ lives, experiences, and memories as the terrain on which to critically analyze both our collective and individual pasts, has revealed the memories of his students are vastly different from that of his own social studies education. In this way, both Angela and Adam have shown that social studies teachers can, through intentional and unintentional ways, use their analyzed and reflected on 157 memories to create new memories for their students that are more just and concerned about issues of social justice and of equity. In this way, social studies teachers who did not experience this type of liberating social studies experience, can use their new plane of immanence to remember differently, more intentionally, and to subsequently change their practice so to disrupt the cycle of mis- and/or non-understandings that have causes inequities to linger and reify. 158 Chapter 5: Eventive Irrealis Memories In chapter 3, where memories of past social studies educational experiences were pulled alongside each other, participants showed that memories of social studies education were indeed embedded within their psyche and that they were able to reflect upon and make them useful when asked. Their memories aligned to some extent to the memories I had of teaching them during those same moments, suggesting that social studies educative experiences can be crafted in such a way as to be experienced and eventually remembered in intentional and useful ways. More importantly, the process of remembering social studies educational experiences exposed memories of absence or omission, instances when memories of social studies education could have been useful as participants confronted aspects of their lifeworld experiences far beyond the place and time of their social studies classes. The identification of these gaps in social studies education further offers evidence of the power memory and remembering differently could possess. When employed as the terrain of investigation, memory can, through consideration of the commission or omission of pedagogical acts, help us understand the long-term, real-world impact and utility of social studies education. In chapter 4, teachers of social studies education were able to make their memories useful in their own understanding of the content they teach and the way in which they engage(d) with that content with their students and for what purpose. This process of bringing alongside past memories with present experience provided insight into how memories (and the process of remembering) can be made useful in the current moment. In this process, participant teachers were able to fill-in memories of omission, areas in which their own social studies memories were lacking, and in turn create different memories for their own students. In 159 other words, the memories their own students created, at least in the short term, were not only different from those of their teachers, but more useful in the present moment than the memories the teacher participants had of their own experience. In this way, memory was made useful in two important ways. First, it served as the content for critical reflection allowing teacher participants to alter and adjust their own practice in the face of the gaps they identified in their own social studies experiences; and second, they were able to create more critical memories of social studies in their own students. Rather than simply hoping that engagement with content will create useful memories and impact the process of student becoming as I did in chapter 3, both Angela and Adam brought forth and engaged in content and with individual student experiences, to different degrees, to further embolden and enliven their curriculum for their students. In the previous two chapters, I asked participants to bring alongside the memories of past social studies education to their present experience. These memories were real – or at least real as perceived by those remembering. In this chapter, we look to memories that have yet to be formed, seeking to identify how taking up and considering imagined future memories of students might influence how we think of our practice in the present. In more precise terms, this chapter addresses this question: can social studies teachers create pedagogical experiences that lead to different planes of immanence from which, upon critical reflection, our pasts can be re-examined and re-imagined so that they inform our present and future in a more critically just way? It can be said that we are, all of us, a particular conglomeration of not only all the experiences which have brought us to this moment, but also that we have been shaped by the 160 real consequences of those events and by how we remember them. If one remembers only in a particular way – in traumatic, joyous, or even privileged ways, might we eschew the learning potential a re-examination of an event and of how and why it’s remembered in a particular way might embody? In other words, could a more open, critical process of remembering offer new insights into what potentials re-examining our pasts might offer? MEMORIES-TO-BE To help further this understanding and to unlock the potential of seeking to create useful memories-to-be, I reach forward and bring backwards, alongside the present, memories that have yet to be formed. To help accomplish this, I adapt the linguistic concepts of realis and irrealis moods to the process of remembering. Andre Aciman (2021) describes irrealis moods as “a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen” (p.3). Realis moods, on the other hand, are described through perceived statements of fact of events known to have happened (realis mood). In this way, the term realis memories refer to those memories of events that have already happened, no matter how faulty our recollection of them might be. They are memories of real events with real descriptors often easily accessible by the one remembering. As we think about memories yet to be, I introduce a focus on irrealis memories – memories that have not yet been formed, may never be formed, but are desired to be formed. In more specific terms, I call on the consideration of the eventive irrealis memories, ones that are desired to be created but are dependent on certain conditions. 161 An eventive irrealis memory may be expressed in this way: “I would probably possess a disposition of social justice if…” In this statement, “if” becomes the operative word. It is in that two-letter word that all that happens in a social studies classroom occurs and which is bound up in eternal potential. The question then that remains is can we develop more just, socially minded former students in the years to come, experiencing the world on a variety of paths as they live their own individual lives, if we as social studies teachers elicit not obscure, distanced content but, rather, use as the terrain of investigation the very realis memories that influence and shape our understanding of and experience in the world? In other words, might the development of critical dispositions of remembering influence our ways of being in the world today (and in the past)? Through pedagogical strategies, memories of personal experiences can be interrogated in such a way that two things become likelier: one, that the memory itself becomes useful and productive, making the experience, regardless of the actual outcome in reality (the realis memory) educative, making it essential in the process of eternal return; and second, a new and different dispositional way of being with the self – past, present, and future – is developed and nurtured, ensuring a long-term impact regardless of what events might shape the life yet to be lived. In this way, the skills and dispositions developed in social studies education through the consideration of memory, can be long-lasting and themselves memorable. MEMORIES OF SOCIAL STUDIES The participant pool in this part of the study were all future social studies teachers, at the time, seniors at a large, Midwest university, who had just completed their first year-long social studies methods course. Before investigating the role of memory and its potential for the 162 future, I asked them about their own memories of social studies education, bringing alongside their present experience of learning to teach social studies with the realis memories of their past. Not surprisingly, many of them had positive memories of their social studies classes which most likely influenced their chosen future profession. Participant data was collected through written surveys followed by virtual interviews with five participants to gather more in-depth data. Common refrains describing the social studies education of these participants included recollections of their teachers as people whom they could “talk to,” who “were fun” and “interesting,” and had an “impact on me as a person,” helping them “wake up to the world around me.” In this way, participants recall the more affective aspects of their social studies experience – what the teacher made them feel. This kind of teacher was so memorable that these participants included these same characteristics as examples they too would like to possess as future teachers themselves. They envisioned themselves as being kind, caring, supportive and challenging teachers in the future. In this way, these acts of pedagogical commission – things teachers can do – were important memories for these participants as they developed their own teacher dispositions and identity. Even amongst these participants, however, still no content was mentioned as memorable. In fact, one fully acknowledged that they do not “recall much” content from their classes. While this has been a common theme of all the participants in this study, this revelation amongst this subgroup is particularly noteworthy. These students had recently, and simultaneously, completed university coursework in and about social studies content. They should have been aware of both the breadth and depth of the content in which social studies 163 classes engage. Yet, their current engagement in social studies content at the university level did not seem to spark any memories of its engagement in previous times in their lives. In other words, they knew the content and were actively engaged in it, but did not find their K-12 social studies experiences with it memorable. About a third of the participant pool, by contrast, described their social studies education in different ways, using terms such as “boring and dry,” “not fun or creative,” full of “PowerPoints, lectures, and 50 question multiple-choice tests.” I do not want to diminish the usefulness of these experiences. Memories like these become useful not as a model from which to pattern one’s future practice, but as a clear warning as to what path not to take. In this way, again, it is the absence or erasure of memories of engaging and interesting experiences that proves useful. In other words, as purveyors of social studies education themselves, attempting to create meaningful and memorable experiences themselves, they can now reflect on what actions, dispositions, and forms of education they participated in and then decide if those are the same memories they wish to create for their own students. Along those same lines, when asked what their social studies education lacked, every participant could identify something they wished they had spent more time on in their classes, identifying a gap in their understanding of the world they felt could have been filled through social studies education. Common identified gaps included engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexual identity. Three mentioned they wished they had spent more time on current events and/or making connections between content and the world today. One mentioned they did not spend enough time talking about the economic differences amongst people and another wished they had spent more time on the unheard voices of history. Although I could 164 not ascertain if these participants as a whole were aware of these omissions while their education was taking place, in follow-up interviews with five participants, it became clear that at times they were aware of these gaps. Faith, a white female participant, remembered how excited a world history teacher was when she taught about a woman. “That always stuck with me,” Faith said, when the teacher talked of “when she CAN talk about a woman. I have always wondered what is stopping her? Why can’t she talk more about women?” Faith never got an answer to that question but the observation itself, at the time and now years later, speaks to a gendered norm within social studies education that her teacher was both elucidating and now one Faith is struggling to combat as she selects content and resources with which to engage her students. Whose experience to center, whether it be male, female, or some other voice, became a theme in Faith’s recollections. She did remember moments when student experience was centered in the classroom in a pedagogically productive way. In her mostly Christian school, Muslim students, for example, were invited to give a talk and answer questions about their faith. “I remember one girl,” Faith recalled, “who was extremely excited to have the opportunity” to talk about “why she chose to wear the hijab.” This personalization of curriculum was a far cry from Faith’s description of her own engagement with social studies, referring to the latter as more likely being in the “abstract.” In this same way, Taylor, another female white participant, described her teachers as “very confined” in their curriculum, stating that we “just like memorized Supreme Court cases” leaving her “pretty bored.” Matt, a white male participant talked about his social studies classes and teachers in a very positive light, but upon reflecting on them in the current moment, he admitted “looking back now, if you’re trying 165 to get students to think critically and learn a skill or something – what he was doing was literally just reciting facts…memorize and regurgitate.” I want to emphasize what Matt is doing here because of its value in the process of remembering. He is able, through his heartfelt commendation of his teachers’ kindness and generosity and his critical analysis of their pedagogical shortcomings, to remember in a more useful way. The ability to recognize that memories can be more than one thing - in fact, that they are loaded with nuance and complexity - allows for simultaneous and often contradictory understandings and memories to exist. For Matt, it is perfectly acceptable to think of his past teachers as “good” teachers because of his memories of being personally connected to and supported by them. But he can now also, through his new lenses and skills as a future teacher, recognize they might not have excelled in inciting higher-level critical thinking. These multiple memories should not (and cannot) be separated. Rather, they must be taken as a whole as we seek greater depth of understanding (this will be developed more below). What is also noteworthy here is what challenges the participants identified resulted from these omissions in their social studies experience. In this process, these future teachers brought these memories of past social studies education alongside their current experience of learning to teach and were able to explain what social studies could have accomplished. They not only identified how these experiences impacted who they are today and how they interact(ed) with the world, but how these memories became useful in shaping how they created their understandings of their social studies teaching practice. For example, one participant admitted that their social studies education did not allow them to “think critically about my country.” One stated that the experience “stunted the growth of my worldview.” 166 Much like the participants in chapter 3, we see here future social studies teachers recognizing that there was more to the world than the bubble that was their social studies classroom which often ignored aspects of life with which they would subsequently be confronted. Another participant “didn’t see the point” in studying social studies at all at the time he was studying it as it made no connection to their lives. Several others recalled similar experiences, explaining how they had to “do more investigating” or “fill in the gaps” on their own. This effort to gird the social studies classroom experience with outside work is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, but the overarching challenge here - a social studies classroom blind to the present moment and unwilling or unable to take up student questions and interests – is what seems to demand consideration. In other words, to these participants, content was so far in the past to be made useful and no attempt to bring it alongside the current experience was made to try to make it so. Even more problematic, another stated that they “just assumed that the history being taught was the only history that mattered,” while another remembered that their experience “reinforced in my mind that the only important things have been done by white men.” While this clarity did not come until years later, it was the leaving out the more unheard voices and taking up issues of justice – the omission of it if you will – that became a lasting and useful memory. In that vein, one participant stated that this experience of remembering “made me think critically about why we didn’t learn more about” issues of social justice. In short, as participants drilled down deeper, and reflected more on their experience, they exposed an understanding that social studies education could have made a difference in how they understand and experience the world, something that was not evident to them at the time. 167 However, the process revealed that there is an answer to Faith’s query about why her teacher could not teach about more women. It was ingrained in the structure and system of how they were taught social studies now housed in the realis memories of that experience. Through these memories, participants revealed how their own memories of social studies education, if not challenged and disrupted, seemed similar to my early teaching approach described in chapter 3 and Angela and Adam’s teacher preparation outlined in chapter 4. The question that remains is has these participants’ teacher preparation, additional education, lifeworld experiences, and analysis of student memories challenged and disrupted their more traditional pedagogical experience in a way that has changed their trajectory moving forward; do they now reside on a new plane of immanence from which to judge and reflect on their own practice in such a way so as to imagine a future more in line with the goals of social studies education? CONNECTING PAST AND FUTURE MEMORIES To this point, this study has focused on a memory of “remanence…of something that has vanished and left no trace of itself but that, like a missing limb, continues to exert its presence” (Acimen, 2021, p. 41). In this way, I have mined the memories of the past and traced their usefulness to show how memories of social studies education were and are useful in the lives of past social studies students and in the development of teaching dispositions and practice. What comes next is a memory of “imminence…of something that has not even come into being yet and still is working its way to the surface, into the future” (p. 41). At this point in the study, I asked the participants (all future social studies teachers) to review the data from my former students explored in chapter 3. I asked these participants what they learned from 168 reviewing those memories. A plurality recognized, as has been noted previously, the lack of memories regarding specific social studies content. There was widespread recognition that social studies education taught through only the exploration of the facts of past events was/is not impactful in the future lives of students. Michael’s realization of this surfaced in a subsequent interview when he commented, “I was looking at the nation’s report card and I think 15 percent of kids actually know U.S. History so maybe it’s not the worst to change what we’re focused on.” Matt suggested in his interview that “I feel like in history, there’s just so many little tiny details and like little facts – remember this treaty or this court. I mean, you can fill up a test with all types of just regurgitating information and I don’t think that does anything. But skills and dispositions, those it seems to me are what…students really took away.” Michael, whose memory of social studies education was one marked by multiple choice tests and lecture was/is struggling with how this change in focus might look in his classroom. “At the beginning of th[is] year,” he said: I was like I don’t know how you can connect history to character things but if you think about it, history is like literally everything that’s ever happened before this moment so it’s like you can teach so many life lessons about what people have actually done or what people didn’t do. And you can apply principles. Like I was thinking about there was this dichotomy between being aggressive and being reckless. In the Civil War, there was Stonewall Jackson who was very aggressive and then you could make an argument that Lee became too reckless and got beat at Gettysburg. So, there’s stuff like that that you can do and then in the process you’re teaching content. (Matt, personal communication, May 8, 2020) 169 What Michael proposes here is a future strategy that challenges the very nature of the linear notion of time and of history. He mused “It would be kind of interesting to see what would happen if you focus your attention on trying to develop a concrete set of skills or character traits you think are timeless and you can adapt.” This deliberate consideration of skills and character traits as being timeless is an important development in how Michael thought about his practice. He now shows signs of recognizing that simply knowing factual information is not an acceptable end, but rather, the development of understanding and developing ways of being in the world, in this case, reckless or aggressive, and teasing out the implications of both through social studies content would be more productive. I then asked participants what they would like their future students’ memories to be. Or, better put, if the first start of this study was done 25 years from now, how would they hope their students would respond. Taylor suggested that I guess you would want to teach them to be adaptable. It’s important to teach that ability to change, to be flexible and accommodating, and to accept that it might stay crazy and that things might get less crazy…but it’s important to look at the past history and see things are always changing and they’ll change in the future. (Taylor, personal communication, May 5, 2020) Rebecca, along a similar line, suggested that “we can help each other through navigating uncertainty” explaining that “in times of uncertainty and crisis, we have to develop ways to ask for help and express our emotional needs.” In both of these imaginaries we see two future teachers looking forward, towards a future unknown, considering what skills and dispositions will be needed to deal with the 170 uncertainty and change that face us today and no doubt will be confront us in the future while still recognizing the influence of the past. This change in mindset, away from only considering how do we make sense of the past to now include how might we be better prepared to make sense of the unknown future, exposes the potential usefulness of the consideration of memories, both realis and more importantly, eventive irrealis, during the process of teaching and learning and in learning to teach. In more specific and operational ways, participants recognized how absent memories around the study of others with different experiences than themselves provided opportunities for them to intentionally create, to expand the if conditions of eventive irrealis memories, to include investigation into how others might have had/have/will have experienced in the world. Faith envisioned her future classroom as a place where “as many viewpoints as possible [are expressed] within my class. So that…people who are in some sort of minority group or have a LGBTQ+ identity, that they feel seen and heard. I want them to feel comfortable to discuss the viewpoints and try to get as many ideas challenged and that people feel comfortable doing so.” Taylor imagined a classroom where one can “see other people’s points of views. Instead of attacking them when they have a different idea, trying to understand where their different ideas come from. It’s very easy to attack people now, but like that’s not going to get anyone anywhere.” With these desired goals, these participants seemingly recognize the confined way in which they were taught social studies, what problems and challenges that limitation provided future students, and envisioned ways in which to fill those gaps and eliminate memories of omission. 171 Two specific areas of focus that participants in this chapter drew and teased out of the data from chapter 3 take us to the discussion of what eventive irrealis memories we might seek to create if we could. First, several participants recognized the chasm between the variety of responses, nothing that “no two students think the same way about a topic.” In this way, social studies was/is/can be an “arena for individual growth and development” that “set students on a path towards shaping their own worldview.” This understanding, that each student was/is/will have a different experience even through common content, activities, and assessments is significant. The variety of the memories of these common experiences (and the subsequent usefulness of them) are contoured by the memories each student had prior to the engagement and will be shaped and will shape the future through the challenges and successes students will experience in the years to come. In other words, students are, intentionally or not, already bringing to their social studies classroom experience memories they have had to date from inside and outside the classroom walls. Some of these memories are easily visible, others may lie hidden and unexamined, but they all impact the cognitive and affective reactions to the educational experience at hand. Furthermore, the variety of lifeworld experiences participants in chapter 3 had after their social studies education called for them to bring alongside those past social studies memories to help assist in understanding the current/past moments they experienced. Oftentimes, however, as we have seen, when the call button was pressed, no memory came to mind, leaving the rememberer at worst, confused and ignorant, and at best, motivated to create new memories that assisted in understanding of the present and/or posited concerns about why no helpful memory was accessible. 172 To further elucidate how this combining of memories of the past and memories-to-be in the present moment of a classroom experience, Taylor suggested that for her future classroom I’m thinking it’d be cool to have a class where you let students tell their stories, like if they have something cool in their family’s history that happened or something cool about themselves or anything. I think that also helped create this idea of understanding. (Taylor, personal communication, May 5, 2020) Rebecca noted that she would like to “front load” this type of work and “maybe put content on the back burner a little bit. Maybe taking time to do little personal interviews with students.” Taylor told the story of a friend of hers in high school from Lithuania who, whenever a topic of Eastern Europe or the Cold War came up, she was allowed to speak to it, revealing a “special claim” on that history. I suggest that this notion of a special claim on the telling of a history is not confined by space or time, but rather is encapsulated in the full and complete lives of each student. In other words, each student has a special claim on their own histories, on their own memories, and that, as these teachers are beginning to understand, provided them a special claim – something of value – to add to the process of teaching and learning. Much like Adam’s question to his students in chapter 4 about what he needs to know about them to teach them African American history, this special claim on the self, manifested in the memories those experiences have left open for examination, provide a rich bounty on which to draw. Understanding that memories have formed/will form and contour and in turn be contoured by the experiences of each individual self is an important consideration when thinking about how the memories created today might shape and bring meaning to each future experience. 173 Perhaps teaching and learning social studies cannot achieve these lofty goals. Perhaps the mission we are charged with does not include developing and/or changing these lifelong dispositions. Not so, say these participants. They recognized in the memories of social studies students in chapter 3 that social studies can “help students develop democratic and egalitarian values that are more holistic and long-lasting,” developing dispositions that deal more with “thinking independently and thinking critically,” explaining “how and why the world works” by teaching “life lessons” that can be used “every day”. In this vein, one participant recognized that social studies had/has a “larger impact on students than I previously thought.” It must be noted though that this realization came about not through the elucidation of content knowledge through test scores or the review of well-written essays, but rather through the interrogation of memories of those experiences, showing once again the value and usefulness of memories and the process of remembering. GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES First and foremost, this group of participants who were about to embark on the endeavor to teach social studies content, identified a memory concerning content; this is important. It reveals, I suggest, an engagement “about the past itself” where they as students were “receivers of information” were provided “what to think” (Segall, 1999, pp. 366-7). In fact, some descriptions of their engagement (“boring and dry;” full of “PowerPoints, lectures, and 50 multiple-choice test) give credence to the notion that they experience that form of social studies education. But the gaps in their own education, now visible in the process of remembering differently, through pedagogical and equity lenses, inform their present and future teacher practice. This process of remembering (of surfacing and analyzing their own 174 memories and those of the participants in Part I of this study) seemed to bring some new perceived weighty responsibility to these pre-service teachers’ conceptions of the value of social studies education. Much like Goodwin and Genor (2008) found in their own work with autobiographical narratives, this study revealed that “each person comes to teaching with preconceptions that need to be consciously examined and deliberately disturbed” (p. 202). As these participants “disturbed” their memories, they began to see how their memories of experience had confined their conceptions of the common/public whose good social studies is supposed to advance. In short, they realized how “their relations to with the world become impregnated with consequence” (Friere, 1974, p. 4). As these participants looked toward to their future as social studies teachers, they did not see the answer in a deeper, more detailed engagement with content, but rather a commitment to developing skills and dispositions that would allow for a more equitable and applicable way of being in the world. In this way, they viewed social studies as a venture that helps “make sense of the past from the present” and one that “encourages the openness of possibilities” (Segall, 1999. p. 366). As they described their imagined future practice, they talked of being “adaptable,” “flexible,” and “help[ing] each other through navigating uncertainty.” They also noted the desire to create classrooms where “as many viewpoints as possible are expressed” and a place to get “ideas challenged.” By doing this, they are seeking to expand the notion of who makes up the public and how memories of the varied experiences that comprise it are worthy – even necessary – to explore if we are to further advance the goals of social studies education. 175 CONCLUSION As these prospective teachers reflected on the memories they would like to create – the eventive irrealis memories–new understandings gleaned from the memories of others was clear. These participants’ imagined future eventive irrealis memories created in their future classrooms solely focused on these dispositions and ways of being in the world that had nothing to do with social studies content. They conjectured that their future social studies classrooms should be about a “safe place [for students] to be themselves” with an engaging classroom environment, one where students felt like “they had a voice” and saw “themselves represented,” they also talked of instilling in their future students, dispositions and ways of thinking that went beyond content. “I want them to remember me for challenging them to think for themselves,” said one. Another responded that “I want them to be curious and relentless learners.” Certainly, these hoped-for memories move far beyond the rote goals of content knowledge regurgitation, but expose a failing that too often limits social studies education. In fact, when asked what dispositions they want their future students to develop, Matt suggested I want to say just simple things like compassion and empathy and like trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and just treat everyone how you want to be treated. Learning about history, there’s so much bad stuff that happens – so much killing and violence and just people doing things that you know would be considered unethical or immoral. (Matt, personal communication, May 8, 2020) Several participants mentioned that they wanted students to have learned “something valuable that they can carry with them beyond the classroom” or “used outside of the 176 classroom.” I find this distinction both heartening and disappointing. While they want to see their classroom as a place for students to be themselves and for their voices to be heard, they also wanted the skills and dispositions being developed to be applicable to things outside of the classroom. In this sense, there remains a distinction between the two worlds, as if the lives students (and teachers) lead outside the classroom and the experience they have inside are somehow bifurcated. This, I suggest, is a false division that does not exist nor can exist when thinking of experience through a lens of Deluezian immanence. One cannot engage in a classroom experience without the memories of outside the classroom seeping in. Nor can one experience outside of the classroom without memories of the classroom leaking out. Immanence is, in short, total. Delueze’s (1997) answer to “What is immanence?” was simply “a life” (p. 28). “A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through,” (p. 29) he wrote, “it doesn’t just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness” (p. 29). To that end, a life is comprised of the past, present, and future and therefore memories of the past and the memories-to-be, if not considered equally, also fall victim to the consequences of the manufactured division between what occurs inside and outside the classroom. But considering what we experience(d) in the past, present, and future through memories of those experiences allows a unique plane of immanence from which to assess and reflect. Through this process, social studies education is no longer confined to an analysis of the past, or even an examination of the current moment, but rather, it becomes a discipline for the future, whatever it may hold. 177 Chapter 6 – Discussion: Bringing the past, present and future together As the three disparate parts of this study were both informative and enlightening on their own, I will bring them together in conversation in this chapter. In this way, the division between memories of the past, present and future can also be blurred, seeking a greater understanding of the usefulness and utility of memory and in line with the theoretical framework as offered by Deleuze and Bergson. In this study, while the present must be the center of this investigation, I sought to bring past memories alongside the present in chapter 3 to identify the long-term memories of social studies education and how they have been made useful. Then, in chapter 4, similar past memories were brought alongside the present to better see the implications of memories, and more especially, the power or remembering differently, on social studies teaching, learning and teacher preparation. Finally, in chapter 5, through the analysis of memories of social studies education and how they could be made useful, I sought to apprehend memories-to-be (eventive irrealis memories) by first imagining them, then bringing them backwards alongside the present experience of learning to teach social studies to inform future practice. In this way, past and future memories, mingled together, seeking meaning and utility, illuminated aspects of experience that both proved fertile for individual development and for more general understandings that will explored below. ALIGNMENT WITH GOALS OF SOCIAL STUDIES Instructively, it is not a coincidence that the goals of social studies, and the corresponding skills and dispositions that acknowledge the lack of consensus of whose interests make up the common good, can also be applied to the analysis of its memories. In other words, as we seek to create public squares of discourse that welcome all perspectives, we must be 178 concerned and attuned to the “ways of story-ing the past we have chosen to call our own” (Segall, 1999, p. 366) both collectively, and now as this study suggests, individually as well. Goodwin and Genor (2008) have shown that “all aspects of one’s autobiography have rich potential for analysis” (p. 202). This study builds on this notion as participants, in their reflection of their social studies memories, revealed gaps in their social studies education that if “deliberately disturbed” (p. 202) could have exposed the “contradictions, nuances, tensions, and complexities” (Cochran-Smith, 2002, p. 158) in these experiences. These more challenging aspects of memory resulting from a process of remembering differently empowered the student participants in Part II of this study, for example, to “become aware of their manner of acquiring knowledge” and helped them to “realize the need of knowing even more” (Friere, 1974, p. 137). The acknowledgement that there was something outside of their own experience, or better put, structural socio/political/economic forces, helped explain why they have the memories they have. This same process challenged the teacher participants to recognize that the memories of their own social studies experiences and of their teacher preparation also did not meet the demands of the present moment, and therefore required an “’entering into’ of the previous understandings which may have been arrived at naively” (p. 137). In both cases, participants sought to expand their understanding of whose experiences (and therefore memories) were open for investigation, moving to a new plane of immanence no longer confined by the notion that memories are “objective, scientific, and true” but rather “open to possibilities” (Segall, 1999, . 366). The process of wresting our memories of experience from the rigid construct that they are infallible and unchanging is one of liberation, but in this process, may reveal a burden that 179 even our pasts are “impregnated with consequence” (Freire, 1974, p. 4). This was most evident in the analysis and reflection of the pre-service teachers in Part III of this study. During this process, while seemingly committed to the grand notions that social studies can and should, in fact, “help young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world,” (NCSS, n.p.), they recognized the “deeply felt, potentially conflicting, conceptions of the collective future” (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 34). This recognition, I argue, led them to a new plane of immanence from which they viewed the teaching of social studies not as one simply concerned with the transference of knowledge, but one rooted firmly in developing dispositions of being in the world and with each other that would honor, respect, and invite different perspectives and viewpoints – different memories – to the public square that would be their classrooms, thereby expanding whose public/common good with which we are concerned. The investigation of individual memories and our willingness to identify its limitations then becomes an important if not essential way to break our often confined conception of human experience, to allow for the recognition and even curiosity about the disparate and equally valid perceptions that no doubt help define the public square. The various unique characteristics of memory allow for such a productive and impactful result. For example, the malleability of memory, it’s capacity to be changed, and in so doing, serve as a spring of new memories that prove insightful in how we perceive our relationship to the world, others, and even our previous selves serves as a foundation from which we can build more complex and nuanced understandings of the utility of memory in social studies education and in teaching preparation. Because of this, findings in this study suggest that memory is, in fact, a terrain on 180 which the more personal process of becoming can be embarked upon and nurtured. By including memory in our conceptions of where social studies investigations should be centered as well as how it can impact our understanding of teaching it, we might span the distance that oftentimes separates our personal experience from the practice itself. In this way too, the utility of memory can be found in its applications towards a more socially just existence, one that both engages in our experiences with issues such as race, gender, and sexual identity, but also surfaces the memories of omission that might have led us to be blind to the experience of others. It is not only identifying what we don’t know or have not experienced, but why those gaps might exist in the first place that is most telling here. To that end, while the absence of memories of specific social studies content was evident in the findings of this study, this does not disparage its importance. Rather, I discuss below how the absence of content specific memories explored in this study might call for a more robust and flexible engagement with and through social studies content. Finally, I suggest that the immersion into memories we identify and or realize we don’t have is just as equally an exploration for the future as it is about the past. The process of analysis through the lens of memory calls on imagined futures certainly contoured by our pasts, but now enlivened with a sense of optimism for how future memories could be different, created with an intentionality aimed at accomplishing the goals of social studies and, hopefully, perhaps towards a more socially just worldly experience. MEMORY IS MALLEABLE The first important revelation found throughout this study it the notion that memory is malleable, that there can rarely be a memory etched so firmly in our minds that prevents new 181 understandings derived from a line of interrogation from a different angle of analysis. We saw this in chapter 3 with students who had, more or less, memories of a social studies education that they described as positive and impactful. However, upon further investigation, the re- remembering of those experiences, especially in the light of the present moment and through lenses of social justice, revealed memories of omission that prevented understanding at subsequent future points in their lifeworld experience. In short, they were confused by events in their lives for which they were wholly unprepared. This ability to remember differently surfaced the shortcomings of their social studies education that was indeed informative. Through this analysis, participants recognized the agentic power of systems and structures embedded in their educational experience that shaped their experience, helping them form certain kinds of memories, and thereby impacting how they understood themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. As participants moved on in their lives, there were moments when additional or different social studies education and investigation could have been useful, namely around issues of race, gender, and economic struggles. This too was the case with the two teacher participants in chapter 4, who enjoyed their social studies experience as students enough to want to become teachers, but upon learning more and reflecting on their experience, realized, sometimes in dramatic ways – remember Adam’s anger when realizing how and why he was taught certain things and not taught others – that more could be done to address important issues that they now recognize plague our experience. In this way, and by using these memories for a defined, intentional purpose, these participants found utility in their memories, making the changes in their practice that were more profound and personal than what resulted in their formal teacher preparation. In other 182 words, the development of their practice was a result of analysis of their memories, and recognition that the memories were not all positive, resulting in not only a change in what they did in their classes, but I argue, changed who they were – as people and as teachers – in profound ways. They had reached a different plane of immanence from which to now remember, and the implications of what they remembered shaped who they wanted to be in the future. We saw a change of focus most pronounced in the units they teach, focused now more on issues of injustice and understanding why we don’t know what we don’t know. While both Angela and Adam still use lessons, activities, and resources they engaged in as pre-service teachers, these memories of commission seemed less impactful than instances when they recognized memories of omission, moments that they now recognized, with a more sophisticated lens, how their social studies education did not prepare them for world they would now be experiencing. Finally, the future teacher participants in chapter 5 found through the analysis of the data of Part I of this study that the content that so invigorated them was not represented in the long-lasting memories of social studies students. Rather, what they gleaned from the memories of social studies education was that utility can be found in how content was engaged and that the goals of our profession should go beyond content. In the language of eventive irrealis memories, it was the conditionality of if the content was engaged in critical, thoughtful, and useful ways that energized its memorial power. In this way, future teachers were both surprised in how impactful and long-lasting memories of social studies can be, and they seemed energized by imagining a future for social studies not confined by the content that excited them to begin with. In short, in all of these cases, I found that analysis of memories of social studies 183 education and of preparation to teach it resulted in new understandings of what actually was learned or ignored during the process. This insight, that changing memories can result in new understandings, new lenses of analysis, new planes of immanence that provide the fertilizer for development can have long-lasting implications for the teaching and learning of social studies. MEMORIES AS THE TERRAIN OF INVESTIGATION This leads to the question of how can content be engaged in useful ways, especially one where dispositions of criticality are developed that may lead to a more socially just understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live? In this way, I suggest memories were not only an exciting terrain on which to investigate this question, but one that allowed for unlimited and repetitive analyses that resulted in new understandings with each pass. For participants in chapter 3, who possessed no lens of pedagogical practice, their recollections started with explanations of how they felt about their social studies experience. In their recollections, the vast majority remembered with fondness their past experience. However, when prompted to bring these memories alongside their lifeworld experiences and to identify ways in which their social studies education left them (un)prepared for their future lives, these participants, with access to their same memories, began to identify gaps of social studies education that left them unable to find utility in them. In fact, participants shared memories of befuddlement when confronted with situations that fell outside the safe bubble that was their limited social studies experience. Through the process of remembering more intentionally, participants began to understand what the implications are when no memory is available to make sense of a present situation. This made more visible the agency of the structural and systematic forces that play a role in our processes of becoming. In chapter 3, David’s analysis of 184 his former situation as a high school student, one that was set in the context of a traditional familial structure, in a school that did not encourage nor reward questioning, illuminated ways in which he would have been unprepared to address and bring meaning to future events that confounded him. Suddenly, these moments of confusion made sense to him. He was unprepared for a reason, mainly because of how his school and social studies education maintained the bubble in which he found himself. In this way, analysis of memories helped David understand himself better. Lance and Susan found different ways to analyze their memories especially when the lifeworld experiences they encountered were not what they thought was promised to them. Lance’s struggle with racial oppression and Susan’s confusion around economic insecurity were not subjects of inquiry in their respective social studies experiences. Rather, the bubble in which they were taught reified their conclusions of an expected life of ease and happiness. Once confronted with real lifeworld challenges, however, they began to see that bubble break apart and recognized their inability to make sense of the context in which they found themselves. The future teacher participants in chapter 5 realized that students will, in fact, remember what happens in your classroom, for better or worse. This is an important recognition. Their analysis of what was actually remembered, however, shifted their gaze away from content and towards more universal, long-lasting skills and dispositions that might benefit students in the future rather than the present. Understanding that it is impossible to predict the world in which our future students will live and what situations they might encounter, they imagined a future social studies that used content as a tool to engage in the development of 185 ways of being in the world that would be adaptable and flexible, more concerned with issues of equity and understanding others than with factual knowledge. Michael, for example, went all in by imagining what a list of characteristics one could live by as an organizing factor of the content we teach. Rebecca imagined a class where this work is front-loaded, leading students to another plane of immanence that sees all subsequent engagement with content through a lens not confined by simple factual knowledge. Faith, through her recollections of student voice being centered in her experience, imagined activities and lessons that sought out more unheard voices, giving equal time to those whose experiences were unlike hers. In all of these instances, it was through the careful and thoughtful analysis of memories that brought forth these new ways of thinking. In the current teacher participants in chapter 4, this change in focus had already occurred. Both Adam and Angela, similar to participants in chapter 3, found their social studies a pleasant enough experience, but also identified gaps in what and how they were taught. For Angela, this more traditional way of teaching social studies was more difficult to escape. But in time and with the support of newly found allies, she committed herself to centering her lessons not on specific content, but on more dispositional aspects of being. Her civil rights unit, for example, emphasized empathy as a way to better understand and react to injustices of the past and present. In addition, she emphasized action and how students can and should act in the face of injustice. This is a far cry from accepting a simple regurgitation or description of aspects of the civil rights movement, for example. Instead, Angela emphasized application and utility of the content she taught, dismantling the walls that divided her content from experience – both hers and her students’. Adam had similar experiences as he was asked to think about the 186 content he taught differently (e.g., Western Expansion vs. Eastern Invasion). During his shift in thinking, it was his reflection on the memories of his own social studies experience, that angered him into thinking about his content and his pedagogy anew. His inquiry based unit on Black-ish, for example, centered mostly African American student experience (and memory) as not only the terrain of investigation, but also as the foundational understanding of the gaps he still possesses when he teaches it. His inclusion of former students to help shape his curriculum as well as his admission that he needs to know more about student experience to teach them is evident in his opening question of the unit: “What do I need to know about you to teach you African American history?” In the responses from his students during this investigation, Adam recognized that this content is no longer about him or some handed-down standards, but rather, it is about the students and their experience. In this way, Adam is already seeking to create different memories from his own as a result of how he engages in social studies content. His students do not talk about who the first African American was to hold a top government position or to invent something we all use. They instead have so internalized his class that they now talk about how they now understand why their granny might make dressing up on Sunday an important aspect of their experience or what appropriation of their culture might be driven by and result in. In this way, Adam has transformed his strategies of engagement to center and enliven experience by making it permissible to access, interrogate, and interpret differently the past and futures his students imagine. A MORE JUST MEMORY Still, the glaring memories of omission surrounding issues of equity cannot be ignored. The former student participants in chapter 3 recognized that their social studies education was 187 not sufficient to the challenges and confusion they experienced in their lifeworld experience in the years that followed nor was helpful in understanding the present moment we find ourselves. This can be easily traced to my initial unwillingness and inability to identify issues of oppression and privilege in my own life let alone in society at large. The clear connection to my own growth in this area with the change in memories of my students is a clear indication that lack of engagement in this content is damaging but also that critical engagement in them can also be beneficial. I see this as a hopeful development! Lauryn, a former student participant, mentioned that she finally felt seen in our school. But this was only after my new awareness of issues of equity opened a new plane of immanence for me. Contrast that with a Mexican America student from an earlier period self-identifying as a non-color during his educational experience. This dramatic change in student memories suggest that teaching social studies differently, with an eye towards issues of oppression and privilege, can result in students creating memories more along the line of the former rather than the latter. By doing so, the goals of social studies education, namely being aware, curious, and respectful of those who are having different experiences; expanding one’s conception of the public and common; and using the perspective of a new plane of immanence to investigate why our memories may or may not include consideration of other’s experiences can be achieved more authentically and therefore serve both sets of goals simaltaneously. For example, the teacher participants in chapter 4, while having different experiences regarding this aspect of their social studies education, developed new ways of thinking about their practice by disturbing their memories. Angela seemed to recognize from an early age her gendered experience, initially being influenced by and seeking out woman mentors who 188 empowered her, recognizing and remembering moments when male students were favored or empowered at much different levels. In fact, the patriarchal nature of educational settings became even more clear to her as she entered the teaching profession and began to navigate it with a new-found language and knowledge. She then had the ability to recognize its oppressive nature while it was occurring. To this end, Angela was able to engage in issues of equity and begin to dismantle the systems of which she and countless others have been victim. Adam had made little effort during his educational experience to understand why he was taught the things he was but nevertheless was able to move beyond that and use his memories of experience to help fill the gaps he now recognized in his past social studies education and teacher preparation. By doing so, Adam intentionally found ways to learn and include new aspects of his understanding of the world into his classes and change how he engaged in them. Both Adam and Angela did not find their teacher preparation useful in preparing them for considering the issues of equity and justice in their classrooms. While the future teacher participants in chapter 5 have begun to identify these issues as a desired focal point of their instruction, I found little evidence that they fault their social studies education in not engaging in it. It can be imagined that these participants are similar to Adam and Angela at the same point in their teacher preparation. At that time, neither seemed driven by this lack of engagement nor were ever asked to critically interrogate their memories in useful ways. It was their subsequent life and teaching experience that called for a full elucidation of these issues. This insight offers potential in which teacher preparation can be more intentional about such an investigation which will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. However, it is important to note that these future teachers, as a result of their analysis of other people’s memories, 189 seemed more committed to a utilitarian social studies, rather than one confined solely to content. SOCIAL STUDIES CONTENT Having said that, one clear revelation of this study, across all participant pools, was the lack of memories surrounding specific social studies content and activities that made up the study of social studies. This is an important finding that deserves some further exploration. As I will discuss in the next chapter, I do not want to diminish the need for a fluency and depth of knowledge of the content we teach. In fact, I argue that the lack of memories of specific content counterintuitively speaks to its importance. However, it must be noted that content that is distanced from student experience, will, no doubt, clamor for relevance. That relevance can be found, I argue, through its connection with memories of lifeworld experiences that shape the way in which students, teachers, and all of us interact with each other and the world. The hope that memory work and the finding that content was not memorable actual speaks to content’s importance, stems from the memories of current high school students of the teacher participants in chapter 4. While not too far removed in linear temporal terms from the engagement in the content, these participants remember more of the content and activities they encountered in Adam’s and Angela’s classes than did any other participant pool. While some of this can be attributed to their recent engagement, I argue that the content itself spoke to these participants in ways that other pools of participants were not exposed. In other words, the fact that memories of common activities were remembered (e.g. the cartoon depicting equity vs. equality, the Empathy Museum, the racist memorabilia) indicate an appreciation of the lives and experiences of students more than more traditional, distanced content 190 engagement. In this way, content was made memorable because it was useful in the lives of students and they found utility in and through it. Consider how Jada’s experience as an elementary student, being forced to build a pilgrim hat instead of a Native American representation, challenged her own burgeoning identity. Contrast that with her expressions of relief when, in Adam’s class, she was able to speak more freely about her identity and her opinions. Part of this new-found freedom can be traced to how the racial make-up of the class itself, with students recognizing almost a reversal in roles between white and students of color, invigorated engagement. Memories of experience centered in the lives and histories of students of color led to memory analysis itself, as Heather began to ask after learning about people she had not even heard of “why we didn’t learn about these people way back in sixth grade and seventh grade?” This identification of memories of omission led to an understanding that how and what students have been taught, both white students and students of color, has shaped our respective identities in a forceful way. That as a result, more work must be done to both dismantle the traditional way in which content is engaged and rebuilt in such a way as to recognize the varied experiences – and memories of those experiences – that aid in and drive our processes of becoming. To that end, I contend that content knowledge, is therefore most important in this process of re-thinking how social studies content is engaged. In other words, depth and breadth of content knowledge makes opportunities for critical engagement more likely and numerous. The more knowledgeable a pedagogue is, the more paths she can blaze through it. In other words, it is in the vastness of the knowledge where numerous paths of investigation can be 191 forged. Exploration into further and unknown outposts are made possible by traversing more and more knowledge. In this way, the content of any social studies class can be more enlivened by a more critical and deep understanding of it. In the same vein, if increased content knowledge and agility allows for more creative and interesting explorations of it, so too is the case in the analysis of the memories of previous experiences. As the dispositions to question, reflect on, and disturb is practiced through collective memories, the same lens of analysis can simultaneously be aimed at individual memories, not only of social studies education and teacher preparation (by teachers and teachers to be) but also of worldly experiences in general (by all). All this speaks to what increased content knowledge can enable for social studies teachers. This flexibility to maximize social studies content for more powerful, impactful, and yes, memorable experiences requires first a thorough understanding of content before one can consider how it might be approached differently, in more nuanced and complex ways. In this way, I suggest the absence of memories of specific social studies content to be a call for a more, not less, thorough understanding of it. The better one understands content, the more malleable it can become as it is applied to the mission of bringing meaning to the present and beyond. This ability to make content flexible and adaptive to the present moment and to the individual students in each of their present moments in a particular classroom setting attempts to make the process of learning as useful as it can be. David Perkins (1995) calls this “generative knowledge…that does not just sit there but functions richly in people’s lives to help them understand and deal with the world” (p. 5). If one’s knowledge of content, especially that of a 192 teacher, is more rigid, interpreted and understood in only a single way, than its ability to be sculpted for use in the moment and beyond is limited. To think that we can learn only one settled thing from any historical event or civics concept is a limiting understanding that gives greater agency of the distanced past and content removed from the present experience. This distancing moves us further away from the memories that shape our identity and guide our paths through the world in a more structured way. It asks that no matter what path you are on, it is now time to move to this path and follow these directions and get to the pre-determined goal someone else has already set. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as a tracing (p. 12), a reproducible journey that can be repeated time and time again. Its success determined by how many travelers get to the end point, ignoring the journey itself. Perkins (1995) refers to this as “fragile knowledge” or knowledge that “students do not remember, understand, or use actively” (p 20). This type of knowledge is what is embodied in content and is reflective of their lack of being memorable to the participants of this study. Instead of a tracing, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) ask us to consider the metaphor of a map. We might think of a map as fixed and rigid like a tracing, but a cursory review of historic maps reveals their ability – their requirement – to change. In fact, you may have taught in a classroom with outdated maps that no longer accurately reflected the state of the world today. In this way: the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a 193 wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (p. 12) If we begin to consider social studies content as a map, requiring modification with each pass through the content, the importance of a more nuanced, complex, and critical understanding of the terrain – the actual content – becomes evident. The implications to social studies teaching and teacher education here are dramatic. A deeper and broader understanding of content, especially those voices who can be heard only by venturing down heretofore unexplored paths that may be missing from existing maps, will allow more and different opportunities to bring meaning from the past to the present. No longer can we be confined to the notion there is only one path through topics as disparate as the Industrial Revolution and voting rights and no longer can we ignore how our previous experiences, and our memories of them, light up or extinguish the guide lamps that lead our way forward from the brightly lit paths of the past. A MEMORY FOR THE FUTURE Finally, I was encouraged by how memories shared throughout this study did not appear static, rigid, or even nostalgic upon analysis. In fact, during data collection, I found participants employing the process of remembering as a tool that might lead to greater understanding for themselves rather than for the purposes of the study. In other words, I did not sense the retelling, or even the telling for the first time, of these memories to be simply a regurgitation of stories participants had told over and over again and would repeat into the future with the same plot and details preserved. For the participants in chapter 3, I found them remembering alongside me and alongside our shared present experience, thinking and reflecting, but moving ever forward, to make sense of the respective worlds which we all found ourselves. Some of 194 these experiences were shared (living through a pandemic, racial strife, economic uncertainty, political intrigue, etc.), but I found each participant struggling to make sense of these present moments in their own, particular and individualized ways. Susan, who worked at an internet provider, was struck with the importance of providing internet access to students who could not afford it as they continued through Covid19 mandated virtual learning. Lance was concerned with the future of his employees and was committed to their sustainability. David, who lives in Washington, D.C., while not directly connected with public protests going on there, was keen on discussing the events and state of his community. And finally, Lauryn, who talked about her recent engagement with public discourse and her active involvement in protest movements, spoke about her reluctance to get involved before. In all of these cases, participants set their memories and analysis of them in the present moment and beyond, thinking not only of their implications as a student so many years ago, but rather, what their recollections might mean for their future understandings and actions. In this way, the critical analysis of memory was not simply a recollection of facts, but became an opportunity, as their memories become more sophisticated, to think about their becoming anew, both with an eye towards where they came from, but also to where they were going. Another example of this was revealed by Jada, a student in Adam’s classes, who was excited to tell me about her future as much as her past. Through Adam’s exploration of the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Jada re-thought what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and changed her college of choice to an HBCU that she will be attending in the fall. In this way, social studies education was able to fill in a gap – a memory of omission – 195 with content whose engagement would not guarantee a new way of thinking or a new imagined future, but opened up an opportunity for one to take hold. I am most hopeful from the responses of the future teachers in chapter 5’s participant pool on how memory work can inform and even inspire the future. Matt’s clear affinity towards his social studies teachers and his unquestioning acceptance of the value of his experience was, through a deeper more critical analysis of his memories of those experiences, disrupted. As he saw value in teaching social studies a different way, one that valued diversity and a focus not solely on content but on understanding the present moment and beyond, he made a clear differentiation between how and what he was taught and how and what he wants to teach. In this process, there was no malice or regret, simply a greater appreciation for what he is now able to see, for his new plane of immanence with which to interrogate his past, using this new understanding to inform, hopefully, his future. Ingvar (1985) suggests as much through his work in imagined futures. He posits that “concepts about the future, like memories of past events, offer important insights into the adaptive nature of human cognition” (p. 128). As the future teachers of chapter 5 recognized, they cannot possibly know what new challenges their future students will face over the next 20-30 years. But they know that, from experience, they will not be the same as today. Perhaps their present experience of learning to teach through Zoom is a stark reminder that they were never prepared for such an existence. Regardless, their common refrain represented by the words of Taylor, that a social studies that is “flexible” and “accommodating” seems a result of both the present moment and perhaps the memories of a more rigid experience from their own pasts. 196 The findings of this study suggest that individual memory work can indeed be impactful in the learning and teaching of social studies by developing similar dispositions required for a robust analysis of each. The participants herein have shed light on the transformational consequences of remembering differently, in a more critical way, to better understand themselves, the present moment, and how we move forward. In this way, several implications to teacher preparation and social studies education have surfaced but suffice it to say, that for these participants, their memories of the past – and the analysis of them - were just as vibrant and energizing as their imagined futures, suggesting that we are, in fact, never done with the past. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE The goal of this study is to show how the immersion into and investigation of individual memory can develop dispositions important to the teaching and learning of social studies. In so doing, the implications can be applied to students in their first social studies experience, those learning to teach social studies in teacher preparation programs, and to veteran teachers who have toiled in its content for years. Memory can made useful in many different situations because of its particular characteristic: that they are contoured by the multiple contexts that make us who we were, are, and want to become. Memory’s application concerns the basic building blocks of our identity and our ways of being in the world, both in and outside of the classroom. Varghese, et. al (2005, drawing on Buzzelli and Johnson (2002)), theorize the relationship between assigned identity, or that which is imposed on you by some outside force, and claimed identity, that which you help create and shape for yourself. This study did not simply seek to surface memories as an expression of experience, perceiving them as static. 197 Rather, it suggests that an active, critical process of remembering has potential, to result in different understandings of past experience altogether. Unexamined memories can assign identity to us, while memories shared in this study, ones analyzed and reflected upon, proved important during the process of instead claiming respective identities as students, teachers, and researchers. In other words, our identity and ways of being in the world are embedded in memory – and in the process of remembering. As we seek to create a social studies open to new possibilities, curious of difference, suspicious of its definitiveness, willing to be disturbed and challenged, and with an eye towards a more just future, this study has shown not only how memory can be useful in that shared process, but also how developing ways of remembering in this way can help lay a dispositional attitudinal foundation from which to accomplish these shared goals. Memory and Social Studies Lortie (1975) warned in his sociological research about teaching that memories of our educational experience and of teacher preparation become so ingrained and unexamined that they often become the foundational default plane of immanence from which many teachers rarely depart. So was the case for Angela and Adam, the participants in Chapter 4 of this study. It was only when their memories were disrupted, challenging their experiences as students and as pre-service teachers, that different paths forward emerged. For the pre-service teacher participants in Chapter 5, carefully examined memories (even those that were not their own) offered opportunities to think about their practice, to “enter into” it “critically, taking the operation as a whole, their action, and that of others on it” (Freire, 1974, p. 137) and develop 198 dispositions required of a social studies respectful of the varied vastness of our collective experience. In this way, this study highlights that memories of social studies education are indeed long-lasting, shape our ways of being in the world, and are productive terrains on which to analyze and reflect. For Angela and Adam’s students, the surfacing of individual memories through social studies content brought a more personal and authentic engagement with content. Social studies became more meaningful and at the same time, opened up students’ perceptions to the possibility that there is something more to their past selves and simultaneously beyond the self. No longer was content limited by some distant tome, uninfluenced by the context of the moment and the learner. Rather, memories of a Black History Month celebration at church, grandma’s Sunday dress, and a father’s military service acted together with content to strengthen and enliven both social studies content and individual memories, revealing each as co-equal sites of investigation. Barton and Levstik (2003) acknowledged, as we must, that people enter into the world and therefore into social studies content with “deeply felt, potentially conflicting, conceptions” (p. 34) that limit constructive deliberation. This process, no doubt, takes place naturally to some extent, but when done intentionally, through focused lines of inquiry, can accomplish more. This is, no doubt, an act of creation resulting in a new perspective, a new plane of immanence. As we begin to understand “how our choices have positioned us to act (or not act)” (Segall, 1994, p. 366), different paths we could have taken are revealed that have led us to the present moment. Still more paths forward become visible as well, paths more attuned to the variations of experience that leads to “informed and reasoned decisions” (NCSS, n.p.). 199 For teacher preparation institutions, the focus on and interrogation of student memories (of pre-service teachers and the K12 students they work with) will take practice and require an additional pedagogical lens. To be sure, for many pre- and in-service teachers, finding out what students know about specific content before engaging in the teaching of it, often reveals gaps of knowledge that then can serve as the focus for future instruction. But, if the goals of social studies are bigger and perhaps more universal than specific content items, as I suggest, it is important to help students consider what is limiting about their own worldly experience and for teachers to identify what one’s classroom practice confines. By revealing these structural forces, teachers can assist students (and themselves!) in breaking down the walls that have prevented them from seeing and appreciating where and how they and others have come to engage in or be ignorant of issues of social studies issues that could lead to a more conducive and productive deliberative discourse. Future Research If individual memory work is to hold a valuable place within our efforts to implement a social studies that asks students to engage in issues of collective concern towards shared solutions, then it must be intentionally included in the curriculum. This, I suggest, is one exciting path forward from this study. To be sure, the interrogation of memory alongside content, either in a social studies or teacher preparation classrooms, can be productive and informative, but it also requires the acceptance that there may not be a common outcome or exit point shared by all participants. In fact, it almost guarantees that there will be just as many paths away from content as there will be upon entering. The work of scholars around the concept of rhizomatic learning (Oladi, 2018; Stewart, 2015; Sellers, 2005) can help us imagine how we might conceive 200 of this learning-as-process model in lieu of preset learning targets. Building on the work of Goodwin and Genor (2008), research involving social studies and/or teacher preparation curriculum that co-centers content with memory work might illuminate powerful paths forward. While still championing knowledge and skill acquisition, memory work has shown to have influence in building dispositions that result in an expanded understanding of the world and of the self. More specifically, research investigating ways that memory work, and the skills developed in its analysis as described in this study, can help achieve the foundational goals of social studies education. In other words, could the same skills and dispositions needed to critically examine individual memories also help us to “make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world?” (NCSS, n.p.) While there is some indication from this study that this might be the case, more precise research is required to further elucidate these more specific manifestations. Finally, in reference to teacher preparation, Kissling (2014) suggest that “teacher learning begins with the entirety of teachers’ lives” (p. 82). If this is the case, should not then those entire lives, and therefore the memories that remain accessible of those lives, be at least part of the terrain on which we develop new teachers? I have suggested that there is a way to remember differently, more intentionally, even more justly. If there is utility in memory work, especially through its interrogation, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4 of this study, and in the imagining of memories-to-be (irrealis memories) as described in chapter 5, expanded research must be done to determine its reach and potential. 201 Conclusion Upon completion of this study it seems strange to me that individual memory work has not been tied to education, and social studies education specifically, in more concrete ways in the past. It was as if a new classroom experience was viewed as a way to start fresh, in spite or in ignorance of any formidable memories that no doubt shaped student (and teacher) experience. But the fact that I had not conceived of including individual memory work in my practice, even over the course of twenty-five years of teaching high school social studies, speaks to just how powerful memories of experience can be in institutionalizing practice when left unexamined and how productive they can be when they are challenged and disrupted. In my own experience, I have come to realize, through the analysis of my past practice and in fact, my entire life, that my memories were not always reliable nor did they tell the whole story. There were, in fact, systemic forces that shaped me, that gave me opportunities to create memories shut off to others, and prevented me from having more difficult memories others are too accustomed to. This study of memory has made me realize that my understanding of who I was, let alone who I want to be, requires more analysis and reflection which will never be complete. But the expanded understanding of the self conversely encourages a greater respect for the other. For if I have yet to apprehend all that memories can tell me about myself, how much more work must I do to understand the people around me? This, I think, is a good argument for memory work to occur within social studies education. As we seek to expand our notion of the public good, struggle with the meaning of good citizenship, and pry open new aspects of our collective pasts, an infusion of our own memories can help authenticate and enliven the experience. 202 In this way, social studies can have explanatory and revelatory power for all time, becoming an area of content investigation that is no doubt informed by the past, for the future. But this process includes the possibility that investigation of memories can and will change with each analysis, with each new lens, from each new plane of immanence. There are memories that are driving us and some that are holding us back; memories that have embedded themselves in our psychological milieu and some still too hidden to offer utility. However, it is the respect for the changing nature of memory that makes each past and future to be embedded with potential. Taken together, allowed to develop, called forth when demanded by the present, re-remembered or re-imagined as gaps are identified and filled, enliven memories to be not a static, intrusive concept, but rather a vibrant, varied, and vigorous process that knows no bounds or ends. The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recently spoke of how memory has been a terrain of change and development in his own life. His mother passed away from cancer when he was 11. When asked what his mother’s greatest gift to him was, his response was “dying.” Her name was Lyla. The half-life of grief is endless. But it has also been hugely productive. I didn’t want her to die, but I don’t know what I would do without the loss as being the engine of exploration, of confidence, of bravery. But the good postscript to this: Near you in Brooklyn…is a little girl who is 10 years old whose name is Lyla. My oldest daughter named her first child after my mother, and a name that was never spoken except draped in black crepe now gets spoken all the time with joy and love. (Marchese, 2021, n.p.) 203 This is an example of the potential of memory – of remembering differently. It is memory’s malleable nature that energizes it; that make it ready to help do the work of dispositional development; that allows for change and re-consideration; for a new memory of experience that helps us imagine (and re-imagine) who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. Social studies education itself is committed to nurturing similar dispositions. It seeks to use the past not as an end, but only a starting point where students and teachers can produce unique understandings about themselves (and ourselves) through content. In this way, learning is not burdened with the limitations of the past, but rather, enlivened by the potential educative power of remembering differently, of thinking anew, of bringing meaning to each fleeting present moment that marks our existence. 204 APPENDICES 205 APPENDIX A: Participant Pool I Instrument (Introduction screen) Hello all. For some of you, it has been awhile since I’ve talked to you. I have since enrolled in Michigan State’s PhD program on Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education. I am now to the last part of the program – the writing of my dissertation. I have chosen the topic of how we make memories of social studies education useful. To that end, I am writing to ask if you could fill out this survey as part of my research. (Consent Screen) Your identity will be kept anonymous and I really want you to be as critical and honest as you can be in your responses. Please print your name and date below after reading the consent form here: (include survey consent form here) (Each of these questions will be separate screen) 1. What do you remember from your social studies education? 2. How has your social studies education impacted your life since leaving school? 3. How has your life experiences impacted or changed your memories of your social studies education? 4. What would you like to have learned more about? Why do you think we didn’t take that up? 5. How were issues of power (race, gender, sexual identity, etc.) explored in your social studies classes? Was that adequate? Why or why not? 6. Anything else you would like to say: APPENDIX A: Participant Pool I Instrument 1. Where are you from? Where have you done to school? 2. What do you remember from your social studies classes in those schools? 3. What do you remember about the teachers? 4. What do you remember about the content? 5. What were those classes like? Did you like them? 6. What about the social studies class you are taking now – what has impacted you while taking it? 7. What do you think you have learned? 8. Have any memories of your past experience in social studies come up – have they been challenged? Or supported? Or ignored? 9. What do you think your teacher is trying to do in this class? 10. Is he successful? How do you know? 206 APPENDIX B: Participant Pool II Instrument For Interview One: 1. Where did you go to middle/high school? 2. What was the school like? 3. What do you remember about your social studies classes there? 4. Do you think your views and memories of your social studies education changed through your life experiences? If so, how? 5. Where did you get your college degree from? 6. What were the most memorable aspects of your teacher preparation? 7. What are the major issues facing teacher preparation that we may or may not have addressed? 8. How have your own memories and memories of social studies education impact what content you teach or don’t teach? 9. How has your own memories of social studies education impact how you teach? Do you engage in pedagogical and/or instructional strategies that you experienced as a social studies student? Do you engage in ones that are different? 10. What do you hope to achieve through your teaching? 11. How do you know if you have accomplished that? For Follow-up Interviews: 1. As a result of what we have done together, have your memories of social studies education changed? Do you see things in a different light? If so, how? 2. How has this process of remembering impacted what content you take up in your class and how you take it up? 3. Do you think the memories of your students are engaged with in your social studies classes? How so? 4. How important do you think these memories are when designing social studies curriculum? 5. Do you see any way this process of engaging in memories of social studies may improve the teaching of social studies? How? 207 APPENDIX C: Participant Pool III Instrument 1. What do you remember about your social studies education? 2. What do you think your social studies education did NOT spend enough time on? 3. What challenges did that omission cause? 4. How has that omission impacted your teacher preparation process? 5. What did you learn about the impact of social studies through the data presented? 6. What in those memories is what you would like your future students to also remember? 7. What in those memories do you NOT want your students to remember? 8. How does thinking about the future memory of social studies of your future students impact how you think about your teaching practice (what content you take up, how you take it up, etc.)? 9. 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