AMERICAN EXPRESSIONS:
THREE CASES ON CURRICULAR FORMS OF TEACHING ABOUT AMERICA IN
SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION
By
Mark Edward Helmsing

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirement
for the degree of
Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education–Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
AMERICAN EXPRESSIONS: THREE CASES OF CURRICULAR FORMS OF TEACHING
ABOUT AMERICA IN SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION
By
Mark Edward Helmsing
This dissertation presents three cases of three different high school social studies teachers and the
curricular forms through which they express different ideological constructions of America as a
contested concept in the social studies curriculum. The concept of America is read across all
three cases as a curricular text theorized through three distinct curricular forms: fantasy, myth,
and fabulation. This method of critically reading the forms of teachers’ pedagogical expressions
entails explaining characteristics of America produced discursively through their teaching. This
method also accounts for how the curricular forms in the teachers’ pedagogy work as symbolic
structures that contain various social and political anxieties and desires social studies teachers
may or may not realize are appearing in their teaching, anxieties that constitute and constrain
teachers’ expressions of America.

This dissertation is dedicated to Mrs. Matney, Mrs. Sawyers, Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Gulde, Mr.
Blythe, Mr. Skillman, Mr. Oliger, Mr. Ervin, and Mr. Clements. Thank you for the lifetime of
enjoyment you have cultivated for me in learning and teaching social studies.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is not the dissertation I envisioned doing, nor the dissertation I planned on writing. It
is, however, the dissertation I have fallen in love with and I finally understand what it means to
feel pride in one’s work and pleasure in one’s knowledge. This would not have been possible had
it not been for the encouraging phone calls Dr. Avner Segall made to me while I was teaching in
Phoenix, Arizona in 2009. Those phone calls took on many different tones, contexts, and
purposes over the last eight years, but they never wavered from their commitment to guiding me
in becoming a more critical and more thoughtful educator, researcher, writer, and person. Since
2009, Dr. Segall has been my advisor, chair, course instructor, team member, collaborator,
conference session discussant, dissertation director, comprehensive examiner, orientation leader,
doctoral program director, co-teacher, co-author, fashion critic, writing critic, life coach, annual
review evaluator, recommender, referee, reference, and guide. He has been my lodestar. We
have shared flights, meals, meetings, film screenings, book recommendations, and more. I look
forward to sharing many more exciting things with him as I continue my career in the academy.
First, I acknowledge my sincere and unyielding gratitude to my friends and family in
Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Arizona, Wyoming, and elsewhere who never relented in the
uncomfortable interrogation of when I will finish.
Secondly, I acknowledge the inadequate task of saying thank you to my mentors at
Michigan State University: Kyle Greenwalt, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Margaret Crocco, Lynn
Fendler, Suzanne Wilson, Elizabeth Heilman, Dorothea Anagnostopolous, John Metzler, Angela
Calabrese-Barton, Don Heller, and many others who made me feel welcomed, supported, and in
need of introspection when the occasion required it. This includes a special Spartan

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acknowledgement for Terry, Kristi, Karen, Amy, and the many other office administrators who
made the Department of Teacher Education the wonderful home that it was for me.
And as a Spartan, I am forever grateful for the financial support from Michigan State University
and its College of Education, the Department of Teacher Education, the Graduate School, and to
its generous donors.
Finally, I acknowledge the community of friends near and far who made my experience
as a graduate student in Michigan so memorable. I cannot begin to list every name that matters to
me, but I extend a very special acknowledgment to Claire, Jeff, Lynn, Adam S, Erin, Jon, Cassie,
Kate, Chad, Don, Elizabeth, Gerardo, Adam G, Jim, Betsy, David, Dante, Matt, Kristy, Patti, and
my friends in the Department of History, especially Michal & Alison. This gratitude for
comradery and collegiality also extends to my friends in CUFA, AERA, and other professional
networks both on and off Facebook, on which I spent far too much time when I should have been
writing this instead.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1
Prelude .............................................................................................................................................1
Contextualizing the Problem and Inquiry of the Study ...................................................................3
Reading America in Social Studies Education Research Literature ....................................3
Reading America as Curricular Form in Social Studies Education ...................................10
Overview of Chapters ....................................................................................................................13
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................16

CHAPTER 1: EPIC LESSONS: DE/CONSTRUCTING FANTASIES OF AMERICA IN
TWO HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY CLASSES ..............................................................................20
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................20
A Framework for Theorizing Fantasy in Social Studies Education .............................................22
Epic Fantasies as a Mode of Social Studies Education......................................................25
Methodological Framework & Methods of Study .........................................................................28
Contextualizing Springfield High School ..........................................................................29
Contextualizing Mr. Bauer.................................................................................................30
Contextualizing Mr. Reardon.............................................................................................31
Analyzing Findings from Two Case Studies of Classroom Instruction ........................................31
Observing Mr. Bauer’s Lesson on the Industrial Revolution ............................................32
Analysis of Mr. Bauer’s Lesson.........................................................................................36
Observing Mr. Reardon’s Lesson on the Vietnam War .....................................................38
Analysis of Mr. Reardon’s Lesson.....................................................................................41
Discussion ......................................................................................................................................43
Fantasies of Heroism..........................................................................................................43
Fantasies of Duty ...............................................................................................................45
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................47
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................50

CHAPTER 2: A CURRICULUM OF NATIONAL BELONGING: INTERROGATING MYTH
AS PEDAGOGY IN AN ELEVENTH-GRADE CIVICS CLASS ...............................................54
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................54
Purposes of the Study.........................................................................................................55
Theorizing Myth in Social Studies Education ...............................................................................57
Affirmative Engagements with Myth ................................................................................58
Critical Engagements with Myth .......................................................................................59
Studies of Myth in Social Studies Education .....................................................................60
Examples of Myth in Social Studies Curriculum ..............................................................62
Myth as a metaconcept...........................................................................................63
Methodological Framework & Methods of Study .........................................................................65
Data Collection ..................................................................................................................65
Contextualizing Oakdale High School...............................................................................67
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Contextualizing Ms. Stewart’s Civics Curriculum ............................................................68
Data Analysis .....................................................................................................................70
Analysis of Findings from Ms. Stewart’s Civics Class .................................................................71
Myth in a Lesson on National Symbols .............................................................................71
Myth in a Lesson on the Common Good ...........................................................................74
Discussion ......................................................................................................................................81
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................84
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................86

CHAPTER 3: BECOMING-AMERICAN: EXPERIENCING THE NATION THROUGH LGBT
FABULATION IN A NINTH-GRADE U.S. HISTORY CLASS ................................................92
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................92
Review of the Literature ................................................................................................................95
Theoretical Constructs ...................................................................................................................99
Becoming .........................................................................................................................100
Fabulation ........................................................................................................................103
Methods of Study .........................................................................................................................106
Contextualizing Springfield High School ........................................................................107
Contextualizing Mr. Reardon’s U.S. History Curriculum ...............................................107
Contextualizing Mr. Reardon’s Students .........................................................................109
Contextualizing the Researcher .......................................................................................110
Data Collection & Analysis .............................................................................................111
Findings from Mr. Reardon’s First Lesson ..................................................................................113
Findings from Mr. Reardon’s Second Lesson .............................................................................119
Discussion ....................................................................................................................................122
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................126
WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................128

SUMMARY .................................................................................................................................136
Review of the Study .....................................................................................................................136
Limitations of the Study...............................................................................................................138
Implications for Social Studies Education ...................................................................................141
Future Directions for this Research .............................................................................................146
WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................151

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INTRODUCTION

Prelude
If, as the National Council for the Social Studies explicitly states, one of the purposes of
social studies education is “to foster more positive relations and interactions with diverse people
within our own nation and other nations” (NCSS, 2010, p. 26), then what, exactly, does that look
like in classrooms? What does “our” nation have to do with the “relations and interactions”
(positive or otherwise) that are, as is suggested, necessary for “an understanding of civic ideals
and practices” that serve as “an essential component of education for citizenship, which is the
central purpose of the social studies” (NCSS, 2010, p. 23)? Furthermore, how is America,
perceived as a nation, in all of its fluid constructs, expressed in social studies classes aside from
the official designation it is given as a specific country whose historical narratives and
institutions should be studied? The “we” and the “our” implied in the NCSS standards are always
already inextricably bound together by America, prior to joining a class or reading a textbook, by
our very presence in the spaces bounded by borders of America (Vinson, 2001; Tupper,
Cappello, & Sevigny, 2010). For the NCSS standards, and for the teachers I studied in this
dissertation project, “America” seems to be an assumed relation, a quick explication of all the
practices subsumed within the curriculum of social studies that offer an occasion for exploring
what it means when people of a nation share markers of national identities and distinct subject
positions as political and economic citizens. When we encounter America in social studies, we
encounter not just an idealized temporal and spatial construct we are told that we share, but also
a set of fantasies and the various expressions that make these fantasies meaningful.
Musical theatre composer Jason Robert Brown (1997) uses seemingly disparate and
unrelated songs in his Off-Broadway musical Songs for a New World to stitch together a “story”
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about America across musical numbers over two acts. In Brown’s song cycle, the “new world” is
a multitude of things. It is the New World in which the United States historically emerges after
the European conquest of the continent in the song “On the Deck of a Spanish Sailing Ship,
1492.” Brown’s new world is also an abstract place located in a shifting idea of America his
characters create, inhabiting this new world once they make important decisions at major turning
points in their lives. “The Flagmaker, 1775” is one song exemplifying this inhabiting of a new
world literally and metaphorically, narrated as a story of a woman sewing a flag as a way to
work through her mourning of her husband who died fighting in the Revolutionary War. The
loosely collected narratives in this piece of experimental musical can be read as fantasies that
give each song its particular form and the theatrical production as a whole its particular shape.
What these “songs for a new world” have in common is their expression of fantasies of and for
America implicated in the whole system of this “new world” of America (as a nation, as a
society, as an idea) and how its inhabitants express different fantasies of America in the songs
they sing and the stories they tell, fantasies expressed by inhabitants of the new world and the
spectators in the audience watching the narration of this new world through song and dance.
Much like the songs that express different fantasies of America in Songs for a New World, the
stories in social studies education operate in a similar manner that I aim to explain in this
dissertation.
My dissertation collects examples from lessons of three different high school teachers I
studied in 2013. Across these lessons I examine how America as a curricular text is presented
through particular expressive forms: fantasy, myth, and fabulation. This method of critically
reading the forms of teachers’ pedagogical expressions entails explaining characteristics of
America produced discursively through their teaching. This method also accounts for how the

2

expressive forms in a teacher’s pedagogy work as symbolic structures that contain various social
and political anxieties and desires social studies teachers may or may not realize are appearing in
their teaching, anxieties that constitute and constrain teachers’ expressions of America.

Contextualizing the Problem and Inquiry of the Study
To ask if and how America is examined in the research on social studies education is too
broad of a query. Nor is it helpful to ask how America appears in the various disciplines of the
social studies as it appears everywhere and at all times. As one example, America appears in
economics education most visibly whenever capitalism and the free enterprise system are
studied. Similarly, America appears in government and civics education most often in the form
of various political institutions and practices associated with the United States. Even social
studies content that is not specifically about America per se as a specific topic indirectly and
inescapably touches upon issues about America, from the environment (Cotton, 2006) to
Hurricane Katrina (Garrett, 2011), from terrorism (Hess & Stoddard, 2007) to Asian American
internment (Camicia, 2007). These and many other topics elicit strong standpoints and feelings
about America that often define and structure the curriculum of social studies education (Biesta,
2011; Cary, 2001; DeLeon, 2008; Helfenbein, 2005; Shinew, 2001).

Reading America in the Social Studies Education Research Literature
Concepts of America emerge most often in social studies research as a particular kind of
narrative or “cultural tool” to help students make connections between the past and the present
(Barton, 2001). Wertsch (1998) identifies the “quest‐for‐freedom” narrative as a powerful shaper
of how Americans view the origins of the United States. VanSledright (2008) problematizes the

3

notion of a common American history when he asks, “what exactly does an Americanizing
narrative or (hi)story contain? How does a story become the story; that is, how is that story
authorized? How is it then promulgated” [emphasis his] (p. 110)? VanSledright maintains that
despite America’s status as a nation of immigrants, and persistent social struggles to negotiate
vast cultural differences among American citizens, what gets transmitted to students in social
studies classrooms is often an uncomplicated narrative of national development and progress.
Kim (2004) criticizes unifying narratives of U.S. history for their failure to address the
importance of multiple perspectives and interpretations in historical analysis.
Research also suggests that America often appears in social studies education as a nation
overcoming any and all obstacles on a triumphant march towards the perfect fulfillment of its
founding ideals of freedom, equality and justice. (p. 989). Epstein (2009) challenges what she
describes as the typical progressive narrative of U.S. history, where “people successfully and
relatively effortlessly challenged inequality, the government created and expanded freedom and
rights, and civil rights leaders brought equality to all” (p. 1‐2). Many teachers and students in
U.S. History courses, despite having to confront the thorny historical realities of slavery,
segregation, and discrimination, often point to the accomplishments of the Civil Rights
Movement as a signifier that racism has been extinguished once and for all (Barton & Levstik,
2004; Wills, 1996). As Kim (2004) argues, “A hallmark of triumphalist narratives is their
transformation of national vices into virtues and their citation of the putative overcoming of these
vices as proof of the nation’s dynamic progress towards the fulfillment of its creed” (p. 989).
Several researchers have argued that U.S. History textbooks typically convey an “archetype of
progress” when tackling race relations, particularly around slavery and Reconstruction (Loewen,
1995; Zimmerman, 2002).

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What poststructural perspectives have generated in the field is an unsettling of narrative
as a construct, a refutation of an objective truth about any social group’s historical experience.
Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob (1994) delineate this skeptical position:
Once there was a single narrative of national history that most Americans accepted as
part of their heritage. Now there is an increasing emphasis on the diversity of ethnic,
racial, and gender experience and a deep skepticism about whether the narrative of
America’s achievements comprises anything more than a self‐congratulatory story
masking the power of elites. (pp. 3‐4)
The implications of this approach have not been absent in social studies, nor has it been widely
adopted, either. Segall (1999) argues that critical scholars have attempted to recast the discipline
of history in ways that involve “scrutinizing the idealized version of history as a picture‐perfect
presentation of an unmediated, authorless past” (p. 358). His survey of critical practices of
historians and anthropologists who disturb the received traditions of linear narratives have
resulted in “a heightened awareness of history’s literary and creative functions” that allowed for
history and historiography to be “defined as partial, subjective, and partisan” (p. 358).
In the wake of Segall’s call to this orientation of critical history and approaches to history
education in this vein, few have provided compelling studies to illustrate such possible
enactments. His consideration of history education argues for how curriculum/pedagogy should
focus on construction—investigating how particular versions of the past came to be known,
repudiated, and recapitulated in subsequent reconstructions. In the work of den Heyer 2003,
2007, 2011, 2012), we see instances in social studies education when historical narratives are
mobilized for a type of agency derived inside the humanist subject of the student as a social
agent. Thus, not all attempts to effect a critical historical thinking in social studies show us the

5

focus is on human motivations in social studies, a focus den Heyer describes as “questions about
the relative roles played by, and interaction between, leaders, discourses and ideals, and social
movements” (2012, p. 292).
Such an approach problematizes historical assemblages and historical thinking. I aim for
my study to bring Segall’s work to bear in how students and teachers engage with America as a
historical narrative when different perspective emerge and conflict with their various subject
positions (gendered, political, economic, etc) and how such perspectives produce and violate
various dispositions and sensibilities (Barton, 1994; Chandler & McKnight, 2009; Seixas &
Clark, 2004; VanSledright, 2002). Related to the identification of narrative power of histories
within social studies education is the field’s tracking of historical consciousness or “historical
thinking” (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Seixas, 1993, 1997; Levesque, 2007; Stearns, Seixas, &
Wineburg, 2000). In this trajectory of research, America would appear as a vehicle for providing
examples of historic moments for students to puzzle through and think about using chronology,
cause and effect, propaganda, and other cognitive tools to help students take on different
historical perspectives.
I began this dissertation study by asking in what ways in different social studies courses
does the construct of America provoke students and teachers towards confrontation, exaltation,
refutation, and related actions and passions? I examined social studies teaching as a collection of
acts, statements, and stances expressed by teachers gesturing towards particular meanings of
America and what such meanings signify. What I have collected in the three articles for this
dissertation is a focused examination of desires and ideologies that each speak to different
characteristics of learning to live with(in) America.

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With the articles in this dissertation I am not referring to the traditional Marxist definition
of ideology as a false understanding awaiting to be corrected through one ‘true’ understanding
(of class, of oppression, of America, etc.) Rather, I am referring to conception of ideology that
“represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence” (Althusser,
2001, p. 109). Especially important in Althusser’s definition is the focus on representation and
the imaginary, which I understand to mean that ideology is a linguistic issue, a textual problem
or condition. This understanding moves us away from thinking of ideology as a form of mindcontrol imposed upon individuals by external powers. As ideology is bound up in language,
ideology is everywhere in our lives where we imagine and ‘fantasize’ stories: movies, songs,
locker room talk, replays of sports, red carpet chatter before award shows, religious ceremonies,
documenting family histories and traditions, in the discourses produced in schools, prisons,
national parks, historical reenactments, department stores, fashion shows, and so on.
We can therefore never access the real conditions of existence due to what Jameson
(1972) calls the “prison-house of language.” In and through language we create our ideas of
reality, as we are only able to imagine various ways in which we live out our daily lives tied as
we are to social functions expressed through values, ideas, images, and other expressions of a
reality mediated through language. In short, language is what enables us to perceive the ways in
which those real conditions are expressed and inscribed in ideology. I follow Jameson (2008) in
claiming ideology as not so much a concept as it is a problematic. While we cannot entirely
escape the ideologies in which we exist, we can, through self-reflexive thinking, reading, and
interpretation, change our relation within ideology as I suggest in this dissertation’s concluding
chapter. Out of necessity, it appears, teachers repress certain knowledges and desires of America
that expressed in their teaching that prescribes and orders their curriculum. The curriculum of

7

America in social studies education needs to be disordered if we are to perceive ideology in order
to view it, legitimate it, challenge it, to confront our expressions of America as symbolic acts.
My study attempts to follow ideology as it manifests into the forms of teachers’
pedagogies and their expressions of America. The expressive modes a teacher uses in social
studies education are tonal styles and moods that work through different themes to express ideas
of America as seemingly natural and taken-for-granted constructs. If, as Ryan (1984) argues,
“ideology makes the social world seem natural and endowed with a self-evident truth value,”
then our use in education of critical theories can show how ideology makes “the productive
operations of representation and discourse seem to be merely passive reflections of a pre-existing
reality” (pp. 33-34). One approach in doing this in educational research is particularly relevant
for social studies education and that approach is to “use the narrative raw material” of social
studies education to read “what happens when plot falls into history” or any other related
curricular form taught in social studies education (James, 1981, p. 130). In other words, when we
attempt to tell a story or impose a narrative on our curriculum, about America, for example, we
are giving it a plot, a story to be told. These narratives can cohere as master narratives that
inscribe themselves into our pedagogical expressions of America. Such expressions contain what
Jameson (1981) would call “narrative signifieds” and they require our attention and critique
because “they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective
fantasies about history and reality” (p. 34). These fantasies about the history and reality of
America may be repressed by social studies teachers, but are nonetheless expressed through their
teaching. While I wish our postmodern condition rejected grand narratives about our world and
about America as Lyotard (1984) suggests we do, and while we have seen the proliferation of
critical practices that scrutinize and interrogate many grand narratives in social studies over the

8

past many years, such grand narratives or “master narratives” inarguably continue to be shared,
shaped, told, and expressed in social studies curriculum. To confront these master narratives we
need critical practices in social studies education that read the unconscious desires and
investments of a teacher’s pedagogy to show how such desires and investments are symptomatic
of ideology in the expressive modes social studies teachers make legible, to be read to explicate
what a teacher’s pedagogical acts and expressions of America hide, silence, and repress.
Some colleagues have argued with me that “we” as teachers do not give our curricular
narratives a plot, that the narratives we teach arrive emplotted to us already enunciated in the
textbooks we use and the standards we follow and use to outline our teaching. This is true,
especially given my understanding of ideology as already there, that we are always caught up in
an ideology, inescapable from it. Further, I agree that textbooks and standards are powerful
objects that inform our teaching, that give us a script to read our teaching on the surface of what
we “do” much like we expect a lesson plan to provide a truthful script indicating we intend
explicitly to teach. However, the argument I advance in this study is tied to the different modes
the expressions of America take on in a teacher’s pedagogical performance, not to curriculum
standards, curriculum maps, textbooks, or teaching resources with the exceptions of certain
instructional materials a teacher uses explicitly during direct teaching for the entire class of
students present. I attend to the style of the teachers’ narrations, the rhetorical and semantic
devices that operate in their teaching, the ideas that are always partially expressed and held in
tension by the different modes through which the teachers express America from seemingly
neutral stances.
Yet no social studies teacher, nor my position as a researcher of social studies teaching,
can be neutral to the effects of any established meanings we encounter. We cannot pretend to

9

situate ourselves outside of the ideological positions that are effected by social studies education.
However, the content of our fantasies, of our pedagogical expressions, and the particular modes
they use, should be regarded as simultaneously empowering and disempowering. They work as
strategies of containment working to store and call forth certain explanations, suppressing
underlying contradictions that sometimes manifest when in conflict with clashing viewpoints
(most often elicited from students’ comments, questions, and response to their teachers). For
Jameson (1981), a strategy of containment is “a representational structure which allows the
individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities”
(p. 30). The representational structures I examine in this dissertation are the fantasies circulating
in social studies teaching encountered in the expressive mode to the pedagogy of social studies
teachers. My analytic move is to uncover and unsettle the ideological content a teacher’s
pedagogy attempts to contain in the form of our fantasies.

Reading America as Curricular Form in Social Studies Education
My overarching argument that I have been building thus far is that the more decisive
ideological aspect of social studies education is the particular form of its pedagogical and
curricular expression, not its particular pedagogical and curricular content (especially the content
found in textbooks and standards). I propose that examining expressive forms of a teacher’s
pedagogical practice can shift our attention to how social studies teachers constitute the objects
of their pedagogy, which in this dissertation study are particular fantasies about America. To
think in this way requires a particular method of reading curriculum and pedagogy not as distinct
objects, but as expressions to be read that make certain readings of the world and of ideas
possible. How I go about this interpretive act is just one among many possible approaches to

10

critical reading, critical theory, and, by extension, critical pedagogy. As Segall (2002) implies
“there is no one, single, authorized text of any phenomenon…from which to start one’s
(different) reading; no agreed-on version on which to base one’s investigation” (p. 8). The
expressions I identify in this study are ones that appeared to me not only through the processes of
coding I employed to find emerging themes, but also ones that I felt to be of crucial significance,
samples I curated to exhibit and explain. They are by no means generalizable nor final. They are
examples that allow me to construct a theory of the narrative forms that give shape to the
American expressions in social studies teaching.
The title of this dissertation uses the word expression in multiple ways. One way to think
about expressions is to consider particular phrases of speech or colloquial sayings that expresses
a particular, often localized, meaning. When learning Standard American English, one would
encounters learning a wide array of idiomatic figures of speech and expressions, ranging from
“as American as apple pie” to “the land of the free.” These statements express particular
understandings as a form of linguistic shorthand. A second way to approach expressions is in the
way they are extensions of our internal thoughts and desires. Our expressions give form to our
particular views, thoughts, and feelings, which can include facial expressions, expressions of
good faith or bad faith, expressions of condolence, grief, gratitude, and so forth. One can assume
such expressions are unproblematically given, with clear intentions laid bare, but such
expressions can be misinterpreted, misunderstood, and received if far different ways than
expected. A third way to think about expressions is to consider them as semiotic constructs. A
work of art, music, literature, film, and other cultural texts express some idea, feeling, or state of
being. The Statue of Liberty can be said to express particular ideas associated with freedom,
prosperity, and equality. In this sense expressions are a vehicle containing possible meanings of

11

an idea, appearing in a way to make such definitions external or visible. Expressions, in this
sense, are the opposite of impressions, which are internalizations of particular definitions and
ideas. Consider the concept of expressions as found in algebra. Algebraic expressions do not
include equal signs to declaratively correspond a value; they are only phrases constructed of
variables, constants, symbols, and signs, not the whole sentence that an equation presents. As
such, algebraic expressions show something, but only through their particular combination of
signs, symbols, and numbers. In a similar way, “American expressions” order and organize
various signs, symbols, and sensations of people, places, and society.
These three ways of approaching expressions (American or otherwise) relate in some way
or another to the way I approach the concept of expressions as particular signs that indicate,
invite, and signal a possible world for us to inhabit. For Deleuze (1990) expressions are always
explanations the Self attempts to provide of the Other. Expressions are created through our
attempt to give shape or form to a particular world or a particular “out there.” When explaining
how facial expressions work, Deleuze suggests “a frightened countenance is the expression of a
frightening possible world, or of something frightening in the world–something I do not yet see”
(p. 346). The reason we do not yet see this world as expressed to us is because it only exists
within the expression itself. Whatever sense, idea, or signification an expression attempts to
make intelligible, the expression “implicates it, envelops it as something else” (p. 307). For
Deleuze and other poststructuralist thinkers, the world can only exist in its expressions. Thus,
for, Derrida (1997) there is nothing that is non-textual as everything is mediated through text.
For Deleuze there is nothing that is non-expressive as everything is mediated through
expressions. Expressions explicate possible worlds that always implicate their observers, which
allows Deleuze (1990) to explain expressions as the moment when attributes we attribute to a

12

particular thing are qualified because no one thing can have its own pure, eternal, transcendental
essence. In this vein of thought, America consists of infinite attributes that can have infinite
expressions, but, as such, America only exists as a collection of attributes, substances, and,
affections. By carefully considering the expressions of social studies education’s content we can
be attuned to its construction, one of the hallmarks of poststructuralist theory and the ways such
theories demand attention to how meaning and understanding is constructed through language.
Any meaning of “America” is always mediated and evidence or traces of such construction is in
the expressions of America we observe, learn, reproduce, disseminate, and teach, expressions
that contain attributes, and affections of particular ideological fantasies as I explained earlier.
I demonstrate in the following chapter how different expressions of America are
produced with pedagogical indications and signals, such as the intonations, gestures, signposts,
highlights, emphases, deflections, inflections, and other expressive maneuvers a teacher makes
during each pedagogical act. This requires reading the pedagogy of a teacher for its formal,
rhetorical, and linguistic conventions and characteristics. The different expressive forms social
studies express in the narrative constructions of their teaching contain a complex set of
ideological influences or fantasies. I read each teacher’s fantasies of America as an index of their
concerns, feelings, fears, desires, and anxieties of America. We are able to “read” such aspects of
a teacher’s pedagogy–or any ideation–by “construing its expressions in terms of the activities
that sustain them” (Geertz, 1973, p. 152).

Overview of Chapters
The sheer immensity of this study, and the dizzying amount of data produced from this
study, has required an uncomfortable amount of focusing, trimming, and limiting of my inquiry.

13

This dissertation focuses on analyses that I have relegated to writing up in articles for publication
in academic journals. What the three manuscripts that comprise this dissertation have in common
is a focused attention on the expressive forms of three teachers in pedagogical moments I
observed in specific lessons of their teaching as an attempt to explain what these expressive
modes disclose in terms of the teachers’ fantasies about America.
To examine these fantasies about America at work in the expressive forms of social
studies teachers’ pedagogies, I follow Jackson & Mazzei (2012) who “think with theory” in
qualitative research, using the practice of “plugging in” theoretical concepts to turn on, uncover,
spotlight, and diffract the findings from a semester of daily observations in three high school
social studies classrooms. In the first of these three manuscripts (Chapter 1), I think with theories
of fantasy to read a lesson on the Industrial Revolution in Mr. Bauer’s world history class and a
lesson on the Vietnam War in Mr. Reardon’s U.S. history class. I intend to submit this
manuscript as an article for review in the Journal of Curriculum Studies. In the second
manuscript (Chapter 2), I think with theories of myth to read two lessons in Mrs. Stewart’s
eleventh-grade civics class. I describe the curriculum Mrs. Stewart teaches as a curriculum of
belonging and locate within her instruction instances of myth operating as a pedagogical form.
This allows me to offer concrete examples of what a mythologizing pedagogy looks like in social
studies education. I intend to submit this manuscript as an article for review in Theory &
Research in Social Education. In the third manuscript (Chapter 3) I think with Deleuze &
Guattari’s theories of fabulation and becoming to offer an alternative stance on using social
studies education classrooms as safe spaces for learning about queer history and queer life in
America. Using a lesson from Mr. Reardon’s ninth-grade U.S. history class, I describe how Mr.
Reardon employs a pedagogy of fabulation to teach students about LGBT history, in turn

14

creating his classroom into a space where becoming-American occurs in the surprising moments
in which students confront the queerness of certain narratives of LGBT history in America. This
manuscript has been published in the Journal of Social Studies Research.
In the summary that concludes this dissertation I consider the different implications my
study has for research on social studies education and for curriculum studies. After reviewing the
results and limitations of my study, I discuss implications my study has for social studies
education by way of discussing practices of othering and exceptionalism that occur across the
cases analyzed and discussed in this dissertation study. I close with some thoughts on future
directions my work and the field of social studies education can take in continued examinations
of the expressive dimensions of teachers’ pedagogical practices when teaching about America
and other contested cultural/curricular constructs in social studies education.

15

WORKS CITED

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WORKS CITED

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CHAPTER 1
EPIC LESSONS: DE/CONSTRUCTING FANTASIES OF AMERICA IN TWO HIGH
SCHOOL HISTORY CLASSES

Introduction
From the time I began teaching social studies education methods courses in the 2010s, I could
discern among some preservice teacher candidates the desires radiating from various
contemporary social movements, propelling through the conversations, animations, and
protestations of those students who wanted to make a difference with their teaching, wanted “to
do something” with their students to respond to what they perceived as a momentous social
change in their lives. The crumbling of dictatorships, uprisings grouped together as an Arab
Spring, the diffuse social spaces of the internet converging in very real ways in our lives (in and
out of schools) all were propelled by intense unconscious desires. Tamboukou (2003) sees desire
everywhere in educational settings because “education is a field par excellence for the study of
how economies of power and economies of desire produce realities” (p. 219). She supports such
a bold claim by citing Marks (1993) who suggests “desire is the central force in teaching, a force
that can be dangerous if it is not recognized and controlled but without which the language and
literature classroom is a dry and boring place” (pp. 3-4). Desire appears in social studies classes
as a spontaneous attraction to something or someone, creating an emergence of relation between
people and things. By exploring desire in subjects and in classroom spaces, we can “understand
that the construction of subjects involves a historically specific fixation of desire, brought about
by the action of social codes, and behavior towards the child” (Patton, 2000, p. 71). Teachers and
students, as subjects located within social studies education, are inseparable from the desires
tethered to ideas of America that produce American subjectivities, which makes teaching and

20

learning about America—and America in the world—a process rather than an origin of identity
and essence that is inescapably American.
One way to see desire at work in social studies education is to consider Willinsky’s
project of explaining how learning “divides the world” (1999) through the colonizing project of
education, especially geography and history, through a coupling of social desires with nationbuilding and the learning of such origin stories in schooling through narrative strategies in
history and geography education. Similarly, in a critique of the logics of area studies that relate
quite closely to the logics of social studies, Chow (2010) posits desire as that which animates
what she terms “empirical givens.” These are “facts of cultural life whose importance is
undeniable and yet whose significance is often overlooked, forgotten, and even foreclosed” (p.
xiii). Social studies education is a project thoroughly invested in the learning and teaching of
empirical givens, including ones Chow has paid special attention to in her work: the dropping of
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the American pledge of allegiance; the use of travel
films in understanding foreign cultures; and the U.S. military’s support of African Studies, Asian
Studies, etc. as academic disciplines born in the U.S. academy during the Cold War and later reappropriated as different course renderings within social studies, such as World Cultures and
Western Hemisphere Studies. For Chow, some desires that make such empirical givens so
entrenched involve the arrangement of the flow of unchecked desires that work to make the
world visible in some particular way (such as how desires structure the covers of National
Geographic magazines and pool together in the images of Discovery Channel documentaries
used in classrooms). Desires to know (about America and elsewhere) require that “the subject
must give up something of its own in order to be ‘hooked up’ with the Other, the visual field,
which is, none the less, forever beyond its grasp. No matter how successful, therefore, the

21

subject’s possession of meaning is, it is by definition both compensatory and incomplete” (p.
87). From this understanding of what desires are and how they can appear in social studies
education, we can begin to work out a theory of forms that give shape to specific desires. This
article examines one form that gives shape to desires in social studies education—fantasy.

A Framework for Theorizing Fantasy in Social Studies Education
Fantasies are the settings for our desires to play out indirectly, and they do so frequently in social
studies education. In a fantasy, we are “caught up” in a particular “sequence of images” that
represent our desires, fears, anxieties, and other forces” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1986, p. 26).
Getting caught up in the scenarios and settings that fantasies offer us engage with social studies
learning in an “as if” mode due to how a fantasy is a “sustained metaphoricity” (Riley, 2000, p.
13). This metaphorical quality of fantasy ensures that a fantasy is never entirely straightforward.
As a fantasy erupts from our unconscious desires, it changes our perceptions to and relations of
the world through its stabilizing actions.
An example of this stabilizing action is when a fantasy works to shape an identity (an
individual identity or a collective identity, such as a national identity). Pease (2009) calls this
work of fantasy in schools and other state institutions “state fantasy work” being “the dominant
structure of desire out of which U.S. citizens imagine their national identity” (p. 1). Even when
traumatic events, such as 9/11 or the Great Recession of 2007, “exceed the grasp of the available
representations from the national mythology,” leading to a temporary breakdown in the
traditional work of an existing myth, the state fantasy work of schools (and social studies in
particular) facilitates re-teaching myths in a new manner to a new situation in a way that does not
shake the social and political order “by inducing citizens to want the national order they already
have” (Pease, 2009, p. 4). Fantasy does this in how it “extracts coherence from confusion,
22

reduces multiplicity to singularity” and “enables individuals and groups to give themselves
histories” (Scott, 2011, p. 51). Fantasies thus impose order on “chaotic and contingent
occurrences” and operate in social studies education to articulate particular ideological identities.
This imposition is possible because fantasy “provides the sticky psychic glue that binds together
the elements of social and political reality (Rose, 1996, p. 4). Such fantasies are always utopic
because any time social and political realities are glued together, to extend Rose’s metaphor, it is
always in the service of imagining something different, not-yet or yet-to-come. This is especially
visible in the representations of collectivities fantasies conjure, be they collectivities in suburban
Michigan, rural Wyoming, twenty-first century America, gay pride parades, military veteran
reunions, and so on. Without such fantasies and their utopian impulses, no collective solidarity
(for better or worse) would be impossible without them.
To illustrate this point, I wish to consider the expressions at Donald Trump’s presidential
campaign rallies as particular fantasies. While I would be hesitant (if not at times accurate) to
compare the social studies classrooms I observed for this study to a Donald Trump rally, the
fantasies circulating both in social studies classrooms and in Trump rallies are utopian to the
extent that they affirm a particular collectivity. At the Trump rallies, the fantasies of the
collective compensate for all that ails it: immigration, unemployment, gay marriage, terrorism,
affirmative action, an oppressive politically correct culture. However, the fantasy of “Making
America Great Again” positions members of this collective to see their utopia as anticipatory,
not compensatory, as it anticipates (negatively and violently) a future desirable only for
un(der)employed, straight, white supremacist men and presumably few others.
The expressions of America I relate in this article all contain a symbolic support for
different ways of thinking America, not just about America, but thinking with, alongside, for,

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and against America. This is why a critique of any fantasy in social studies education is
necessary for the possibility of teachers and students to imagine a different future. What this kind
of imagining can be called is dissent as it makes possible “resistance on principle to institutional
controls” of social studies education in how it imagines “open-ended reform and change”
(Bercovitch, 1993, p. 346). To engage in this kind of thinking requires reading the modes and
contents of our fantasies in confrontational ways. Rose (2005) considers what such
confrontations with our fantasies could make possible for us to think when she asks about our
(un)willingness to question the fantasies that give identity shape:
What would happen to a political or religious identity, even the most binding, if it could
see itself as a contingent, as something that might have taken another path? Can you be
devoted to an identity–or would you be differently devoted to an identity–if you knew it
was also unsure (p. 96)?
As a partial response to Rose’s question, this article considers how such dissent could be possible
in social studies education when we invent and project new visions and new possibilities for a
future through our desires for America expresses in the fantasies of our teaching. If this results in
students refusing identifications with fantasies of America expressed in social studies education,
then it is possible that teachers could maneuver their teaching towards disarticulating a
curriculum with America as an exceptional object of study, a remapping of desires and
possibilities for many new Americas, and unsettling a political unconscious that can imagine
them in social studies education.

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Epic Fantasies as a Mode of Social Studies Education
This article examines one particular mode through which I find social studies teachers express
their curriculum: the epic mode. There are other modes at work in social studies education,
including the comic mode, romantic mode, gothic mode, grotesque mode, pastoral mode, to
name a few. The concept of mode is a concept from literary studies. Modes enable literary,
cultural, and artistic works to “collectively build a significant and orderly world around
themselves” (Miller, 1995, p. 69). The pedagogical modes through which I find social studies
educators teaching match closely to the kinds of narrative modes found in literature. These
modes endow a particular work or expressive form with particular identities and meanings
through their own “series of incidents, figures, motifs and characters” that work together to
“generate meaning according to repetition, emphasis, amplifications and other rhetorical
devices” (Wolfreys, 2004, p. 163). Modes possess “particular thematic features, moods, and
modalities of speech” (Frow, 2006, p. 65). Unlike genres, modes do not follow technical rules,
organizations, conventions, or dimensions that are often identified only by readers alert to the
workings of a particular genre. Genres are measured by whether or not their expectations are
successfully met in a particular text (Currie, 2011). The horror genre, for example, must have
some established rules governing any narrative or expression following the laws of horror as a
genre: a dark setting, an element of haunting, and some form of ruin in either spatial form (such
as a castle) or temporal form (such as a cursed family). Texts in the genre of horror tend to either
fit or exceed their generic conventions, and since the establishment of postmodern expression
and thought, genres can be upended, transgressed, or hybridized (Currie, 2011). Modes highlight,
emphasize, and establish particular tones, such as a sad tone in an elegiac mode, or an triumphant
tone in an epic mode (Fowler, 1982). Because modes are adjectival in nature they are useful for

25

discriminating and differentiating the kinds of expressions that appear in social studies
classrooms. We can identify modes in any kind of text through the styles by which texts are
modified, qualified, and thematized (Gennette, 1992). On a cultural level, modes signify
particular movements a given society or culture undergoes (Frye, 1967). These modes work as
thematic repetitions to make expressions (of America, in my study) appear universal, natural,
timeless, or given. The operative modes shaping pedagogical expressions in the two classrooms I
discuss in this article render particular constructions of America to appear factual, homogenous,
and familiar. This rendering, as I shall now explain, is in keeping with the particular mode of
fantasy expressed in the pedagogy of these two social studies teachers, that of the epic. In the
epic mode, movement is shown as a quest or a journey that a hero makes through overcoming
obstacles, challenges, and external threats.
As I demonstrate in this article, the epic mode allows one to celebrate conquest, struggle,
and heroes. Fantasies expressed in an epic mode focus on demonstrating how the historical
reverses of a given place, a given age, or a given group of people are often outweighed by an
external set of influences, either divine or predestined in nature, shaping their ambitions through
a continuous demand of commitment and self-determination in completing a journey or a quest
(Innes, 2013; Moretti, 1996). A dominant feature in epic is the how the teller of an epic, an
epicist, can speak both narratively of an event, recounting the actions and deeds of a hero or a
group externally, while also being able to project an internalized mindset that attempts to speak
for a given place, given age, or a given group of people (Damrosch, 2003; Dekker, 1987;
Dimmock, 2006, 2008; Murrin, 1980). This gives epic what Bellamy (1992) terms a “definitive”
and “self-sufficient” stance in speaking of the past, as she argues epic is a psychoanalytically
powerful “account of history” (p. 3). For Bellamy all epics work emerge from narcissism insofar

26

as they project a sense of triumph, grandeur, and success of the Self imposed upon the World.
This large-scale quality of epic allows those who tell and transmit epics to appear objective and
omniscient, the epicist sees and knows all and can thus speak on behalf of the past which is being
recounted in the epic form (Becker, 1995; Quint, 1993).
Epic is a form of fantasy well suited for styles of social studies education that teach
through celebration, commemoration, nostalgia, and heroizing. Lévesque (2008) identifies this
strand as a dominant trope in history education through how it history educators often place
“generous emphasis on the stories of national heroes and the superior moral character of the
nation” (p. 103). This emphasis is a central feature in paradigms of history education described
as “traditional” or otherwise adhering to forms of memorializing national accomplishments
through patriotism, nationalism, or, in the case of the United States, virtues of classical
republicanism (Levstik & Barton, 2008, 2011; VanSledright, 2011; Wineberg, 2001). A less
overt attention in these studies, however, is towards how history education forms such a close
affinity to narratives of heroes and triumph, to narratives of progress and victory, and especially
how such narrative construction occurs through ideological processes. This is where I see
thinking history education through the concept of fantasy as a productive maneuver.
I arrived at this hunch through a long study of ideas that structure the disciplinary field of
American Studies. As this article comes out of a larger, rather sprawling study of America as a
concept imagined in social studies education, I took a detour through American Studies literature
to see what its practitioners have said what it is we talk about when we talk about America. For
Pease (2009), when we teach and talk about America we take a “need for an idealized national
heritage” and find ways to link that need to “an epic narrative” (p. 162). What we create through
this process is a particular “idealization” thoroughly “imagined, symbolized, and supplied with

27

characters and events” (p. 162). In the canon of books at the heart of American Studies—The
American Adam (Lewis, 1955); Virgin Land (Smith, 1950); The Machine in the Garden (Marx,
1964); Errand into the Wilderness (Miller, 1956)—we can see how, throughout history,
American writers, artists, and philosophers (along with their interlocuters, school and college
educators) expresses America (rather narcissistically in keeping with the epic mode) as a “figure
of heroic innocence and vast potentialities” (Lewis, 1955, p. 1).

Methodological Framework & Methods of Study
This study is located in between the design formations of an ethnography and a case
study. Ethnographies often determine how a given culture works whereas case studies are used to
understand an issue or problem through the specific illustration of a case (Simons, 2014).
Ethnographies tend to be experiences in systematic, extensive fieldwork over a long period of
duration, often a year or more in length of time. In terms of those characteristics this study is not
an ethnographic study in such a sense as I only spent four months visiting four different teachers
in two high school twice a week, two of whom are discussed in this article. For precision, I used
the multiple case study approach advanced by Yin (2003). Creswell (2007) summarizes Yin’s
approach to case study methods as a focus “in which the investigator explores a bounded system
(a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection
involving multiple sources of information (e.g., observations, interviews, audiovisual material,
and documents and reports), and reports a case description and case-based themes [emphasis his]
(p. 73). Yin (2003) divides case study research into explanatory, exploratory, and descriptive
qualitative case studies. This is in contrast to the general approach to qualitative case studies in
education research that Merriam (1998) advocates or the argument by Stake (2005) that case

28

study research is neither a method nor a methodology, but a choice of what is to be studied. The
multiple case designs for my study allowed me to take the design of my inquiry across four
different classrooms (one of which is the focus of the analysis for this article). My aim was not to
generalize from one classroom case to the next, but to use the logic of replication to see how
ideas and ideals associated with America are expressed in different social studies classes.

Contextualizing Springfield High School
Springfield High School (S.H.S.) is the only high school in a suburban school district
located on a boundary line within the unincorporated community of Springfield and the adjacent
the large metropolitan city of Washington (pseudonym). The information pertaining to S.H.S.
reflects its demographics and available public data about the school for the 2013–2014 academic
year. S.H.S. is a Title I high school serving 1036 students in grades 9-12, 80% of whom qualify
for free or reduced lunch under federal guidelines. According to student demographic data
available for the academic year, the composition of ethnic groups of the student population is
34.4% White, 31.6% African American, 16.0% Hispanic of Any Race, 13.3% Two or More
Races, 4.4% Asian, and 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native (www.mischooldata.org). The
neighborhood of Springfield in which S.H.S. resides is illustrative of many of the distinguishing
features of an American Rust Belt community: higher than average unemployment, a mobile
student body that frequently sees shifting patterns of enrollment and un-enrollment throughout
the academic year, and a neighborhood space heavily patrolled by local police forces to guard
against high incidents of property crime and assorted violent crimes. The two teachers I studied
at S.H.S. (Mr. Bauer and Mr. Reardon) constructed a brief history of S.H.S. they recounted to me
during my first few weeks visiting the school. According to this history, S.H.S. was an integral

29

element of the Springfield community for much of its history in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It
had a homogenous zone of student enrollment entirely within the Springfield community.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the school district of the city of Washington allowed a school of
choice enrollment option for Washington residents living outside of the Springfield community
to enroll in Springfield’s public schools. Mr. Bauer and Mr. Reardon have viewed this change in
enrollment patterns negatively, feeling it creates a sense of distrust amongst students and
teachers in S.H.S. towards students from Washington who live outside of Springfield. Both
teachers claim that levels of student academic achievement began to decline broadly in the 2000s
once students from Washington began enrolling at S.H.S.

Contextualizing Mr. Bauer
During the spring 2013 semester, Mr. Bauer taught three different courses at S.H.S.,
including World History, Genocides, and The History of Me. That year marked Mr. Bauer’s 24th
year on the faculty of the school. As the coordinator of the world history curriculum, Mr. Bauer
helped lead his social studies department in transitioning from a curriculum in global studies to
the curriculum used in the current world history curriculum. He describes himself as a “selftaught historian,” having majored in sociology as an undergraduate and later pursuing teacher
certification as a non-traditional adult student returning to a university. The logic of Mr. Bauer’s
world history course, as he shared with me in an interview (Bauer, personal communication,
May 29, 2013), is to “get the students to see there is a whole lot out there besides us, that there’s
more to the story of history than what we Americans have done.” The “out there” Mr. Bauer
invites his students to consider becomes always populated with the “us. The primary goal or

30

objective in his world history course is to call attention to the exceptional nature of America: “I
want kids to understand how unique America is.”

Contextualizing Mr. Reardon.
During the spring 2013 semester, Mr. Reardon was in his ninth year as a teacher at S.H.S.
and in his twelfth year of teaching high school social studies. His specialty is teaching the U.S.
history course for ninth graders at S.H.S. Mr. Reardon’s educational background consists of
undergraduate study in history, post-baccalaureate study in history education, and graduate study
in history with a M.A in history. He identifies with a concern for “making history relevant” and
“showing all sides of history.” He describes his role within the social studies department as the
“peacekeeper” who tries to “keep the parents and admin happy while doing what’s best for the
students.”

Analyzing Findings from Two Case Studies of Classroom Instruction
In this section, I share findings from two lessons observed at Springfield High School. The first
excerpt of data describes a lesson on causes and effects of the Industrial Revolution during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Mr. Bauer’s tenth-grade world history class. The second
excerpt of data describes a lesson on the experiences of U.S. military personnel in combat during
what in the United States we call the Vietnam War, a conflict within the broader global history of
the Cold War. After sharing moments of classroom instruction observed in each class I analyze
the findings from my observations to identify dominant impressions and expressions related to
fantasies of American exceptionalism.

31

Observing Mr. Bauer’s Lesson on the Industrial Revolution
During a unit on the Industrial Revolution in his tenth-grade world history class, Mr.
Bauer focuses on three concepts that structure the entirety of the unit for his tenth-grade students:
labor, production, and manufacturing. Commencing his lesson on manufacturing, Mr. Bauer
begins by displaying three corporate logos in a PowerPoint slide on the screen in the front of the
classroom. He asks students to identify each of the three logos. Mr. Bauer commends the
students for their correct identification of the Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler logos and
informs the class these companies are collectively known as “the Big Three” automobile
manufacturers in the United States. Mr. Bauer claims that what makes these three companies so
important “is their role in symbolizing the American automobile market.” Mr. Bauer provides a
concise overview of how the Big Three companies worked in tandem to establish the United
States as the major market for the production and distribution of personal automobiles around the
world. “For most of the 20th century,” Mr. Bauer framed, “America was synonymous with the
car industry. Cars are what helped build America and the center where this all happened was
right here in Michigan.” He asks the class if this is still the case. Students spend a few minutes
quietly pondering his question until a student, Lauren, breaks the silence to suggest that after the
bailout of the automobile industry in 2009, the Big Three are “helping rebuild America.” Mr.
Bauer acknowledges Lauren’s response, writing the word “bailout” on the chalkboard. He asks
Lauren if she could say more about why the bailout is necessary for understanding how the car
industry is important to America. Lauren responds by claiming the bailout helped the Big Three
from “going out of business” and because they did not “go under” the Big Three remain
important parts of “the American economy.” Mr. Bauer uses this response to launch into a
lecture on the economics of the automobile industry. During this lecture, he offers ideas about

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how the U.S. market for buying automobiles was significantly altered in the 1980s when Asian
car manufacturers entered the market:
Mr. Bauer: We were once on top and then, suddenly, almost overnight, America starts
losing its pride and joy to Honda, Toyota, and then later Nissan and other foreign car
companies. Sure, there had already been Volkswagens and Volvos on the streets here, but
even in Michigan the Big Three started losing ground to these other companies. And, of
course, we all know what happened then.
It is not immediately spelled out what happened, although it can be inferred Mr. Bauer is
referring to the economic struggles associated with a diminished market for the Big Three,
associated with financial crises for Michigan when the Big Three began downsizing and closing
assembly factories and management offices in the state. A student, Danny, asks Mr. Bauer if he
thinks the automobile industry should have been bailed out. Considering Danny’s question for a
few seconds, Mr. Bauer responds with an ambivalent answer.
Mr. Bauer: Well, it’s not really important what I think. But I would say it’s important to
point out that America needs to diversify its economy. If in Michigan we’re only focused
on producing one thing, that’s not going to be good for us in the long run. The problem,
though, is that America has changed. And I don’t think there’s any going back to how it
once was. We’ve lost our dominance as a global economic force. So whether it’s NAFTA
or globalization or iPhones or whatever, or even our cars, it might be that America has to
rethink what we specialize in and what we export.
Nick quickly follows Mr. Bauer’s reply with a perspective that Nick attributes to his father. He
explains how his father had told Nick “manufacturing in America is dead.” Nick bemoans this
situation because, as he sees it, manufacturing is the main livelihood for many residents of the

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state. Nick points to a specific factory in town that was once a central source of employment and
middle-class advancement, but is now no longer seen as being able to support families in the
Springfield community. Nick claims “you can’t make as much money there as you could back in
the day with GM or Ford.” The alternative he offers is going to college, which leads only to
indebtedness according to Nick. Mr. Bauer agrees with Nick and issues a cautionary comment
about debt. Mr. Bauer explains how during and immediately after the Industrial Revolution debt
was a cause for imprisonment in debtors’ prisons. In our contemporary moment, Mr. Bauer
contends, “we have so many people in your generation imprisoning themselves from loans and
credit cards and other stuff people your age didn’t have to worry about long ago.” Mr. Bauer
indicates many people share the perspective of Nick’s father:
Mr. Bauer: This is a great lesson to remember, that even a country as large as America
can’t be on top all of the time. If you look back at our history, you can see how America
grew through industry and manufacturing–steel, copper, mining, like all of the coal mines
in Appalachia. That’s all pretty much gone. So what do we have now?
With this question Mr. Bauer realizes this is an opportune time for students to work in pairs to
create a list of major exports from the United States. Working in pairs, students discuss together
which goods are produced in exported by the United States. Mr. Bauer gives students six minutes
to work on their lists and then calls the students to reassemble as a class, calling on volunteers to
share items from their lists. Students share out the following: automobiles, electronics, oil, paper
and wood products, farm animals, arms and ammunition, grain, coal, and uranium. After
acknowledging the items on the list (with the exception of uranium, which he claims is an odd
item to include), Mr. Bauer situates America as a global trading entity. One student, Katie, asks
if money can be classified as an export, “like the stuff on Wall Street and with the other big

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banks?” Mr. Bauer responds that “yes, we do export money, as well as intangible things such as
knowledge. We’re a big exporter of knowledge. What else is missing from this list?” he asks the
class. Paul suggests airplanes, to which Mr. Bauer confirms that is true, claiming aircraft and
spacecraft are some of the most rapidly growing exports for the United States. This discussion
spurs Paul to ask Mr. Bauer “why do people complain about stuff being made in China and not
in America if we’re number two or three in the world at exporting? Doesn’t make sense.” Mr.
Bauer responds to Paul by way of providing an explanation.
Mr. Bauer: We’ve tried to do in the past what Paul is talking about. In the 1930s we
said, ‘if only people would buy domestically then we can avoid a depression.’ This is
why we put tariffs on things of importance. Let’s say we said to China that if they wanted
to import cars, if they want to sell cars in the United States, we would put a fivethousand-dollar tariff on any car sold here. Do you think they’re going to turn around and
do? They won’t sell here! And that’s what made our economy so strong for so long. We
resisted things overseas. We made things here and we sold them here. We kept
Americans making and buying American things. It was all about manufacturing, which is
what we’re taking about today. This is what is different about the American economy
now from the past. The factory system is pretty much dying out. In the past, with
Rockefeller and Carnegie and Ford, vertical integration transformed America. Those days
are gone so now we have to figure out what the business of America will after the glory
days of American manufacturing.
Danny asks Mr. Bauer why factories were so successful earlier in the world’s history. This
question allows Mr. Bauer to draw crucial connections between earlier domestic systems of
manufacturing and production to more modern factory systems of manufacturing and production.

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Mr. Bauer reminds students how earlier in the unit they learned that the appearance of factories
forced people to move from smaller rural homes and farming communities to relocate and live in
larger urban areas:
Mr. Bauer: Remember all of the changes we’ve been talking about in this unit. This is
when we started seeing our old ways of life die out. The countryside was no longer where
we wanted to live. Well, maybe we did want to live there, and maybe we still do want to
live in the romantic and rugged wilderness, but most of us live in cities. You’re all going
to have to move to big cities if you want a good quality of life, I’m afraid to say.
The class period ends with Mr. Bauer previewing the next day’s lesson, which will be a case
study of Wal-Mart as an example of globalization. “A lot of people say they don’t want to shop
at Wal-Mart,” Mr. Bauer adds. “But we’ll see just how difficult that is to put into practice.” The
bell rings signaling the end of the class period and this lesson.

Analysis of Mr. Bauer’s Lesson
In Mr. Bauer’s lesson, one encounters expressions of America existing in a state of
disorientation. The economic might it once enjoyed appears to be fading. As a narrative of fall
and decline, the curriculum in Mr. Bauer’s lesson expresses America in an epic mode through
focusing on loss: a loss of comfort in terms of wages and employment, a loss of comfort in terms
of business interests to support communities, such as Springfield, and a loss of comfort in terms
of the sense of respect and prowess America enjoyed as a global leader in manufacturing,
specifically automobiles, a particularized vision of greatness that is localized to Springfield in the
way historical narratives of America’s epic greatness in leading the world in manufacturing steel
would be localized at schools in, say, Pittsburgh or Cleveland. Functioning in the role of teacher-

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as-epicist, Mr. Bauer serves as a kind of prophet. He can both see behind in the past for causes
and point towards likely paths America will continue down in its currently unfolding historical
quest. His prophetic view is not entirely positive, as when he suggests to his class “I don’t think
there’s any going back to how it once was.” This tone is reflective throughout Mr. Bauer’s
lesson, as he expresses a sense of disenchantment with future economic outlooks for America.
That which America must intimately value the most, it’s “pride and joy” in Mr. Bauer’s phrase,
is the grand position it held as one of the world’s leaders in manufacturing automobiles. When
this was “lost” we see a value judgment established that this is a blow to America, a fatal flaw
from which it may never recover, as Mr. Bauer expresses tragically in his lesson.
This disenchantment appears in how he identifies in this history he is teaching a “great
lesson” that students must heed. For Mr. Bauer it is a sobering reality that America, described as
large, can fail. Despite the epic nature of America (“even a country as large as America”) the
lessons of its history prevent us from ignoring that “it can’t be on top all of the time.” Mr.
Bauer’s apparent aim in his lesson is to present a total fantasy of America as a mighty hero who
has fallen. In his teaching we see a fantasy that wants a transposition both to show everything
that was great about the American economy through the specific example of the automobile
industry in Michigan. The epic nature of this curriculum means for Mr. Bauer that it must be
taught comprehensively, both in how America works, literally and figuratively, as an epic hero
and as an epic space where the ideals of the Industrial Revolution can be materialized for
students to learn, accomplished by Mr. Bauer’s own totalizing representation of America as a
power to make his students better consumers of history by leading them to sympathize with rise,
decline, and fall of America he provides in his lesson. There is a performative element to Mr.
Bauer’s instruction in that he wants his teaching to make something happen. His students will be

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able to “see how American grew” and will be required to “figure out what the business of
America” will one day be in this unknown future, a dark future of which Mr. Bauer forewarns
his students by offering a historical detour through debtors’ prisons and their modern-day
equivalent in the crushing debt of student loans and credit cards. Debt is just one more arduous
obstacle to face and overcome, a villainous concept in need of defeat in this epic quest America
has undertaken. Mr. Bauer teaches his students that their fate, and the fate of all of America, is
tied to the actions of the nation in terms of economic output.

Observing Mr. Reardon’s Lesson on the Vietnam War
During his unit on the Vietnam War in his ninth-grade U.S. history course, Mr. Reardon devotes
three class periods to an in-class screening of the documentary film Dear America: Letters Home
From Vietnam. On the third and final day of this lesson students conclude their viewing of the
film and discuss with Mr. Reardon their perceptions of how living in Vietnam during armed
conflict affected U.S. soldiers. As the film nears its conclusion, a montage of black and white
photographs of U.S. soldiers disembarking planes upon returning to the United States are shown
while Chuck Berry sings lyrics to one of his songs: “I’m so glad I’m living in the U.S.A.” Many
students audibly say “aww” in unison displaying an affection for the young men whose faces and
bodies occupy the large projection screen in front of them. Witnessing the soldiers’ reassembling
in the physical space of their country as U.S. citizens, a few of the students visibly shed tears. A
student sitting next to me takes tissues from Mr. Reardon’s desk and wipes her eyes during this
part of the film. As the narrator of the film discusses the death of a solider whose letters to his
family are featured prominently throughout the documentary, a student, Alexis, says aloud to no
one in particular, “it’s a shame he died so needlessly.” Mr. Reardon asks Alexis what she means

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by this and she offers her thoughts in the form of walking back the intensity of her original
comment, saying “I don’t know, I mean, it’s just kind of dumb that this person had to give up his
life, for what?” Mr. Reardon says Kylie makes a “heartfelt” point and that “patriotism is a fuzzy
thing.”
He then asks students to answer the remaining list of questions on the handout. Upon
their finish, Mr. Reardon calls the students back together as a class. He turns their attention to the
eleventh question on the study guide, which reads: “After watching footage of the war and
hearing the letters that soldiers wrote during the Vietnam War, write a paragraph on what you
saw. How did the movie make you feel? Has your opinion about the war and those that fought in
it changed?” He solicits responses from students after asking for students to voluntarily read their
responses aloud. The first student to share is Jennifer:
Jennifer: Before watching this movie I didn’t have a stance on whether the war was a
good thing or not. But after watching it, I don’t think I would have supported the war.
With the massacres of villages with children and women angers me. Those young
children and women have done nothing wrong. Also being a solider you should be proud
to fight for your country, not miserable as the soldiers’ families were as well. They were
terrified for their family member’s life and was (sic) not for sure if they would ever see
them again.
Mr. Reardon questions Jennifer on her first sentence about not truly having a stance, asking her if
she had a feeling or thought about the war at all, or what the term “Vietnam War” made her think
or feel prior to this film. She replies that all she thought of when hearing those words were of
“old people fighting somewhere in Asia and some came home and some didn’t, but that we were
proud of them.” When Mr. Reardon asks Jennifer where such pride comes from, she claims that

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“it’s who you are, you’re an American and you were put there to protect America.” On this
comment, Mr. Reardon points out what he finds to be a contradiction in Jennifer’s comments.
“Could one be proud and not support the war?” he asks the class. Students think over this for a
few seconds and one student, Michael, responds that “yeah, you do what you have to do because
that is your job, but you don’t have to like it.” Mr. Reardon acknowledges Michael’s comment
and asks Michael about his opinion on war, to which Michael shares that his opinion on the war
did not change:
Michael: I still oppose war and now more than ever. This movie made me think about
how hard it must have been for the soldiers and their families. I don’t understand war and
never will. Seeing all the dead bodies and the missing soldiers and people being carried
away by helicopters hurt. It made me angry that the war started, but the people at home
that hated America and the soldiers were more infuriating.
Mr. Reardon asks students to recall ideas he had mentioned about President Johnson from an
earlier lesson in their unit, reminding students to “remember that even President Johnson didn’t
really understand the war and didn’t really want to send more young people over there. But he
had to do what he felt he had to do. Why?” Upon considering this question, students are quiet for
a few seconds. After waiting for responses from students and receiving none, Mr. Reardon
answers his question, claiming President Johnson was worried that his plans for achieving the
Great Society initiative would be futile if the United States surrendered and withdrew from the
conflict in Vietnam. A student, Adam, questions Mr. Reardon’s claim, asking if the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution changed the president’s perspective on the war:
Adam: Didn’t that give the president all the power to make decisions to fight in
Vietnam? If so, why didn’t he use that power to remove the troops? He could have saved

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a lot of lives and just brought everyone home and then he could say that Congress wanted
him to do it because of the resolution, right?”
Adam’s question opens up a space for deeper speculation about the conflict in Vietnam and how
the United States should have approached the conflict as it unfolded and how the nation should
remember it in the present. Mr. Reardon says that Adam is “kind of on the right track” in his
thinking, but that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution put the Vietnam War into “warp speed.” By this
Mr. Reardon says he means it was the moment President Johnson widened the war after he won
the election in 1964:
Mr. Reardon: He felt this was America’s duty, that it had no other choice but to fight on
and press on. America never gives up, and Johnson didn’t want to give up, either. So he
sends 50,000 additional troops. The U.S. drops almost half a million ton of bombs on
North Vietnam, and over a million in South Vietnam. It kept escalating and escalating.
But it’s not American to just give up. We stay the course. America wins wars, we save
the world, but we didn’t do that in Vietnam.
Mr. Reardon transitions to the final part of the lesson, which covers the lottery system that
drafted U.S. citizens into combat during the Vietnam War. Students work with photocopied
newspaper articles about local residents who were drafted into combat during the Vietnam War
and work on this and related activities for the remainder of the class period.

Analysis of Mr. Reardon’s Lesson
In Mr. Reardon’s class we see America in a state of redemption. When students are
invited to take a stance regarding America’s involvement in the Vietnam War epic characteristics
allow Mr. Reardon to salvage America in the face of criticism and uncertainty voiced by the

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students. In the documentary film, an epic trope humanizes the soldiers through their efforts to
communicate with loved ones at home. Exposed and vulnerable far away from home in a strange
and unfamiliar land (Vietnam), the soldiers are on a journey which many did not ask to be a part.
Indeed, the contested nature of the conflict—as both a foreign war and as an epic fantasy to be
taught in this lesson—is stated in the title of the Buffalo Springfield song that plays in the
documentary film students view. “For what it’s worth,” as the title proclaims, is not something
that can be answered for and by the soldiers on their epic quest. To do so would upend the epic
convention of being firm and committed to following through on the quest. In epic fantasies one
follows the course, even when straying off the path due to external temptations and challenges,
only to return to follow through on their principle of determination. As Mr. Reardon informs his
students, “it’s not American to just give up.” When he says “we say the course,” his use of we
performatively binds the students to him and to this greater, epic identification with America
while simultaneously staking out a definitive, normative claim about America that an epic mode
demands.
But this condition of America and being American must be taught. To do so, Mr.
Reardon must execute in his role of teacher-as-epicist the work of assaying his students to
answer the question of worth. When his student Kylie proclaims a solider “died so needlessly,”
she calls into question the very nature of this war and challenges its status as an epic quest. Mr.
Reardon attempts to downplay this conflicted feeling Kylie expressed by describing patriotism as
“a fuzzy thing” rather than confront how Kylie could challenge a consensus that fully supports
the sacrifices America made with its soldiers fighting in Vietnam. However, this querying Mr.
Reardon sets up for his students throughout this lesson is less about the ethical and political
quandaries of fighting in the war and more about properly celebrating the cathartic involvement

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of America as an actor in the war, as soldiers fighting for America, and as students of history
engaging with this event a history lesson. Epic makes this cathartic involvement more
consumable in the classroom because of the strong, overpowering emotions it offers. This is very
much the case when we see how students react to the film Mr. Reardon selected to screen for
them, form anger to sadness to grief in a students’ tears, an epic mode in teaching can easily
solicit extreme attitudes and reactions. Those for whom an epic is retold are expected to invest in
the telling with a similarly appropriate level of heightened emotional appeal. His student Jennifer
is clear on her stance when she connects her favor to the very being of American: “it’s who you
are.” When Mr. Reardon questions one’s ability to critique duty and honor, his student Michael
aptly demonstrates how epic fantasies, especially when set in times of war or conflict, flatten
critique of duty and honor. Even though Michael expresses hesitation in glorifying the soldiers as
heroes, one of the signature elements of an epic fantasy, he nevertheless falls in line with the
demands of glorification epic requires when he states he has anger for “the people at home [who]
hated America.”

Discussion
Two distinct fantasies that emerge as dominant themes in the course of Mr. Bauer and
Mr. Reardon teaching about America in their respective history classes: fantasies of heroism and
fantasies of duty. Both contribute to a curriculum of American exceptionalism as discussed in
this section.

Fantasies of Heroism
There are inevitable consequences for America in both lessons examined in this study. In
Mr. Bauer’s class, is it inevitable that America accept a new role in the global economy that
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shakes off any lingering desire for industrial might it once enjoyed. In Mr. Reardon’s class, it is
inevitable that America follow through in requests to fight conflicts and engage in war even
when such calls of duty are questionable or contested. Reading these lessons as epic fantasies of
heroism calls our attention to how America exists as a hero in its own quest, its own struggle to
arrive at a predestined end. In the lesson Mr. Bauer teaches the predestined end for America is in
a reconfigured sense of purpose and self-sustaining role in a global economy. In his unit on the
Industrial Revolution, “all of the changes” Mr. Bauer reminds students they have learned in
studying industrialization serve as a kind of foe for America. The fantasy of a strong, powerful
America allows Mr. Bauer to personify the Big Three automobile manufacturers as heroes who
helped lead America in its epic quest for global economic conquest. Fantasies of national
strength and global dominance allow Mr. Bauer to teach the Big Three as heroes of America,
emphasizing a fixed identity of the Big Three as heroes in the epic mode of history his pedagogy
expresses. Mr. Bauer articulates a past that was “so strong for so long” made by progress in
industry, manufacturing, and trade. When his student Paul wonders about the change in fortune
America faced with its fall and decline in exports and imports, Mr. Bauer points to Rockefeller,
Carnegie, and Ford as virtuous, individuals who “transformed America” during its quest/history
as a nation. America was a hero at the height of its powers before certain forces changed its
course with destiny. As provider and protector, America’s heroic qualities are left in doubt as
Mr. Bauer guides his students to consider the nation’s future, a future that they “have to figure
out” and “what’s next?”
Mr. Reardon does not express such a sanguine view of America’s past in his epic
construct of America, chronicling the Vietnam War as but one of many obstacles America has
faced in some play ‘over there’ and ‘far away’ from here, it’s ‘home.’ By resisting to use wealth

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as a symbolic power for America as a hero, Mr. Reardon instead turns to the soldiers as heroes in
spite of their desire to return to home, not in spite of it. This allows Mr. Reardon to construct a
powerfully emotional fantasy using the way epic expressions demand heightened states of awe,
compassion, pity, or sadness, or, to use Mr. Reardon’s phrase, that “fuzzy thing” we feel when
we encounter patriotism. This herofication evacuates from Mr. Reardon’s instruction any need
for questioning exterior motives, ideological influences, alternative possibilities, or other forms
of critique that would lessen the purchase of duty as an organizing and explanatory concept in
this lesson. The power of duty as an epic fantasy overrides the scathing tone of the “Fortunate
Son” song Mr. Reardon plays for his students. It is not destiny that an unfortunate man not born
into a political family would fight in the Vietnam War, despite how much Mr. Reardon connects
this causality to a national draft. Yet the epic mode of Mr. Reardon’s lesson prioritizes heroizing
the solider in this protest song in spite of Mr. Reardon’s acknowledgment of social and political
forces that bind the solider to serve in combat.

Fantasies of Duty
Mr. Bauer constructs a fantasy of duty for his students when he presents a bleak future of
America, one in which students will have the duty to move to cities if they “want a good quality
of life.” The patriarchal values associated with epic work to construct America not only as
someone who must win, but must win particular things, such as a good quality of life, a
shorthand for money and the patriarchal belief in heading a household or sacrificing other forms
of happiness to be financially sound. Mr. Bauer teaches students this quality of life is to be found
only in the city presumably because of an abundance of employment opportunities and not
because of other reasons left unmentioned, such as access to goods and services, culture and

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entertainment, infrastructure and transportation, and so forth. In keeping with epic fantasies
presented in stark black and white terms, with no gradients of ambiguity, we can identify how in
Mr. Bauer’s lesson the changes in America’s manufacturing history are not taught as complex
and multitudinous, but rather as something that we have a duty to fix, to change, and confront
with a renewed entrepreneurial spirit that may be lacking in the present, thus creating the current
conditions in which America finds itself. But as with all fantasies, if America were to recover its
epic sense of greatness, of being a hero of the world once more, what would Mr. Bauer desire?
Fantasies work as container for our desires in the sense that if we were to ever fulfil them, or
satisfy then, we would be left with no search, no yearning for that desire. We would have no
pleasure or no basis to fantasize. Because fantasies work not by obtaining our desires, but by
being turned on, seduced, and entranced by that which we desire, we risk losing the very
animating drives of fantasy if we achieve and realize it. Mr. Bauer’s pedagogy we lose its driving
force: would would be left to desire in fantasizing an America that is broken, beaten, and in need
of a comeback (another ‘bailout’ to salvage and redeem America?) While it may seem
unpleasant to feel anger, resentment, or despair at America’s economic lot in life, the epic quest
for winning and resuming the mantle of “being on top of the world,” to borrow Mr. Bauer’s
phrase, is to drag out America’s epic quest without ever ending it or realizing its conclusion. In
this way, teaching the history of America is to teach it as a never-ending story, one without end.
Using a similar strategy of displacement and deferral, the epic fantasy of Mr. Bauer’s
lesson both embraces and condenses the history in rather fatalistic ways. We see “old ways of
life die out” presumably never to return. Despite not saying “Detroit is dead,” Mr. Bauer does
suggest the progress of America’s epic quest, its “good ol’ days of booming industry and
manufacturing” will not return as they “are clearly over.” Detroit becomes works as part to

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whole, a synecdochal relationship for America at large. The limit of this troping of Detroit,
however, is that all examples available to Mr. Bauer are necessarily unique. It is dangerous to
claim that so goes Detroit, so goes all automobile manufacturing in the United States, as the
success of foreign automobile manufacturing in the South, despite one’s stance on right-to-work
labor conditions, is neither typical nor explanatory for a totalizing history (economic or
otherwise) of America, and certainly not of the world as a global entity, even more necessary to
consider given that Mr. Bauer teaches this lesson in a world history course.
This act of displacement appears in Mr. Reardon’s lesson in the move to displace
questions and critiques of American duty onto President Johnson. Even while acknowledging the
conflicted impulses in President Johnson, Mr. Reardon gestures towards some grander cause, or
sense of fate, returning an epic sense to his lesson on the Vietnam War. This is a fantasy of duty.
Consider his contention that President Johnson “had to do what he had to do.” Mr. Reardon soon
thereafter answers this question by once again invoking duty. As an external force, duty shapes
the destiny and directs the outcome of those involved in the Vietnam War.

Conclusion
The role of fantasies in social studies education in the United States allow teachers to
play a decisive role in establishing certain meanings, certain truths, and certain ideas of America
that appear in their teaching as universal, essential, or natural. Social studies education is, in this
regard, a fantastical subject matter as it encodes underlying desires of the nation, the self, the
other to form a curriculum that on the surface plays out as reality itself. Žižek (1989) gets at this
issue when he suggests

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ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape an insupportable reality; in its
basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’
itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks
some insupportable, real kernel (p. 45).
The fantasy-constructions I identify in the expressive modes of a teacher’s pedagogy shape
learning about America, fantasies of the nation that range from civic virtues to national
exceptionalism. Indeed, one of the most pervasive fantasies in learning about America through
social studies education can be found in the American Dream, a fantasy-construction that serves
to support a national reality and structure social relations in America (Blankenship & Helmsing,
2016). Once we understand there is no neutral position from which one can teach about America,
as a nation, a place, an idea, or a concept, we can begin to read such fantasies as forms our
pedagogy rely upon in our classrooms. Rather than rejecting fantasy outright as something
inappropriate or problematic in social studies education, we should instead learn to read our
fantasies rather than strive to excise them from our teaching; identifying fantasies and
recognizing their effects can be a productive practice for social studies educators. This is partly
why Žižek believes the choice between accepting reality or accepting fantasy is a wrong
construct for “if we want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our
fantasies that make us fit this reality” (in Wood, 2012, p. 126). For Žižek (1997) the symbolic
order that structures our sense of reality is dependent on fantasies that supplement the symbolic
order as they provide a sense of coherence or completeness to the stories we construct to make
sense of our lives.
Fantasies regulate our teaching because they offer a “framework which tells us how we
are to understand” and make sense of our world and in the very same move how we can suspend,

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transgress, escape, and violate such structured understandings (Žižek, 1997, p. 29). We can see
that fantasy organizes desire in our pedagogy through the narratives, expressions, and other
representations that give map onto distinct modes we use to make sense of the narratives,
expressions, and other representations we consume and pass on in art, literature, and other forms
of culture. Social studies education, and especially its project of history education, must heed
special attention to how it engages with the fantasies of its teachers, students, and curriculum.
Because social studies education all too often explains historical narratives, social problems, and
cultural behaviors without the intervention of a speaker, no “I” and no “you” appear directly
allowing social studies education to just happen and to explain itself. By reading moments of
social studies education closely for the fantasies it creates and uses in different pedagogical
scenarios, we can better identify how the predominantly essentialized and given traits of its
curriculum constrain the choices teachers and students consider, thereby permitting teachers and
students to share hopes, fears, anxieties, and other desires as one way we exist in the world.

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CHAPTER 2
A CURRICULUM OF NATIONAL BELONGING: INTERROGATING MYTH AS
PEDAGOGY IN AN ELEVENTH-GRADE CIVICS CLASS

Introduction
“One of the main words you’re going to hear repeatedly in this course is the word
‘republic’ – let’s all say it out loud.” With this preview from their teacher in mind, the assembled
group of 21 students chime aloud in unison the word republic within the first few minutes of
their first day in Ms. Stewart’s civics course. Ms. Stewart places a concentrated emphasis upon
the concept of a republic in each unit throughout the duration of her civics course. Ms. Stewart
foreshadows the premise of her course when she informs the class, “Thomas Jefferson said that if
a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and
never will be.” As she shares with me during one-on-one discussions about the philosophies
informing her teaching, Ms. Stewart desires to lead her students out of their own ignorance of
how their nation’s government operates. This desire is the fundamental guiding force in her
teaching. Ms. Stewart strives for her students to complete the course leaving less ignorant about
their republic than before they began the course. This flight away from ignorance will
presumably allow students to exist in a state of freedom whereby they transcend the ignoble
(not)knowing of what it means to be a citizen in this republic, to be a citizen in America. Ms.
Stewart’s provides a brief description of her course at the very top of the course syllabus: “the
study of our government and our role as citizens in the republic.” The who and whom of “our
government” and “our role” is implied to the syllabus reader as that of an Oakdale student
residing in the United States. The student is already “in” the republic. Bounded by borders of the

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nation that give rise to how we configure the United States, the student is already turned towards
an introspection of possession: this government is yours/ours; there is no refusal possible. This
brief description is interesting for as much as what the course is not about than what it claims to
be about. Absent are indications that the course focuses on how the United States government
operates and functions (or malfunctions). As will be demonstrated throughout this case study, the
civics course at Oakdale High School, according to its description Ms. Stewart provides in the
syllabus, exists less for the student’s personal purposes and more for the maintenance of
“informed and responsible citizens” that belong to the nation and must inherit its ideas and
ideals. To this end, we read in the syllabus, “a republic cannot survive without the participation
of an informed electorate” and indeed Ms. Stewart suggests as much when she tells the class,
“this fact was both a consideration and a concern of our nation’s Founders when our Constitution
was developed.” The role of citizen in a republic is taken on by acquiring the tools and apparatus
of national citizenship. The means of this acquisition, as I explain in this article, is through a
curriculum and pedagogy of myth.

Purposes of the Study
It is, I argue, a curriculum and pedagogy in the form of myth that Ms. Stewart transmits
each day to her class in lessons on civic virtues, civility, and the common good, to name just a
few. The forms of pedagogy given to a specific vision of American in this civics class are
presented to students as conditions by which they, individually, take on a mode of belonging as
members of the nation. Rather than becoming a citizen by growing into a role according to terms
of their own lives and situational contexts, the students already enter into the position of a citizen
of the United States through modes of American belonging Ms. Stewart introduces to them on

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the first day of class. This article sketches out how the construction of the nation as a set of ideas,
and of a shared sense of national belonging, is operationalized through engagements with myth
as a form of civic knowledge. As Ms. Stewart’s course syllabus states, “our role” is presumably
collective and unified by virtue of belonging to this government. Therefore, learning multiple
and differing conceptions of what constitutes citizenship, and the constraints and possibilities
citizenship the United States government affords, do not appear in the course rationale, but do
appear in the lessons I observed that I describe in this article. As a curricular and pedagogical
form, myth operates in Ms. Stewart’s class by prioritizing expressions of belonging to the nation
through teaching students what constitutes an individual as an American citizen. Myth, as I aim
to show, simultaneously teaches students how an individual is denied, rejected, our dismissed by
the borders of a singular American citizenship: one either belongs or does not belong to America
and the conventions of myth allow such dismissal and acceptance to be taught as natural,
normalized, and unquestioned.
I constructed this article out of a case study of one civic teacher from a larger semesterlong study of four high school social studies teachers. The purpose of the study was to follow
moments and events in observations of course sessions and interviews with Ms. Stewart and her
students that read the nation as a discrete set of civic characteristics and qualities. Ms. Stewart
and her students use these concepts to learn about “America” as a way of life, a tradition of
belonging that is made available to certain people under certain conditions, which are,
presumably, foundational to the American nation articulated in rhetoric and discourses of
belonging. I unpack these conditions in two examples of instruction from Ms. Stewart’s civics
class: first, in a lesson on the common good, and secondly, in a lesson on individual rights. I
conclude the article by interrogating how ideas of belonging are destabilized by myth, a

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pedagogical form predicated upon safeguarding and transmitting the very essence of belonging
to any community, society, or group. The article concludes with a consideration of how social
studies educators can read their own moments of teaching for instances of myth circulating in
and through their curriculum and pedagogy, becoming alert to the possibilities and foreclosures
myth creates as a curricular form.

Theorizing Myth in Social Studies Education
Most theories of myth suggest myth is not a primitive or irrational construct, but
something that exists outside of (and parallel to) scientific thought insofar as myth projects a
political way of explanatory thinking related to life in a social realm (Segal, 2004). Whereas
studies of ‘ancient myth focus on the Greek myth of Persephone or the Egyptian myth of Isis, we
can think of the myth as a contemporary concept in the myth of Aryan supremacy, or the ‘rags to
riches’ myth of American meritocracy, or the myth of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West
and the East as two distinct spheres of our world. Each of these examples exist as a complex
narrative because each myth is never transmitted or narrated in the exact same way, with the
exact same plotting, setting, and characters. Thus Bottici & Challand (2013) associate myth with
a pedagogical significance, “situated between what is consciously learned about the world and
what we unconsciously apprehend about it” (p. 4). This conscious learning and its own
unconscious apprehension is what leads Anderson (1983/1991) to identify myths as a chief
component nations use to create an ‘imagined community’ out of nationality. As such, myths are
part of the “biography” of a nation, such as Canada and the U.S. (Anderson, 1983/1991, p. 204)
and work as a type of answer to a nation’s “need for a narrative of ‘identity’” (p. 205). This work
of myth in an imagined community is what Berlant (1991) calls the “national symbolic,” a socio-

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historical function a nation carries out by “traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals,
and its narratives” in order to “provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national
subjectivity” (p. 20). Some go so far as to call myth a “civil religion” (Bellah, 2005) or a
narrativized form of “public feeling” (Stewart, 2007) which work to establish the nation as
premised upon what myths make possible for its citizens to apprehend. Greenwalt (2009), while
not directly engaging with the construct of myth, suggests one’s imaginations of a nation are
“vibrant, flexible, and alive” when one learns the discursive and symbolic markers of a nation
and nationhood (p. 515). These approaches all suggest myth—in its various forms—provides
some sort of symbolic means to make sense of and cope with life in a nation or society. A way to
cope with society, therefore, is to reconcile myth and history as complementary narrative modes
of explanation. This produces two kinds of engagement with myth. The first is an engagement I
describe as affirmative, which is played out in the hermeneutical practices of Paul Ricoeur. The
second engagement I term as critical. This engagement is best exemplified in the hermeneutical
practices of Roland Barthes.
Affirmative Engagements with Myth
Ricoeur (1974) attempts this in his defense of critiques of myth that seek to debunk or
“demythologize” aspects of society. For Ricoeur, a myth is a “disclosure of possible worlds” that
work by showing us alternate ways we can imagine our collective past and future through a
“logic of surplus and excess” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 410). The sacred qualities of myth should give
society a resource to hope and imagine for a better future over the profane explanations that a
“cold” or “hard” science offers. Thus, Ricoeur argues myths help us live in the here and now, in
between the past and the future, between the way things have been and the way things ought to
be. It is an expressive stance, however, that cannot ‘hold up’ the content of their curriculum as

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we shall see. This is in part because myths are always illusory and thus any mythic form of
explanation or teaching deconstructs through the very language one uses to express a myth.
Critical Engagements with Myth
For Barthes (1972/2012), it is this illusory quality he finds in myths that render them as
explanations for a social force, taken for granted and permeated through mediated forms of
culture and society, be it in schools, on television, in advertising, and so forth. After engaging
with ideas that would later be associated with poststructuralist thought, Barthes realized the
indeterminate quality of language, always in flux with unstable meaning, meant it is not possible
to locate a universal, essential truth hidden within myths (McQuillan, 2011). His revised reading
of myth held that “myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear”
(1972/2012, p. 231). This distortion is made possible by the way language (and, I would argue,
teaching) works, by expressing something as full of meaning even though the meaning is
distorted in order to deprive the statement of any traceable meaning. This is one process by
which myth operates in social studies education. Through this distortion of meaning, myth
becomes depoliticized speech, by which social studies teachers can inflect and translate their
curricular content into universal and symbolic significance in a form that does not signify
directly with the curricular content explicitly expressed (Bazzul, 2015). I suggest myth, as a
pedagogical form, acts “economically,” a term Barthes uses to explain how myth “abolishes the
complexity of human acts” and gives social explanations “the simplicity of
essences…organiz[ing] a world which is without contradictions” (p. 256). Myths simplify
concepts that we may not otherwise wish to discuss or confront. Segall (2013) imports this
reading of myth as a concept for critical thought in social studies education by claiming myths
work by “making dominant values, assumptions, and beliefs appear self-evident and timeless”

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(p. 479). In describing how myth works in economic education, Segall singles out how “the
myths of upward mobility, individualism, and the American dream, have managed to “hide” their
social consequences” (2013, p. 483). Social studies education employs these myths to maintain
“a mostly unquestioned status” of capitalism and consumerism in society (p. 483). It is this
critical engagement of myth that informs my reading of pedagogical practices in this article.

Studies of Myth in Social Studies Education
The relationship between myth and social studies education operates on two levels. The
first level is myth as a concept of social studies curriculum itself. This requires identifying and
dislodging myths from textbooks and other social studies curriculum materials. The second level
is myth as a metaconcept within social studies education, as an object or function of some sort of
cognitive process worked on by either a teacher or student or sometimes both.
Researchers in social studies education have chosen by and large to focus on identifying
ideological constructs in social studies curriculum rather than analyze and theorize the presence
of myth as curricular constructs (Brown & Brown, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Marino, 2011;
Sanchez, 2007; Thornton, 2006). These studies are characterized by identifying
misrepresentations, erroneous descriptions, ideologically influenced perspectives, and the
choices of how concepts such as race, gender, and violence are presented and discussed (or not).
Illustrative of this mode of inquiry is the title “Lies My Teacher Still Tells” by Ladson-Billings
(2003). This title cleverly builds off the prodigious influence Loewen’s work on ideological
analyses of social studies education has offered in his versions of Lies My Teacher Told Me
(1995) and the variations of this title employed in his subsequent books. Yet what Loewen’s
reading offers that few of these studies do is a focused reading on the narrativization of how

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certain people, places, events, and topics are constructed mythically, ranging from the usual
suspects of Christopher Columbus to less suspect figures, such as Helen Keller. Although
Loewen chooses not to use the word myth, presumably because of the word’s connotation that
makes it so immediately dismissed out of hand as a narratively false concept, he does show how
myth in social studies education, particularly history textbooks, operates, mostly through actions
such as heroization and vilification, two narrative actions quite operative in many forms of social
studies education (Bickford, 2013; Carlson, 2003; van Kessel & Crowley, 2017).
Myth is often framed as a problem in social studies education, something to avoid at best
or, at worst, attempt to debunk or demythologize. This was not always the case. May (1991)
reminds curriculum historians that “history’s ancient ancestors were poetry and mythology, and
when the Greeks began to use history in education to convey lessons of the past, it replaced
poetry” (p. 168). Eliminating distortions of a blurred reading of history contaminated by myth is
the process most commonly evidenced in research on history education. Nonetheless, Thornton
& Barton (2010) found that the American Historical Association, the Organization of American
Historians, and the National Council for the Social Studies all agreed in 1943 that providing a
“unifying narrative theme” was upheld as a key curricular aim of social studies education, one
that was “to be accomplished through critical thinking and not inculcation for national myths” (p.
2476). Thornton & Barton (2010) show that forty years later a concern in social studies
education continued to exist that strove to avoid teaching “blind patriotism, myths, and mastery
of facts” (quoted in Banks, 1982, p. x). In geography education, Brenner (2009) calls on
geography educators to teach geography through “unmasking the myths, reifications and
antimonies” that constitute geographic thought (p. 1999). McFarlane (2011) extends this goal of
critical geography not only to expose myths as “necessary or truthful” but to follow up in

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presenting “an alternative set” of “knowledges, imaginaries, logics, and practices” that would
supplant myth (p. 154). Harvey (2001) implicates myth as a form the past takes when it is
subsumed by geography under the guise of learning heritage, which flattens a learner’s
experience of space and place when memorializing a space or place in effect becomes an
instance of mythologizing.

Examples of Myth in Social Studies Curriculum
If we take as exemplary the standard survey course of U.S. national history, we would
first see lessons on Christopher Columbus and the myth of discovery, which includes tropes of
“the new world,” “visitors,” “discovery,” and “contact,” all of which have profound semantic
implications in how this myth works as curriculum, if not formally as pedagogy. This myth is
one that is more frequently demythologized, with Berry (2012) describing it as “the Columbus
affair” and Todorov (1984) calling attention to how Columbus and the myth of discovery work
to ‘other’ indigenous people conquered after contact with Columbus’ crew. Simon (1993)
offered a critical reading of how a pedagogy of counter-memorialization reroutes the effects of
how the myth of discovery is taught. For some time now social studies educators have
domesticated the demythologization of the myth of discovery after Bigelow & Peterson (1998)
packaged pedagogical strategies of demythologization in their Rethinking Columbus text.
Other myths prominent in canonical U.S. history curricula receive less critical attention.
The study of Pilgrims and Puritans through the myth of a ‘promised land’ could reveal powerful
attachments to origin stories, less as a predestined linear experience and more as a disordered
beginning full of paradoxical struggle and discontinuous formation of national cohesion. Yet
most often the myth is left in tact with an inconvenient presence/absence of indigenous Native

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Americans and the effects of settler colonization and the complicated encounters amongst
“Puritan clergy, the emergent bourgeoisie, the white backwoodsmen, the mixed-blood, American
Indians, and African Americans (Schueller & Watt, 2003, p. 5). In the textbook An American
Promise: A History of the United States (Roark et. al., 2015), the myth of a promised land
operates both in outlining learning objectives (“understand how Puritans came to dominate New
England society”; “recognize how Puritanism influenced the development of New England”, p.
77) and in organization with sections on “Puritans and the Settlement of New England” (p. 79)
and “The Evolution of New England Society” (p. 84) that claim the origins of American
democracy began with the Puritans and Pilgrims as they ‘found’ a ‘utopia’ in the ‘new world.’
Similar myths exist when studying the American Revolution, which uses the myth of the
Founding Fathers to allegorically position notions of legitimacy within a language of kinship
(fathers, birthing a nation, a nation coming of age, getting along and putting aside conflict, etc.).
This myth often deconstructs in popular culture, such as when President Barack Obama appears
with a wig in an illustration on the January 26, 2009 cover of The New Yorker), but rarely within
U.S. history curriculum. The national paradigm constructed in textbooks and in most official
curriculum rarely calls into question various contestations of this myth. Recognizing and
reflecting on the different strands of this myth—via race, gender, class, entrepreneurship, radical
political orientations—would disrupt the hold of the Founding Fathers myth. Myths of Manifest
Destiny and westward “expansion” of the U.S. as a melting pot, and of the American Dream and
the self-made American are a few other prevalent myths in U.S. history curriculum
(VanSledright, 2008).
Myth as metaconcept. Myth also works as a concept in social studies education as a
metaconcept, by which I mean the ways myth works pedagogically to postpone any social and

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political discontent in a national belief system, a system that is often upheld in the curricular
goals and standards of social studies education. In a study on students’ conceptions of historical
significance, Cercadillo (2001) identifies symbolic significance as one of five types of ways
students regard the significance of historical events. This perspective allows students to endow
historical events with a significance symbolizing a mythic past.
In a study of how social studies textbooks construct history through the use of
performance activities for students, Chappel (2010) found that tasks in textbooks often asked
students to perform understandings related to myths rather than detailed historical accounts, such
as the mythos surrounding performances and reenactments of the First Thanksgiving in the U.S.
Chappell argues myth operates in these creative, theatrical activities in social studies textbooks
by “colonizing the imaginary” through “narrative structures and performances intended for
children’s consumption” (Chappell, 2010, pp. 248-249; Chappell, 2008, p. 18). Letourneau
(2006) works through the repressive pedagogical effects of teaching and learning grand
narratives when learning national histories through what he terms “mythohistory,” which refers
to “meta-representations or general frameworks [and narrative structures] that will act as sorts of
intellectual crutches that help [students] understand the world in its past and present, and
anticipate its future as well” (p. 71). In related work, Den Heyer & Abbott (2011) explain how
history education can often appropriate elements of myth, or the stylings and sensibilities of
myth, to work through curriculum and pedagogy in the form of “proper nouns,” which work to
“consolidate a shared identity” amongst students (p. 616). Barton & Levstik (2004), in their
taxonomy of stances with which students take when learning history, found “a mythic view of
the past” was prevalent among elementary age students in social studies classrooms. Gesturing
towards a stance I seek to advocate in this article, Barton & Levstik suggest that “rather than

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simply discounting (or ignoring) such mythic identifications, educators might treat them as open
questions, suitable for investigation by students” (p. 63). While their attention is focused on how
students engage with myth, I am interested in the pedagogical operation of myth in social studies
teachers’ practice. Having explored theories of myth, and locating myth in the relevant literature
from educational research, a supple understanding of myth allows me to locate a particular
ground or area within the field of social studies education for me to place and share this study.

Methodological Framework & Methods of Study
A case study methodology for data collection and analysis informs this study, specifically
an instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) as my intent was to learn from Ms. Stewart’s instruction
as a way to better understand how social studies teachers construct and frame ideas and
understandings about what defines America as a curricular concept. The data discussed and
analyzed in this article is one “bounded system” from a larger study that included four bounded
systems of four different social studies classes, each a different social studies disciplinary area
taught by a different teacher (Stake, 1995, p.2). This method allowed me to adopt and use certain
ethnographic approaches and conventions to study the daily events of a classroom without
conducting a full-scale ethnography (Rex, Steadman, & Graciano, 2006).

Data Collection
My primary method of data collection was regular observations of Ms. Stewart’s
instruction during the spring 2013 semester. I observed Ms. Stewart’s class approximately two
times per week from the beginning of the school’s third academic trimester in February through
its conclusion at the beginning of June. I consulted with Ms. Stewart each week about arranging

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times to visit her 5th period class that would align with class sessions devoted primarily to
teacher-lead instruction (thus excluding class days devoted to testing, watching films, review
periods, and so forth). Following guidelines for participant observation (Merriam, 1998), the
majority of my time was spent observing Ms. Stewart’s instruction. I would, on occasion, talk
with students with whom I sat nearby in the classroom.
During each class period spent observing in Ms. Stewart’s class I took detailed field notes
using a protocol that allowed for me to delineate observed events for subsequent coding and
analysis. I designed an instrument that would allow me to identify and later interpret moments
during instruction that related to some course content on or about America broadly defined. I
audio-recorded classroom conversations following Internal Review Board approval and used
transcriptions of audio-recorded classroom conversations to provide the dialogue between Ms.
Stewart and her students contained in this article. Classroom conversations are presented in this
article verbatim from transcriptions and, where indicated, contextualized with notes I wrote
during the observation(s) associated with the lesson(s).
I informally discussed my observations with Ms. Stewart at the end of each day I visited
her classroom. I wanted to increase the validity of my interpretations and returned to her
classroom with a more formalized summary of the previous observation to help ensure I had
understood what was delivered in her instruction. I formally interviewed Ms. Stewart once
during an hour-long one-on-one semi-structured interview. I also interviewed the class of
students discussed in this article during an hour-long optional and voluntary focus group
interview. Little to no data from either interview is included in this article, however.
I followed the recommendation of Yin (2003) to collect multiple types of documents and
physical artifacts that could be relevant to interpreting Ms. Stewart’s instruction and her civics

66

class curriculum. During the course of the semester, I collected the following: (1) printed
samples of Ms. Stewart’s handouts, worksheets, notes, quizzes, tests, and projects; (2) my own
copy of the civics textbook Ms. Stewart used in her course; and (3) samples of student written
work.

Contextualizing Oakdale High School
Oakdale High School (O.H.S.) is the only high school in a rural school district located in
the small town of Oakdale, which is located 15 miles south of the large metropolitan city of
Washington (pseudonym). The information pertaining to O.H.S. reflects its demographics and
available public data about the school for the 2013–2014 academic year. O.H.S. serves 1027
students in grades 9-12, 26% of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch under federal guidelines.
According to student demographic data available for that year, the composition of ethnic groups
of the student population is 89.48% White, 5.36% Hispanic of Any Race, 2.92% African
American, 1.27% Asian, 0.08% Two or More Races, and 0.01% American Indian or Alaska
Native (www.mischooldata.org). While the total enrollment of students at O.H.S. is only nine
students fewer than the enrollment at S.H.S, the demographic breakdowns by reported student
ethnicity is markedly different. The community of Oakdale resembles many small Midwestern
farming communities that evoke a small town feeling. Much of the commercial activity in
Oakdale, unlike Springfield, centers around a downtown square that forms a perimeter of a
county courthouse that serves Springfield, the seat of its county.
The effects of globalization and post-industrialization are less pronounced upon
Oakdale’s visible surface due to the heavy presence of farming and agriculture that in part
defines Oakdale. As such it appears less in keeping with the nearby Rust Belt socioeconomic

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cultures of Springfield, Washington, and other locales; however, Oakdale is not an affluent
community and its school district is not wealthy in comparison to other rural and suburban
districts nearby that have recently constructed new school buildings. Residents of Washington
(where I resided while conducting this study) often remark that Oakdale is “all white” in terms of
the racial and ethnic makeup of its community. Given that almost 90% of the students at O.H.S.
identify as non-Hispanic White, this is not an inaccurate description. Much of the discourse from
O.H.S. teachers and students about the identity of their school works through a process of
difference; which is to say O.H.S. is often defined by what it is not: it is not like the high schools
in Washington and not like the larger communities to the north of the town. As is the case with
many rural towns outside of larger urban and suburban areas, the close distance between Oakdale
and Washington (15 miles) means Oakdale residents go to Washington for shopping, dining, and
employment, but return to Oakdale as a place to reside.

Contextualizing Ms. Stewart’s Civics Curriculum
The civics course at Oakdale High School is required for graduation. Many students take
the course during their junior year (Grade 11). It is one trimester in length, which means students
have the course for one 50-minute period five days a week for a duration of twelve weeks. Ms.
Stewart and one other faculty member teach all sections of civics. They use seven content areas
pulled from the Michigan Merit Curriculum to give shape and meaning to what this apparatus
looks like in terms of social studies curricular content: Conceptual Foundations of Civics and
Personal Life; Origins and Foundations of U.S. Government; Functions of U.S. Government,
The United States in World Affairs; Citizenship in the United States; Citizenship in Action; and
Civic Inquiry and Public Discourse. Many of the units in this course take on titles of a romantic

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style of civic education, with tiles including: “The Perils of a No Rules World,” “Judeo-Christian
Religious Traditions in America,” “British Origins of American Constitutionalism,” “Promoting
Civic Virtues,” “Abuse and Misuse of Governmental Power in America,” and “Understanding
States Rights.”
The conceptual focus in Ms. Stewart’s civics instruction coheres around descriptions and
appreciations of American political culture, with significant historicizing detail included as
content, as opposed to the truncated version of political science operating in high school civics
courses that use unit titles to foreground present-day issues such as “Public Opinion,” “Elections
and Campaigns,” “Interest Groups,” and “The Judicial System.” Adding to this construct of
America-as-republic and of the model U.S. citizen is Michigan’s “Core Democratic Values” that
are a coextensive part of the state social studies academic content standards. Ms. Stewart and
other civics teachers at Oakdale High School teach these as the values that “framed” the U.S.
Constitution and in turn “frame” students’ identities as citizens.
Ms. Stewart’s classroom is decorated with posters and framed prints of what could be
called Americana: folk art paintings, portraits of U.S. presidents and political thinkers, such as
George Mason, and photographs of landscapes and places located on the east coast of the United
States that are likely quite familiar to most students: Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty; The
homes of Presidents Washington and Jefferson, Mt. Vernon and Monticello, respectively; and
paintings of U.S. Civil War battlefields. There is a bulletin board near the front of the classroom
on which several small laminated posters are arranged on a backdrop of red, white, and blue
patriotic patterns. Each poster displays one of the Core Democratic Values identified by the State
of Michigan. Students in Michigan devote much of their time studying social studies in the
elementary grades to thinking about and writing about issues related to these values. At the

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secondary level, the values become less explicit curricular content as instruction gives way to
subject matter devoted to history, economics, etc. During one of my classroom visits early in the
trimester, Ms. Stewart emphasizes two values in a lesson she is teaching on the concept of the
common good. She gestures directly to “Common Good” and “Individual Rights.” Letting her
land linger on the value located in the middle of the arrangement, Ms. Stewart exclaims, “If I
could teach only one lesson for this entire course, it would be about individual rights and the
common good and what happens when rights interfere with the good.”

Data Analysis
To analyze the data collected, I used an analytic strategy that identifies issues within each
case study constructed for this study and looks for themes that cut across all four teachers
(Saldaña, 2009). This required establishing a detailed description of each case and themes within
the case as well as thematic analyses across the cases, anchoring assertions and interpretations to
the empirical encounters within each case. Using what Miles & Huberman (1994) term “a timeordered display”, I arranged emerging themes and ideas in each of the lessons observed over the
chronological sequence in which they were presented in the course. These emerging themes
became data for coding, what Auerbach & Silverstein (2003) term “relevant text,” which exist as
the material used during a six-step interpretivist process (Miles & Huberman, 1994). First, I read
my field notes along with the guided notetaking handouts and reading guides Ms. Stewart
provided for her students (and me). I then created provisional codes to thematize issues related to
teaching about America as an explicit concept and began identifying patterns, refining each
pattern to find thematic connections across each case and within each case.

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Analysis of Findings from Ms. Stewart’s Civics Class
In this section, I present two lessons I observed Ms. Stewart teach in her civics class at
Oakdale High School. The first lesson centers on teaching about national identity, national
symbols, and bonds of the nation. The second lesson centers on teaching about the civic concept
of the common good. Within the description of each lesson, I narrate pedagogical moments
recorded during the lesson and analyze the curriculum of belonging as it is shaped by how myth
operates in Ms. Stewart’s teaching. This integrated analysis also serves to discuss ways in which
myth operates in Ms. Stewart’s class and, by extension, provides an example for how to locate
and engage with myth at work within social studies education.

Myth in a Lesson on National Symbols
During a class conversation about national symbols, Ms. Stewart guides students as they
take notes from her lecture on what kinds of moral behavior and commonality Americans learn
through national symbols. Ms. Stewart informs the class that the national anthem of the United
States is “one thing we all know and that we all sing in common.” Michael asks Ms. Stewart if
Michigan has a state song. She replies, “I’m not sure, but that’s a good question. Songs are
important for telling us who we are. They contain our stories and we remember them easily
because we sing them so often.” On the classroom video projection screen, Ms. Stewart displays
a series of images: a bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. national flag, and a stock
photograph of a woman reciting the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance with her hand over her heart. Ms.
Stewart’s attention goes towards Suzie, a student spending the year at O.H.S. as a visiting
student to the U.S. from Taiwan:
Ms. Stewart: Do you have any symbols in your country that are unique like ours?

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Suzie: I don’t know. But we do have a song we all sing.
Ms. Stewart: Many Olympic athletes feel that hearing our anthem played is one of the
most moving moments of the Olympics. Why, then, is it good to share rituals and to
agree on some morals?
Henry: Because it’s like the fabric we talked about earlier, it binds us together. If you’re
an American, you know these things. Or should know them. And you should feel proud
about them.
Alice: Yeah, but you can still be a good person and not say the Pledge or refuse to salute
the flag.
Judd: Then you’re a Commie.
Alice: No, it means you’re still a patriot. You don’t have to like the government to like
the country.
Ms. Stewart: Well, our Founders were pretty clear about the need for everyone to learn
about our agreed-upon morals. This was what they valued in a moral education. You
admiring these symbols described in history, literature, poetry, and music. But many
Americans today don’t necessarily feel that way, unfortunately.

One of the pedagogical powers of myth is in how it inscribes feelings of commonality among
members of a given group (French, 2009). Ms. Stewart ascribes to the U.S. national anthem a
mythic ability to invoke a shared bond. Ms. Stewart presents the anthem as a song everyone is
supposed to know, identified as part of a cultural effort to create a community of commonality.
Although Suzie does not share which images may be symbolic of Taiwanese nationalism, she
does indicate there is “a song we all sing.” The question Ms. Stewart poses regarding the efficacy

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of these symbols and rituals exhibits a mythic stance in regard to Henry’s answer. “Should know
them” and “should feel proud” become rationales linked to an aspect of citizenship introduced in
a previous lesson, which Henry recalls as “the fabric we talked about earlier.” The binding
properties of this fabric are activated by the commonality Henry articulates in his answer to Ms.
Stewart, supporting myth to frame this lesson as part of a curriculum on belonging. Alice objects
to the totalizing possibility of this commonality by “refusing to salute the flag.” Her objection
that “you can still be a good person” pushes back on the limits of myth insofar as she envisions
America as a space to allow dissent. When Judd rejects this with his accusation of one being a
“Commie” if one does these things, it is unclear if becoming a Commie invalidates any mythic
claim to belonging in this lesson as an American. It seems having that status would disallow
someone to “still be a good person” in Judd’s eyes. When Alice counters Judd’s claim in
providing the incompatible logic between not liking one’s country and not reciting the Pledge of
Allegiance, Ms. Stewart reroutes the curriculum by employing a mythic stance of the Founding
Fathers to intervene in Alice’s argument.
Yet there is an important shift in address in how Ms. Stewart pedagogically uses this
construction of commonality, moving from a claim that the Founders desired this in the past to a
doubled address of “you”: the “you” in need of admiring these symbols is referring to the past
citizens living in the 1700s, but also the “you” of the students in the room today. Here Ms.
Stewart taps into one of the concretizing effects of myth in its ability to universalize normative
behavior as a condition for learning (Stivale, 2002). Ms. Stewart qualifying the state of present
affairs as unfortunate informs the class of her desire for a shared, communal moral sense or
moral education. The “many Americans today” is a concept that works pedagogically in the
service of myth informing this instruction, existing as something threatening for the

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commonality associated with the nation. Alice’s suggestions work to expel her from this
curriculum of belonging as any suggestion of not valuing these traditional formulations of
recognizing shared cultural beliefs and symbols of moralism and national identity are taught in
contrast to how one “should know them” in keeping with Henry’s phrase. As such, Ms. Stewart
uses myth to position America within her curriculum of belonging as a fragile whole, with its
commonality at risk when faced with a pluralistic set of competing viewpoints, diverse
perspectives, and the conflict that ensues when one stands up for an individual’s right. This is
worded as such in the a sentence students complete on their note sheet for this lesson on national
symbols: “When _________ (individuals) want certain rights, the _______ (fabric) of our nation
begins to buckle and tear, pulling us apart.”

Myth in a Lesson on the Common Good
I analyze Ms. Stewart’s pedagogical use of myth as an attempt to foreground in her
curriculum of belonging a privilege of the majority, especially so when she teaches lessons on
the civic concept of the common good. The power of the common good as an expression of
unification against difference appears frequently in Ms. Stewart’s civics class during lessons that
position rights (always termed individual, never as civil or communal) as objects that take
dismantle the common good. An example of this positioning occurs in the following lesson I
describe in which Ms. Stewart has given students a hypothetical situation to consider: should the
Oakdale City Council ban video games in the town? Students create lists of “pros and cons” for
supporting the ban on video games. The students show some struggle with articulating reasons
why the City Council may want to ban video games at all. Ms. Stewart notices the difficulty with
which students are having in thinking of possible rationales so she pauses the activity to have

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students reflect on conditions and characteristics of Oakdale. Ms. Stewart instructs students to
write down on their note sheet the word “homogenous.” She informs students that “our Founders
desired small, homogenous communities.” Students copy this down on their note sheet. She
defines for the class the word homogenous as “same or being composed of the same thing.”
After students write this down Ms. Stewart leads the class in a consideration of exemplifying
what homogeneity looks like in their world:
Ms. Stewart: We live in a small community here, how do you think this would be
different in a city like New York City? How is life different here? Turn to a partner and
discuss. (Students discuss examples for about a minute). Ok, let’s hear from Henry.
Henry: Here you can leave your house unlocked, but in a big city, you have to lock your
house whenever you leave.
Ms. Stewart: Yes, that is true. We don’t have much crime at all here in Oakdale. Do you
have to lock your doors where you live, Suzie?
Suzie: Yes, we lock our doors when we go out somewhere.
Ms. Stewart: You must enjoy not having to do that here then!

An unlocked door takes on a powerful role in transmitting a myth about belonging and
commonality, which, Ms. Stewart teaches, is something that does not exist in New York City.
New York City exists within this myth pedagogically as the ‘other’ of Oakdale in this construct,
everything that Oakdale is not. In this manner, Ms. Stewart leverages myth’s expressive hold in
shaping pastoral worldviews. By this, I mean specific desires conveyed in many mythic forms to
leave, abandon, or reject cities and urban landscapes for rural areas (Alpers, 1996; Garrard, 2004;
Huggan & Tiffin, 2010). Through pastoral expressions, myth often idealizes simplicity and

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sameness, exploiting feelings of vulnerability and susceptibility to the ‘outside’ or ‘the other,’
working to teach a provincial worldview that severs critical connections between one’s current
location and their wider world (Buell, 1995; Gifford, 2011, 2014; Williams, 1975). Through
invoking the pastoral, Ms. Stewart’s mythic pedagogy highlights in her curriculum of belonging
a set of ideologies that romanticize and idealize provincial spaces of sameness (“homogenous” as
she terms it) without acknowledging the problematic sides of such spaces, teaching Oakdale as
unspoiled by markers of progress (technology, modernity, growing infrastructure) compared to
New York City. This mythic pedagogy teaches the class at the expense of acknowledging the
complex realities of life in both spaces.
Unlocked doors are an idealized part of a pastoral myth of small towns, where citizens
presumably can enjoy the peace of mind of not having to lock doors, something the citizens of
New York City must regrettably concern themselves with doing, offering a cautionary note to the
myth that such is one’s lot in life to endure this hardship in large, diverse cities. Still, I am
interested in why Henry first things of unlocked doors. The “freedom” to not lock one’s door at
one’s house serves functions in a curriculum of belonging as a lesson in both commonality and
communality. Immediately Ms. Stewart turns to Suzie, who, visiting from Taiwan, is upheld as
someone who most likely has to lock her door because she lives “in a big city.” Suzie’s response
neither confirms nor refutes the assertion that her community that experiences crime, taught to
students as lacking homogeneity solely because of its location in a city, despite Ms. Stewart’s
pronouncement that Suzie clearly benefits from the commonality that America offers her in
Oakdale, a virtue of belonging reinforced in the mythic power of this social studies curriculum.
As the lesson progresses Ms. Stewart extends her construction of homogeneity to a
consideration of neighborhoods and how neighborhoods function in cities. She asks her students:

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Ms. Stewart: Have any of you been to a city that has neighborhoods?
Isaac: Yeah. I’ve been to Greektown in Detroit.
Ms. Stewart: Yes, a lot of larger cities have neighborhoods for certain ethic groups, like
Chinatown in Chicago. Good. Why would the same groups of people want to live in the
same neighborhood with each other?
Hollis: People feel more at home in small communities.
Ms. Stewart: Right. Why is it helpful to live in a small town?
Alice: Because we can help one another.
Ms. Stewart: But if someone in this town took a brick and threw it through someone’s
window, what would happen? I would call you mother. In a small community, we take
care of one another and we pay attention to what people are doing. Most of the time we
like that, but sometimes we do not. We might have a little crime here, but of course it’s
much better here. The Founders liked the idea of small, homogenous communities. In
what ways are small communities mostly homogenous?
Isaac: Everyone looks the same or talks the same or acts the same. Like here in school,
we’re all mostly White and everyone speaks English. Except you, Miguel.
Miguel: Hey! I speak English just fine.
Ms. Stewart: Homogenous means uniform and that there isn’t much difference. There’s
mostly agreement about how we live and what we want for our nation. A lot of people
want to move to Oakdale because it is small and uniform. This is a benefit of living in a
homogenous community and our Founders felt that would be a strength for our nation. It
would cut down on disagreement and conflict.

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Even though Detroit’s Greektown currently lacks several, if any, Greek or Greek-American
residents, Ms. Stewart allows Isaac’s example to stand in the conversation as an example of
demarcating boundaries. The reason given for populations to reside communally in larger cities
is to replicate Oakdale’s commonality that cannot be found in large cities. This rationale, again,
like the example of low crime and unlocked doors, allows myth to pedagogically suture violence
and deviancy with diversity and urban spaces in the scenario of someone throwing a brick
through a window and to “help one another.” The pastoral nature of this social studies lesson
teaches students that because of their size and diverse populations, these city neighborhoods
cannot support a sense of the common good because of their size. The small size of Oakdale, as
an exemplary contrast, is taught as desirable in Ms. Stewart’s claim that “a lot of people want to
move to Oakdale.” The reason why, we learn, is because of the absent of one the values on the
bulletin board Ms. Stewart relates to the class:
Ms. Stewart: Now if we look over here at the Core Democratic Values on the bulletin
board we see the value “Diversity.” This is a very controversial one because diversity
means difference and when you have different viewpoints and different people it leads to
conflict. Think about places with lots of diversity. Let’s name some diverse countries.
Will: China.
Ms. Stewart: Suzie, you live in China. Is it diverse?
Suzie: Well, it’s complicated. I live in Taiwan, which we call China, but some people
don’t call it China. But most people on the island have commonalities.
Ms. Stewart: Ok, so there’s disagreement. Diverse viewpoints, like the kind Suzie
shared, leads to disagreement and conflict. Where else? Miguel, what about Mexico?
Miguel: I guess Mexico is diverse. I don’t know.

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Ms. Stewart: Isn’t your family from Mexico?
Miguel: No, Puerto Rico. It’s a part of America.
Ms. Stewart: Do people there speak Spanish and English and other languages?
Miguel: Yeah.
Ms. Stewart: So we could say Puerto Rico is diverse. Iraq is probably a good example of
the problem with diversity. They have a difficult time compromising. There’s a lot of
conflict there. Places with lots of diversity are generally places of war and homogenous
communities are generally places of peace. If they’re so entrenched on how people are
different, then conflict is a way of live in these large, diverse communities.

Suzie wishes to complicate the way Taiwan is constructed against America in Ms. Stewart’s
lesson. Conflict stems from disagreement and disagreement stems from diversity which is in turn
a condition of lacking homogeneity. Ms. Stewart others Puerto Rico, despite its belonging to the
United States as a part of its national identity, which momentarily destabilizes the curriculum of
belonging taught in this lesson. Students are given time to write down some of the details Ms.
Stewart has shared on their note sheet under the heading for this command: “Give two examples
of the benefits of a small, homogenous community.” Within the span of a few minutes we make
an analytic leap from not locking doors in the small town of Oakdale to ethnic civil wars in Iraq.
In the request to “name some diverse countries” Ms. Stewart and her students do not mention the
United States. It is possible that diversity is already present in this construct beginning when Ms.
Stewart references New York City. The query that begins the conversation—what makes living
in New York City different from living in Oakdale—is left largely unexamined. Henry suggests
leaving doors unlocked would be a key difference, but it difficult to believe that in most “small,

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homogenous communities” in the United States, including Oakdale, doors are left unlocked. And
yet the notion of unlocked doors can be read as a mythic example in Ms. Stewart’s curriculum of
belonging: if you belong in a certain community, by a perceived sameness, you are afforded the
ability to leave one’s home unlocked. Whether this is a convenience or a luxury is unclear. Why
is this a desirable characteristic of where one lives? It is neither a right nor a duty in the binary
framework Ms. Stewart constructs in the beginning of the lesson. What an attention to how myth
works in Ms. Stewart’s class makes possible to consider is this process by which students are
taught to learn national belonging as a set of “practices of group identity” that work to “mark out
terrains of commonality that delineate the politics and social dynamics of ‘fitting in’…” (Fortier,
1999, p. 42). In this way myth operates in Ms. Stewart’s lesson as a strong marker of inclusion
and belonging through a pastoral ideology idealizing the choice or the space of trust in which one
can live behind unlocked doors.
And yet this lesson Ms. Stewart constructs is not only about unlocked doors. Ms.
Stewart’s misrecognition of Suzie’s Taiwanese national identity and Miguel’s ethnic family
heritage prevent a fully inclusive demonstration of shared belonging. Thus, it follows, from how
Suzie and Miguel are positioned, that they must be able to share details of life outside
homogenous comforts and stability. Suzie is quick to point out there are commonalities amongst
citizens of Taiwan just as Miguel is quick to point out how he identifies as American given
Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Suzie perhaps unintentionally thwarts the movement to locate
diversity as exterior to America by pronouncing its supposed other, commonality, is present and
at work in Taiwan. Miguel’s inability to comment and offer an example of personal experience
living in a supposedly diverse nation fails the attempt to other him. Diversity is singled out as
“controversial” in Ms. Stewart’s mythic conception of America because diversity leads to

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conflict and exists as the source for conflict in Iraq, an ambiguous example to use in this lesson
as it neglects the quite common celebration of diversity and multiculturalism within the United
States. Rather than claiming a pluralistic notion of diversity as an aspect, or even a value, that is
esteemed and admired in many narratives of America, Ms. Stewart prioritizes a mythic approach
to teaching the common good in a curriculum of belonging by suggesting diversity is to be found
elsewhere and, with it, conflict and violence. Difference is something that Ms. Stewart teaches as
“entrenched” within and associated with “large” spaces, exterior to the desirable homogenous
spaces of Oakdale. This demonstrates how the pastoral mode of myth in her lesson complicates
an insistence of belonging by mystifying students’ attitudes towards Oakdale, New York City,
Taiwan, and Iraq. A wider range of legitimate relationships to one’s home or place of residence
becomes problematic, tacitly warned against as something that works against the common good.
As a result, the curriculum of belonging in Ms. Stewart’s civics class enables students to learn
how “they (Iraqis) have a difficult time compromising” but we in America apparently do not.

Discussion
The mythic impulse in Ms. Stewart’s class serves to promote the sanctity of the universal,
which is deeply wedded to the power of the students’ capacities to belong as active citizens and
subjects of the nation both during and after participation in Ms. Stewart’s class. The proud
affirmations of the purportedly unique characteristics of both the national government and the
national character of the United States are deeply entwined with ideas of national and ethnic
diversity that work through a double process of particularism and universalism in the examples
of the two lessons I analyzed in this article. If a distinct American subject is formed by belonging
to America, then it is in no small part a consequence of myth’s ability to “immobilize the world”

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through how a myth can “suggest and mimic a universal order” (Barthes, 1972/2012, p. 155).
Ms. Stewart mythologizes national belonging through a series of confrontations and
contestations with that which is not-American in her lessons. The pedagogical form of myth
enables Ms. Stewart to naturalize and universalize these contestations on terms by which we (as
students, as citizens, as a university researcher) read our own sense of national belonging.
Through a pedagogy of myth, certain students learn they have the right to belong as Americans,
their attachment to the nation goes unquestioned. Yet there is always an outsider in myth, an
‘other’ whom, as embodied in Ms. Stewart’s lessons, exemplify what it means not to belong
when they present a perspective that challenges, questions, or undoes the curriculum of
belonging in Ms. Stewart’s civics course. Such moments in Ms. Stewart’s class lessons come up
against the very idea of national belonging, endlessly deferred in a continuous process of de/reconstructing a legitimate citizenship in America. In Ms. Stewart’s civics class, and against civic
processes outside the class in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, conceptions of citizens who
do not belong are in tension with how myths embody and particularize otherness to those who
are not of the nation and who must stay in place as othered, positioned outside the bounds of a
national belonging as presented in Ms. Stewart’s social studies curriculum. In the process, an
idealized national citizenship is (re)naturalized through a (re)affirmation of legitimacy and
belonging. This runs counter to the increasingly heightened calls for a more inclusive version of
civics within social studies education (Parker, 2008; Sapon-Shevin, 1999), one that
“encompasses those who are outside the norm, as defined by the dominant group” (Santora,
2011, p. 13)
Because social studies education is a powerful system of meaning that works to attach
significance to various representations of the world, mythologizing allows social studies

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educators to naturalize aspects of culture, history, politics, and other social structures,
transforming social studies content into universal norms. Barthes (1972/2012) terms this process
“inoculation.” It is the characteristics of myth that allows teachers to admit, acknowledge, and
account for a small amount of imperfection, deficiency, faultiness, or problematic characteristics
of some idea, object, or person. This immunizes or inoculates the object of critique from greater
scrutiny and criticism by downplaying its problematic features once we have spoken for a rather
minimal problem with it by comparison. Inoculation allows myths to ward off more complicated
and sustained critique, as in how Barthes (1972/2012) analyzes the way French commercials
acknowledge some of the minor blemishes and inadequacies of butter to deflect greater attention
away from its more serious inferiority to butter. Inoculation is what allows Ms. Stewart to
mythologize the virtues of homogenous communities when she acknowledges there may be a
small amount of crime in Oakdale, but not on the level found in communities that lack
homogenous populations, such as New York City. The pastoral ideal reflected in Ms. Stewart’s
mythologizing of sameness and difference simultaneously upholds and ignores the complex
nature of crime through inequalities and inequities, systemic social structures that foster crime.
The mythologizing at work in Ms. Stewart’s civics class does not equip students to discriminate
against location, culture, or history—context seems to evaporate or wash out in this curriculum
of belonging. Contexts and examples are historicized in favor of others, which subsequently
overdetermines the examples Ms. Stewart chooses to use in her instruction in favor of structuring
other places (e.g. New York City) as inherently and naturally opposed to reimagining and
rethinking the place one inhabits (e.g. Oakdale). The bucolic life in Oakdale is presumed in Ms.
Stewart’s lesson as having always existed that way. In Ms. Stewart’s curriculum of belonging,
the qualities of American belonging lack causality and agency, they merely exist, inherited from

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ideas we associate with the Founding Fathers. This also occurs in the lesson on national symbols
when Ms. Stewart claims “many Americans” do not share the viewpoint the Founding Fathers
are taught as having held on the value of national constructs, such as a shared national literature,
music, and so forth. Despite that “many Americans” may reject the need for such common
bonds, Ms. Stewart sustains the power of national symbols and upholds their pedagogical role in
her curriculum of national belonging. Myth allows Oakdale to be inoculated from the alienating
features of belonging as taught in this civics curriculum. Ms. Stewart uses myth to inoculate her
students against the alienating effects of small places. In thinking and writing about small places,
Kincaid (1988) explains how “people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture,
they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something, anything” (p. 52). Smallness,
and, by extension the homogeneity privileged in Ms. Stewart’s curriculum, does not champion or
promote context. Whatever historical sense or discrete set of causes and effects that can be
mapped onto broader practices of belonging in Ms. Stewart’s curriculum is diluted through
mythologizing local embeddedness and sameness over and above perceived threats of global (or
even urban) interconnectedness and diversity.

Conclusion
Several features of Ms. Stewart’s pedagogy are salient for understanding how myth and
mythologizing inform instructional practices in social studies education. First, in contrast to
alternative modes of pedagogy in social studies education defined as radical (DeLeon & Ross,
2010); critical (Segall, 2013); or democratic (Kincheloe, 2001), the mode of pedagogy supported
by mythologizing content through one’s curriculum and instruction privileges neutrality, denies
biases and partiality, narrowly defines concepts, refuses to embrace and take advantage of

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uncertainty, and obscures the limitations and boundaries of our world and representations of it.
Rather than drawing attention to the organizations, relationships, and frameworks for rethinking
insider/outsider statuses and other ways of living with and among other people, a pedagogy of
myth distorts and quiets diverse interpretations of the world. The kind of constitutive distortion
of how one belongs to America in Ms. Stewart’s curriculum is not a matter of false
consciousness, but rather a matter of being attuned and sensitive to any inexorable closure of
difference and otherness. This creates a kind of openness Popkewitz (2009) identifies in
educative acts of myth-recognition, a pedagogical project whereby the teacher is engaged in
“making visible the authority of existing systems of reason [as] a strategy to open to the future
the possibilities of alternatives other than those already present” (pp. 303-04). Social studies
education can challenge myths, teaching “against the global order and the ideological
mystification that sustains it” (Ẑiẑek, 2011, p. xv) and teach mythologized curriculum in a
different light, turned around and put to use in novel, surprising, and productive ways to forge
new meanings and new understandings that arise out of engaging with the gaps, ruptures, and
contradictions of the concepts we teach.

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CHAPTER 3
BECOMING-AMERICAN: EXPERIENCING THE NATION THROUGH LGBT
FABULATION IN A NINTH-GRADE U.S. HISTORY CLASS

Introduction
Many classrooms in schools and universities in the United States are increasingly
displaying a verity of related stickers indicating the particular classroom or educator’s office is a
“safe space” or “safe zone” (Mayo, 2013). The symbolic power of safe space or safe zone
stickers underscores a hope invested in such stickers that their visible presence deems a
particular space safe for all occupants, particularly students of minority sexual orientations in a
school setting. The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) offers a Safe Space
program that identifies a designated Safe Space as “a welcoming, supportive and safe
environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students” (www.glsen.org)1. The
informal curricula of these advocacy programs attempt to assist in creating educative spaces
where LGBT students (and, increasingly, students with diverse gender expressions) can learn
without fear of ridicule, shame, or verbal and emotional abuse. Educators and students work
together to channel particular frames of language and thinking that serve to structure what Pepler
terms a “social architecture” built to prevent bullying and victimization (2006). Distinct roles for
teachers and students in designated safe spaces predominantly attend to deeds and words,
encouraging or discouraging particular forms of student voice and peer relation (Doll et. al.,
2013). Such programs often do not take as their focus the planned or explicit curricula of the

1

I consciously choose to use the phrasing LGBT in this article as my focus is on narrating histories of people who
identify, or are identified with, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans* identities. I use the letter sequence LGBT in
keeping with the title of this special issue on “LGBT and Queer Issues.”

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courses that convene in such designated spaces; rather the focus is beyond the scope of any one
curricular area and is aimed at developing and practicing discursive practices for educators and
students that enhance acceptance and tolerance and minimize opportunities for threatening
conversational or otherwise interpersonal moments, preventing injurious speech from spreading
in the safe space. The goal is to prevent and intervene in moments of abusive or harassing
discourse (Espelage & Rao, 2013; Goodstein, 2013) or to help create a responsive educative
space that counters anti-LGBT talk by promoting awareness and inclusivity of LGBT-related
topics or issues across the curriculum (Greytak & Kosiw, 2013; Ollis, 2013).
These laudable goals, however, can be quite difficult to achieve with respect to the
tensions involved with negotiating sexuality and sexual identity (Airton, 2014; Gilbert, 2014;
Loutzenheiser, 2010; Weems, 2010). Indeed, my own experience teaching in both high school
and college classrooms has long given me significant doubt about the effects of an educative
space inclusive of LGBT issues that is rendered “safe”, a word synonymous with benign,
harmless, innocent, and sheltered. Such doubts lead me to wonder if the social studies education
classroom can and should be a safe space for formal curriculum related to sexuality and
queerness. How much novel learning and challenging perspectives and worldviews can be
cultivated in a space that is safe or restrictive in what is allowable to be said or thought? And yet,
not wanting to reject the necessity of a safe classroom that prevents harm, nor the necessity of a
dangerous classroom that opens up uncensored avenues of perhaps taboo inquiry, I want to share
with social studies educators in this article an alternative possibility: the social studies classroom
as a space of becoming. This is an educative space with a social studies curriculum oriented
towards considerations of how different viewpoints, perspectives, and epistemologies for
thinking of one’s place in the world are always changing, forming and reforming, and ongoing

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processes that are never completed. Reading a social studies classroom as a space for becoming
means being alert and vigilant to observing, noticing, and describing instances in which students
are confronted with external stimuli (music, images, art, literature, sounds, words, bodies, texts)
that induce some kind of change in how they think with and respond to their world. It is an
ethical space one that is constantly desiring change, flux, movement, and a swirling distribution
of felt forces—affects, emotions, feelings, moods—that move between teacher and student,
student and student, student and text, text and text, and other spaces in which the classroom
exists and in which students and teachers occupy. There is very little that is meant to be “safe”
about a space of becoming. What matters in spaces of becoming are not the fixed terms of
agreement that we can associate with a safe space; instead, what matters in spaces of becoming
are constantly negotiating interactions with ideas and forces that cannot be contained within the
intentions of a teacher, the manners of a student, the mandates of a curriculum, or the pages of a
lesson plan. Expect the unexpected in spaces of becoming, welcome that which pushes, prods,
and probes limits of comfort and familiarity. The spaces of becoming I present in this article
come from a ninth grade U.S. History course in which two lessons on LGBT histories are
analyzed, drawn from the teacher’s week-long unit on LGBT minority populations and current
issues since the 1990s.
The following sections examine how spaces of becoming can work beyond safe spaces to
be more inclusive of competing and contentious perspectives on LGBT issues. To do so I first
begin by consulting the literature on how LGBT issues are treated as curriculum within social
studies education. Informed by the terrain in which social studies education engages with a
curriculum of LGBT issues, I then outline a theoretical framework for LGBT histories in social
studies education that makes use of two concepts receiving significant attention in Deleuzian

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theories of educational studies: becoming and fabulation. After defining and illustrating the
utility of these concepts for social studies education, I follow the tenets of humanities-oriented
qualitative research by “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) across data from a
qualitative research study on social studies classrooms I conducted in 2013. This section
examines in detail how the narration of LGBT histories in two lessons of a ninth grade U.S.
History course work both for and against a space of becoming in this social studies classroom in
a suburban high school. After viewing these data through the lenses of becoming and fabulation,
I discuss some implications one can draw from this study for social studies education, namely
how social studies education can push beyond awareness and visibility for LGBT persons for
more radical curricular possibilities.

Review of the Literature
The social studies education field is increasingly devoting attention and consideration to
issues of LGBT sexual identity (Mayo, 2011, 2013). We can see different areas of focus within
this burgeoning research, perhaps coming into sharp relief during the 1990s when education
researchers sometimes referenced social studies when calling attention to LGBT issues in
promoting richer frameworks for multicultural education (Bloom, 1998; Pang & Park, 1992) or
in theorizing critically about infusing sensibilities and topics of queerness into curriculum
thought (Britzman, 1995; Summara & Davis, 1999). These broad considerations of LGBT issues
began to focus more sharply on specific curricular interventions LGBT issues could make within
forms of social studies education that are more attentive to gender and sexuality (Crocco, 2001;
Levstik & Groth, 2002; Mayo, 2007). Another fruitful strand of research born out of these
developments examines the intersection of LGBT issues, sexuality, and education for democratic

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citizenship. The knowledge content of such curricular concerns often remains at an expansive
level with a focus on the effects of particular dispositions for students, such as tolerance (Avery,
2002); trust (Niemi & Niemi, 2007); heterosexist ideologies (Bickmore, 2002; Schmidt, 2010);
or on the effects of approaches to student learning, such as critical literacies that include content
on LGBT issues (Wolk, 2003). Predominant in this research are moments in classroom
interaction where LGBT issues are framed around rights-based discourse, namely deliberating
and discussing same-sex marriage as a controversial issue. Goldberg (2013) suggests issues of
gender and sexuality help engage student interest in deliberating public issues as many students
express particular interest in discussing such issues. Hess (2009a, 2009b) finds that including
LGBT issues, especially the politics of same-sex marriage as an “open” controversial issue, is
productive, but remains “rare in many parts of the nation” (2009a, p. 117), facing significant
curricular gatekeeping from groups and individuals who do not want LGBT issues or same-sex
marriage issues discussed in the classroom despite evidence strongly suggesting adolescent
learners support same-sex marriage (Hess & McAvoy, 2015, p. 32). Beck (2013) underscores the
necessity of focusing on establishing and maintaining “safe” discourses for students when
discussing same-sex marriage in classrooms in order to safeguard the identities of LGBTidentified students. A prominent concern amongst educators when considering the place of
LGBT issues, such as same-sex marriage, in the context of social studies classroom is the
presence of homophobic discourses. Crocco (2002) warns that homophobic discourses make it
difficult to support “ideas about democratic citizenship that are respectful of diversity” (2002, p.
218). Frank (2002) explored school-wide and student-centered classroom interventions designed
around anti-homophobic solutions to reroute what he identifies as “a negative social force” that
affects everyone in a school community (p. 274). Homophobia thus appears in social studies

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education as a challenge to a democratic vision for citizenship education and requires an additive
element to social studies in order to be combatted (Marchman, 2002; Oesterreich, 2002)
What the next movement of research on LGBT issues in social studies education can
investigate is the effects of LGBT issues when they become significant and explicit parts of an
enacted social studies curriculum. Thornton (2002, 2003) has argued persuasively for social
studies teachers to visibly connect and express LGBT topics connected to traditional social
studies content knowledge in way that is more than mentioning or referencing. An example of
Thornton’s reasoning would be informing students that Alan Turing, one of the founding
thinkers of what we know today as computer science, was persecuted, arrested, and arguably
killed for his gay identity. This making-visible for Turing’s gayness must be connected to a
deeper curricular objective in historical perspective taking or in making connections to present
day analyses of the criminalization of LGBT persons in many parts of the world. No conceptual
domain of content knowledge within the social studies is removed from the possible intersection
of LGBT issues and themes. Students in a geography course could examine changes in
governmental regulation of LGBT policies and rights in different regions of the world while a
sociology teacher could have students explore the high rates and causes of homelessness
amongst LGBT youth. A limitation of Thornton’s suggestions lies in how such curriculum would
be received as a curriculum of awareness. The array of possible adjustments to the social studies
curriculum offered is within a conception of social studies as informational or factual coverage.
In Thornton’s clarion call for gay and lesbian inclusion and awareness, some aspects of social
change and acceptance receive less consideration, including aspects of queer visibility and
recognition related to political, social, and interpersonal aspects of civic life and social living. I
would argue a curriculum of awareness is better than nothing, certainly preferable to the

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curricular realities in some public schools, such as in Utah and Tennessee, where, at present, the
word “gay” is not allowed to be spoken or used by either students or teachers. But does an
additive process of “making time” to talk about gays and lesbian reify stereotypical assumptions?
Or does the inclusion of this yet still controversial array of social studies content knowledge have
the potential to deepen critical thinking skills and enrich civic dispositions? Both are possible
outcomes, but more research is needed in investigating how the social studies curriculum
operates with/in content knowledge expressly connected to LGBT issues and topics. Maguth &
Taylor (2014) believe greater inclusion and representation makes a significant impact. Their
research on The Difference Maker Project suggests that “the inclusion of LGBTQ topics in the
social studies will not only begin to dismantle the process of erasure for millions of U.S. students
but will provide a greater understanding of how heteronormativity operates in the United States”
(p. 24).
The effects of such inclusion are, however, framed as contributing to the creation of a
safe space. Maguth & Taylor point to this in their reasoning to “infuse” LGBT topics in the
social studies curriculum, suggesting that omitting LGBT persons, histories, issues, and topics is
in effect silencing, which can only serve to marginalize “the struggle of sexual minorities”
presumably both in the classroom and the wider world (2014, p. 25). Additionally, they suggest a
priori that teachers must create “a safe and relevant environment for the discussion of
sociopolitical issues for LGBTQ youth.” One may wonder, then, if a teacher will avoid any or all
attempts to include LGBT issues if the social studies classroom cannot always already be a safe
and relevant environment. This presents a somewhat similar dilemma to the one I raise with
Thornton’s assessment of partial success in providing visibility versus none at all. While I share
their concern for preventing harm to befall any student in a classroom, I do think an overly

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cautious and safeguarded approach may unintentionally backfire in creating a sterile, sanitized
celebratory exploration of LGBT histories, issues, and topics. As I argued earlier, goals of
establishing a safe space are admirable, but insufficient and could offer unintended consequences
of curtailing critical thought and admonishing inarticulate yet passionate thinking on the part of a
student in need of guidance toward more ethical considerations of the Other. I would once have
strongly agreed with Maguth & Taylor when they bemoan a reality in which “it seems as if gays
and lesbians exist everywhere but within the social studies curriculum” (2014, p. 25). But as data
from the research study I share in this article illustrates, there are some social studies classes with
a heavy infusion of LGBT perspectives and representations, perhaps problematically too much in
the case study I share.

Theoretical Constructs
A growing interest has exploded amongst educational researchers for work that mobilizes
ideas and concepts from Gilles Deleuze and his occasional writing partner Félix Guattari.
However, the field of social studies education has yet to significantly work with research that
speaks through Deleuzian thought or uses the vocabulary from Deleuze and Guattari’s sole and
co-authored works. Masny and Cole (2012) suggest that one reason Deleuze is gaining rapid
attention in the areas of educational research is because Deleuzian theory “offers an approach
that charts beyond the false opposition of anarchic relativism on the one hand and a pragmatic
subjection to already established norms” (p. viii). Deleuzian theories are often labeled as poststructural theories of difference and are used in instances when we sense in our research
encounters “deviation, deflection, or mutation” in our efforts to “recognize that judgment and
speaking take place through constituted systems” (Masny & Cole, 2012, p. vii). I employ two

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theoretical concepts for examining and interpreting LGBT curriculum in a ninth grade U.S.
History course that are informed by my reading of Deleuze: becoming and fabulation.

Becoming
Deleuze offers a “grammar of becoming” that situates the process of becoming as a co-mingling
of “perspective, point of view…voice, and all the other devices for revealing the locatedness of
position [that] ultimately situates thought” (Deleuze in Colebrook, 1999, p. 130). We can think
of becoming as a concept to help us think beyond the limits of how a student or teacher expresses
a given, singular identity. When thinking with research data through the concept of becoming the
researcher attends to how research participants continuously express changing reactions to
presumably stable content matter. Thus, when studying moments of becoming in a classroom,
the researcher should focus on affective engagements: moments of surprise, delight, disgust,
laughter, and boredom, to list just a few affective engagements that occur with moments of
becoming in a social studies class period. To pursue moments of becoming in a social studies
classroom is to focus on a process that is exterior to a subject, undergone by an interactive group,
or a “multiplicity” composed of student-teacher-textbook-TV-PowerPoint and so on indefinitely.
Youdell (2010; 2011) studied politics and practices of becoming in a study of subjectivity in
secondary schools for at-risk students. Her analyses of becoming show that schools are sites
where “knowledges, subjectivities and affectivities are produced, regulated, and erased and
where subjects, both students and educators, are schooled in the acceptable and unacceptable
forms that these take” (Youdell, 2010, p. 324). Jackson & Mazzei (2012) succinctly capture the
power of becoming in their assessment of its usefulness as a concept for qualitative researchers
in education. They identify becoming as a process that is “directional, away from sameness” a

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theoretical construct that demands qualitative researchers consider movement within specific
spaces, such as classrooms, movements among students and teachers that is “immanent to, not
outside of, the social field to which it applies” (p. 87). In her study of young children and their
“becoming” of their school curriculum, Sellers (2012) suggests that “becoming is all there is” in
a classroom (p. 89).
Zembylas (2003) discusses the potential for studying becoming as an effect of schooling
in his consideration of resistance and self-formation in the work of Britzman. Zembylas suggests
that an identification of the various processes of becoming in classrooms may help to give shape
to the “dynamic character” of teachers’ and students’ subjectivities. He adds that “even small
events within a particular cultural and political context play a significant role in this dynamic of
change” (p. 114). Such contexts are always already at work in fostering particular pedagogical
moments for teachers and their students in social studies classrooms. In her ethnographies of
student teachers learning to teach in classrooms, Britzman (1992) pays close attention to
moments of becoming in the subjectivities of the teachers in her study. Effects of becoming as a
pedagogical enactment in classrooms exhibit durations of change because:
…each of us struggles in the process of coming to know, we struggle not as
autonomous beings who single-handedly perform singular fates, but as vulnerable
social subjects who produce and are being produced by culture (p. 28)
The case study I share in this article comes from a larger yearlong study of moments of
what I term “becoming-American.” I argue these moments capture particular ways and styles of
expressing the idea of “America”—broadly and openly defined—through how teachers and
students perform ideas, visions, and invocations of America as an allegorical concept across
multiple social studies classes in different high school settings. Such moments and examples of

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becoming-American in the course of observing multiple social studies classes over the course of
one school year allowed me to experience the misfires, contestations, negotiations, breakdowns,
affirmations, and other passionate attachments that form among and between the teachers and
students of social studies classes when America appears in the content studied. The National
Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (NCSS, 2010) ask teachers to assume the autonomy of
the subject when their students are expected to “expand their knowledge of democratic ideals and
practices” and “see themselves taking civic roles in their communities” only by “recognizing and
respecting different points of view” (p. 23). Becoming-American is an unfolding of the subject’s
vulnerability in these and related affairs beholden to the social studies classroom when
conceptualizations of America materialize in class. In the case study of Mr. Reardon’s ninth
grade U.S. History course at Springfield High School (both pseudonyms), I focus exclusively on
how representations of LGBT histories of the United States produce particular moments of
becoming-American across different moments in the teacher’s lessons. Two questions
theoretically inform my analysis in this paper. First, how does an attention to these processes as
or against a type of becoming work in social studies education? Secondly, are such normative
knowledges, identifications, and feelings about (and for) LGBT histories in the United States
troubled by particular acts within social studies education? If so, in what ways does becoming
take place through the intended, the enacted, and the hidden curricula of LGBT issues in social
studies classes? Thus moments and examples of becoming-American in the course of observing
multiple social studies classes over the course of one school year allowed me to experience the
misfires, contestations, negotiations, breakdowns, affirmations, and other passionate attachments
that form among and between the teachers and students of social studies classes when America
appears in the content studied and especially so in the lessons on LGBT histories Mr. Reardon

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presents for his students. The affective moments discussed from this study illustrate the potential
for a critical history education to provide learners with a complex engagement with narratives,
and the expressions of such narratives, that challenge notions of history as mere referential
reality or a corresponding truth to an idealized version of the past (den Heyer, 2003; Segall,
1999). A poster I had displayed on one wall of the high school classroom where I began my
social studies teaching career addressed readers with the suggestion, “unfortunately, history has
set the record a little too straight.” Below this large lettering appeared black and white
photographs of Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and the other historical figures Thornton and
others used to open up the social studies education field to a serious acknowledgment of
curricular inclusion and diversity. I am interested in how this particular record, of LGBT history
in the United States, is fabulated in a number of many creative, confounding, and contradictory
ways throughout social studies classrooms. The case study of Mr. Reardon’s 9th grade U.S.
History course is an entry into this exploration. Somewhere, over the rainbow on Gay-Straight
Alliance posters in schools, LGBT identities are constructed through the dynamic narrative
making of becoming-America in social studies education.

Fabulation
Fabulation derives from the Latin fabulare, which translates into English as “talking.” Engaging
in the creation, making, and dissemination of stories is to fabulate. As a method of telling stories
fabulation is one expressive choice amongst many from which historians can choose to narrate
historical content (White, 1975; Munslow, 2007). Fabulation offers narratives a creative flourish
or a bit of embellishment that impress upon receivers of the narrative through colorful details or
memorable features that entertain. Fabulated narratives must be distinguished from tall tales,

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legends, myths, or fantasies. Myths, for example, are created and disseminated to explain a
phenomenon or concept (Coupe, 1997). A legend is a particular tale bounded in time and place
about a person the details of which are beyond any possible empirical verification (Dégh, 2001).
Fabulation in the sense I find useful for research on history education derives from Deleuze’s
concept of fabulation as an act of narrative performance that presents “larger-than-life” persons
and personages (Bogue, 2010, p. 19). Fabulation provides looser, more flexible and creative
renderings of stories, narratives, histories, biographies, and related forms of representing a
person, place, idea, or concept. This can allow for an increase in the diminished visibility of a
dominated category of peoples—such as gays and lesbians in the United States—to be
understood and approached by people from other categories in less constrained/constraining
ways. The paired learning goals of making strange things familiar and familiar things strange for
students are closely related to the pedagogical promise of fabulation. Thus, the potential for
fabulation in Deleuze’s estimation is that it can “electrify” any social context in which narrative
performances occur.
The history classroom, perhaps more than any other social studies course and almost all
other academic courses with the exception of perhaps literature courses, is always already a
fertile place for fabulation to occur. Fabulation works through taking familiar notions of a
concept and connecting the concept intimately to an audience by making the concept “fabulous”
(in both the literal sense and the figurative sense associated with gay male vernacular – history
can be “absolutely fabulous”). Fabulations can be traditional, verified histories that are slightly
transformed with a fabulist’s own personal interpretive modifications, often to elicit an
imaginative effect in the minds of the fabulist’s audience. I find much generative utility in
thinking of history education through the narrative expressions fabulation provides.

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To see imposed practices of fabulating America, one could use a number of classificatory
schemes to refer to what is traditionally taught and learned as that which “makes” America (a
middle class working towards the American Dream through upward mobility; a preordained
manifest destiny; hospitality toward immigrants; a tolerance for diversity) while also that about
America which is sometimes absent in normalized models of social studies curriculum (class
conflicts; divisive ideological passions; genocide coupled with imperialism). The descriptions of
these historical processes appear through fabulation expressed in the titles of commonly used
U.S. history textbooks. Through such naming, fabulating the nation for students in the U.S.
becomes a: Challenge of Freedom (Sobel, LaRaus, DeLeon, & Morris, 1990); a Call to Freedom
(Stuckey & Salvucci, 2003); and a Land of Promise (Berkin & Wood, 1983). Teachers and
students ostensibly come to experience America in social studies variously as the following
things: an Anthem (Ayers, de la Teja, White, & Schulzinger, 2009); a Progress (Jackson &
Perrone, 1991; Feeland & Adams, 1946); an Unfinished Nation (Brinkley, 2010); an Odyssey
(Nash, Salter, Scholl, 2002); a Vision (Appleby et. al., 2010); a Triumph (Todd & Curti, 1986);
an Adventure (Peck, Jantzen, & Rosen, 1987); a Struggle (Strong, 1976); a Pageant (Bailey &
Kennedy, 1991); a venerable coupling of Life and Liberty (Roden, Greer, Kraig, & Bivins,
1984); and even ineffable grammatical constructs, including America as an exclamation—
America! America! (Buggey, 1977) and a future progressive verb—America Will Be (Armento
et.al., 1999). One could reasonably agree with Pease (2009) that such identifying tropes of an
imagined essence of America operates less as a “collection of discrete, potentially falsifiable
descriptions of American society than as a fantasy through which U.S. citizens bring these
contradictory political and cultural descriptions into correlation with one another through the
desires that make them meaningful (p. 8). Considering how the framing discourses that regulate

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interpretive orientations of America for social studies education stops short, however, in
considering what these constructions make (im)possible for teachers and students. It is those
effects I intend to study as they come to life in the classrooms I will observe in instances of
“becoming-American.”

Methods of Study
This study is located in between the structures of an ethnography and a case study.
Ethnographies often determine how a given culture works whereas case studies are used to
understand an issue or problem through the specific illustration of a case (Simons, 2014).
Ethnographies tend to be experiences in systematic, extensive fieldwork over a long period of
duration, often a year or more in length of time. In terms of those characteristics this study is not
an ethnographic study in such a sense. For precision, I used the multiple case study approach
advanced by Yin (2003). Creswell (2006) summarizes Yin’s approach to case study methods as a
focus “in which the investigator explores a bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems
(cases) over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of
information (e.g., observations, interviews, audiovisual material, and documents and reports),
and reports a case description and case-based themes [emphasis his] (p. 73). Yin (2003) divides
case study research into explanatory, exploratory, and descriptive qualitative case studies. This is
in contrast to the general approach to qualitative case studies in education research that Merriam
(1998) advocates or the argument by Stake (2005) that case study research is neither a method
nor a methodology, but a choice of what is to be studied. The multiple case designs for my study
allowed me to take the design of my inquiry across four different classrooms (one of which is the
focus of the analysis for this article). My aim was not to generalize from one classroom case to

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the next, but to use the logic of replication to see how America is expressed in four different
social studies classes: an economics course, a civics course, a world history course, and a U.S.
history course (Mr. Reardon and primarily 9th grade students).

Contextualizing Springfield High School
The story told in this article comes from data collected in the 2012-2013 academic year at
Springfield High School (pseudonyms used throughout). Springfield High School is the only
high school in a suburban school district located on a boundary line within the large metropolitan
city of Washington. It is a Title I high school serving 1400 students in grades 9-12, 80% of
whom qualify for free or reduced lunch under federal guidelines. According to student
demographic data available in 2013, the composition of ethnic groups of the student population
is 40% African-American, 40% White Non-Latino, 17% Latino, and 2% Other. The
neighborhood of Springfield in which S.H.S. resides is illustrative of many of the distinguishing
features of a rust-belt American city: higher than average unemployment, a mobile student body
that frequently sees shifting patterns of enrollment and un-enrollment throughout the academic
year, and a neighborhood space heavily patrolled by local police forces to guard against high
incidents of property crime and assorted violent crimes. Beginning in the late 1990s, the school
district of the city of Washington has allowed a school of choice enrollment option for
Washington residents living outside of Springfield to enroll in Springfield schools.

Contextualizing Mr. Reardon’s U.S. History Curriculum
Mr. Reardon, who is the focus of the case study explored in this article, has been a
teacher at Springfield High School since the early 2000s. At the time of collecting data for this

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study, Mr. Reardon was in his twelfth year of teaching high school social studies. His specialty is
teaching the U.S. History course for ninth graders at Springfield High School. Mr. Reardon’s
educational background consists of undergraduate study in history, post-baccalaureate study in
history education, and graduate study in history with a M.A in history. He identifies with a
concern for “making history relevant” and “showing all sides of history.” While his pedagogical
orientations I observed rarely aligned with the hallmarks of a critical pedagogical tradition, he
does have an interest in social and cultural history evident in most of his lessons, although rarely
does Mr. Reardon employ counternarratives, “histories from below,” or other radical-critical
approaches to history curricula. He describes his role within the social studies department as the
“peacekeeper” who tries to “keep the parents and admin happy while doing what’s best for the
students.”
The U.S. History course at Springfield High School is typically taken by students in the
ninth-grade year, although high rates of students not passing the course in their ninth-grade year
means many sections of the course also have tenth grade students enrolled. In the section I
observed, all students were enrolled in the ninth grade. The course met for 45 minutes each day
Monday through Friday in the period immediately after the first lunch hour. There is no officially
assigned textbook. Most course content is transmitted to students via Mr. Reardon’s daily
PowerPoint lectures, handouts he writes, and photocopied readings from magazines, newspapers,
books, and other print sources, many of which Mr. Reardon downloads from the internet.
When I first visited Springfield High School to meet Mr. Reardon and inform him of my yearlong study of how America is constructed in social studies classrooms, I was initially surprised to
learn that he includes annually a substantive unit on LGBT history in his 9th grade U.S. History
course. The working-class culture of Springfield, its volatile internal school politics, and its

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location in a politically conservative region of the country lead me to think this space was
inhospitable to an explicit instructional unit on LGBT histories. What I discovered, however, is
that this same assemblage of social forces (class, politics, etc.) position Mr. Reardon to both
view and enact his curricular design of LGBT history in what he describes as a “matter of fact”
way, an approach he feels mitigates parental concerns about the appropriateness of this unit in
his course. Both Mr. Reardon and I discussed how we suspect this kind of curriculum would
either be more vocally accepted or more rejected in an affluent school district where parents
appeared to be more intimately involved in their students’ education than is the case at
Springfield.

Contextualizing Mr. Reardon’s Students
The group of students who appear in this study were from Mr. Reardon’s 4th period U.S.
History course. 26 of the 27 students in the class were in 9th grade while one student was in 10th
grade and re-enrolled in the course after failing the course in the prior year. 18 of the 27 students
were female and 10 of the students were male. There was no knowledge of, nor attempt made to
learn, by either Mr. Reardon or the researcher, if any of the students in the class identified as gay,
lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer. As a whole, the class of students consistently expressed
qualities of compliant pupils: rarely talking out of turn, quiet when writing down notes from Mr.
Reardon’s PowerPoint slide lectures, and completing work tasks during class. Attempts I made
to engage the students in open-ended, semi-structured, off-topic, or pointed informal
conversations during downtime in the class mostly remained unsuccessful. This was not unique
to the unit on LGBT History. Although the students consented to participate in the study and

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knew me as “the guy from the university,” their desire to actively engage in informal
conversations for the purpose of eliciting responses to my study was mostly muted.

Contextualizing the Researcher
My predisposed thinking on this reception of a LGBT history unit comes from my own
positionality as the researcher in this study. My formal public education through high school
occurred in a small rural town located in the Eastern Midwestern region of the United States.
Throughout my school experiences in the 1980s and 1990s, LGBT history was never expressed
or included in the formal curriculum. The only time LGBT lives or identities were given voice in
my schools occurred in the context of “special” gender segregated half-day lessons once a year
beginning in 5th grade in which the school nurse and the school physical education teacher
implemented a very basic, rudimentary form of sex education. During this lesson in 6th grade I
asked my PE teacher how someone might know if he or she is gay. I do not recall his answer
verbatim, but I remember clearly that it was an awkward, overly cautious mix of supportive
approval and an attempt to de-stigmatize the students’ perceptions of gay individuals. It was my
first move towards negotiating and incorporating my sexual orientation as a gay man into my
experiences of school. Since that time, I have had an ambivalent relationship to how I control
and perform my sexuality as one part of my educator-scholar identity. Although I was never
actively closeted to my high school (and now university) students, I was also not actively out.
Cultivating a non-stance made me think I could be permitted to more actively create and present
LGBT-related curriculum for my high school students. Mr. Reardon is a teacher who if read only
on outward appearances registers as a straight male, which is how he chooses to identify himself.
This creates for his teaching a context of presumed dispassionate or personal disinterest in being

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an “activist” or “advocating” for a “biased” view of history that affirmatively includes LGBT
voices and perspectives. Fears amongst teachers who identify as gay that their sexual orientation
will somehow position them as overly invested in a LGBT-inclusive curriculum felt muted when
I was in Mr. Reardon’s classroom. I often wondered if his enactments of fabulation occurred
primarily by virtue of his identification as a straight male social studies educator. Throughout
this article I approach the fabulations of the LGBT history unit with my own gay sensibility. This
provided an acute alertness to the historical examples, references, and content Mr. Reardon chose
to share with his students. Seeing my own “history” as I had internalized the narratives made it
impossible for me to distance my own interest and curiosity in how Mr. Reardon fabulated these
LGBT histories.

Data Collection & Analysis
For data collection, I followed the recommendation of Yin (2003) to collect six types of
information: documents, archival records, interviews, direct observations, participantobservations, and physical artifacts. During the course of the 2013-2014 academic year, I
collected the following: (1) printed samples of Mr. Reardon’s study guides, lecture outlines
assignments, tests, and projects; (2) copies of readings Mr. Reardon assigned to students, of
which there were none for the LGBT history lessons; (3) samples of student written work; (4)
weekly or semi-weekly written notes during each time I observed Mr. Reardon’s class, which
includes a total of six lessons observed for the LGBT history portion of the Civil Rights unit; (5)
audio recording of Mr. Reardon and his students from the beginning to end of each class period
observed; (6) audio recordings of three semi-structured hour-long interviews with Mr. Reardon;
and (7) an audio recording of an hour-long focus group interview I conducted with Mr.

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Reardon’s class in May of the 2014. For the scope of this article, I consulted only the transcripts
of the lessons I observed in the duration of the LGBT history learning segment. The other five
types of data collected throughout the scope of the study did not yield information relevant to the
focused consideration of LGBT history I discuss in this article. Both the semi-structured
interviews and the focus-group interviews contain some general observations and remarks from
Mr. Reardon and his students about this unit, but they are more of an interpretive reflection on
the Civil Rights unit as a whole and relate less to the examples analyzed and interpreted in this
article that come directly from observed classroom lessons, constituting one type of data
category collected.
To analyze the data collected, I used an analytic strategy that identifies issues within each
case and looks for themes that cut across all of the cases (Saldaña, 2009). This required
establishing a detailed description of each case and themes within the case as well as thematic
analyses across the cases, anchoring assertions and interpretations to the empirical encounters
within each case. Still, one can read this approach, despite all objective attempts at empirical
social science, as an act of fabulation itself. Surrounding one’s researcher self in the voices of
Mr. Reardon and his students and the affective environments of each lesson observed—the tone
of the lesson, the mood of the classroom, the voice of the teacher and the students, the reactions
to images and sounds shared during lectures—all become material artifacts presenting as data to
analyze. In order to bring integrity to my analysis of data collected from this study I chose to
conduct analyses that emerged as the findings emerged when reading transcripts and listening to
recordings of the observed class lessons. I knew a compelling story should be shared from what I
felt was a daring attempt by a teacher to offer his students a thorough exploration of LGBT

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history in a 9th grade course. I wanted a story to exist, but it was not clear what the “story” about
Mr. Reardon and his classroom was.
Using what Miles & Huberman (1994) term “a time-ordered display”, I arranged
emerging themes and ideas in each of the lessons observed over the chronological sequence in
which they were presented in the course. A critical incident chart organized key events related to
the narrative making enterprise Mr. Reardon employed in each lesson I observed. This allowed
me to identify key inflection points in Mr. Reardon’s instruction in which colorful elements,
entertaining aspects, or embellished depictions of LGBT history lead to the fabulation of a
distinct marker or identifying element of LGBT communities in the United States. Using a
descriptive coding strategy (Saldaña, 2014) allowed for the summarizing of each key inflection
point as a datum contributing toward the larger process of narrative making I wanted to
document and explain (and, later, theorize as fabulation). These key inflection points became
data for coding, what Auerbach & Silverstein (2003) term “relevant text,” which exist as signs
expressing LGBT history as a fabulation: songs Mr. Reardon played for the students,
photographs he incorporated in his PowerPoint slides, and pieces of explanatory or expository
text that students quickly copied down off of the PowerPoint slide and on to the pages in their
notebooks.

Findings from Mr. Reardon’s First Lesson
On the first day of his unit on LGBT history in his ninth grade U.S. History course, Mr.
Reardon begins the class period by playing the song “It’s Raining Men” from the late 1970s
disco music group The Weather Girls as he takes attendance. This is the first of many examples
of how Mr. Reardon engages in fabulating LGBT histories in the United States during a three-

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month long unit on the history of minority citizens of the United States during the 20th century.
With this song, Mr. Reardon fabulates the concept of progress for gay men despite the song itself
never acknowledging gay men, their histories, or their particular circumstances. Does Mr.
Reardon use this song out of a stereotypical sense of how and where gay and lesbian people
belong in the concept of America? The song has, since the early 1980s, been almost exclusively
associated with the gay male community and same-sex desires and pleasures in the United States
(Stockbridge, 1988). I look around the classroom of 27 students, no student is smiling, or
laughing with me. Mr. Reardon does not emote any particular emotion through his facial
expressions (nor does he do this for any song I observed him use). Characteristic of a frequent
use of playing popular songs in his course lessons, Mr. Reardon neither introduces the song by
identifying its title or artist nor does he explain its significance after the song ends. I immediately
recognize it as As a kind of silent disc jokey, he plays this song, as he does all others, and walks
around the room as the students listen. Sometimes the students are busy copying down in their
notebooks bullet point information from a slide in the PowerPoint files Mr. Reardon creates for
each lesson. But most of these songs are three to four minutes in length and students finish
copying the notes long before the songs end their playtime. So how do these songs work and how
do they contribute to the wider processes at work in these lessons that achieve a becomingAmerican for students amidst curricular content very much taboo in many classrooms across the
United States?
Much like the use of incidental music in a play, the songs curated in this U.S. History
course “address” the content and action being played without direct commentary or reference
from the persons on stage, or, in this case, the teacher and his students. But the audience/students
hear the song and cannot avoid it. And each song Mr. Reardon plays for students in these lessons

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contributes to how Mr. Reardon fabulates LGBT histories as examples of becoming-American,
ranging from sympathy to ridicule to compassion to pity. If America’s heteronormative society
had been without any change from its founding as a free nation, the emerging new forces in
LGBT histories appear for the students in this song through the suggestion of a storm brewing
through America’s landscape of values and morals (crucial to dramatizing tolerance for national
belonging in the history course):
I feel stormy weather/Moving in about to begin/
Hear the thunder/Don’t lose your head/
Rip off the roof and stay in bed/

At the end of the class I asked some of the students what they thought this song was about. Kyle
remarked it was about “how gay guys love men and disco.” Pushing for some historical context,
I asked what informed his connection. “I don’t know. Maybe dancing?” he offered. Rachel felt
the songs, as she phrased, “are really gay.” I asked her if she had a reason for that assessment.
“Not really, I mean they’re happy songs and so gay people are probably happy because of their
rights,” she offered. I wondered if the students fully understood the suggestions of the lyrics, that
the song’s recommendation to “stay in bed” implied: acceptance has started to storm in over the
country pouring liberation down to gay men who should seek this triumph to have more sex.
Mr. Reardon frames this unit on LGBT histories in the U.S. by providing a rationale for
students to learn what he terms “a very controversial topic”:
For one [reason], the gays are another group inspired by the successes African-Americans
have in their civil rights movements, just like women’s rights, and Latino rights, and
Native American rights. They were very active in the 1960s and 1970s and are still active

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today in struggling for equality. Another reason to learn about it is because it is a
controversial topic. There are many conservatives who think being gay is a sin whereas
there are many liberals who think being gay is a civil rights issue. And so I think because
it is controversial, it’s a good reason to learn about it and be more informed and have
more to add to the conversation. Another reason, not that the other rights movements are
“done”, but this maybe more than any other minority we study about is really current.
And really in the past two years there have been a lot of changes, a lot of gains for the
gay rights movement. It’s one of the frustrating things about teaching this, too, because I
always have to change it. I had to change it last Thursday to update the content based on
what is the news because things changed that day. Another reason to learn about it is
because it’s part of the Michigan social studies curriculum. I am supposed to teach you
about women’s rights, Latino rights, and gay rights. So there are lots of reasons to learn
about it.

In other units and lessons that I observed with Mr. Reardon, he never mentions student comfort
as a concern or attempts to preview his content with any kind of advisement or caution. On
occasion, he will offer a rationale, but not in the pointed and direct manner he does with this
lesson. He begins the lesson by offering a starting point, an “origin story” of sorts from where he
jumps off the presentation of information about gay and lesbian people in the United States, by
going outside of the United States:
To learn the history, we have to go way back thousands of years ago to ancient
civilizations. And there are lots of historical and archaeological evidence that
sexuality was pretty common and not looked down upon. Some of the evidence

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we have today that indicates homosexuality wasn’t looked down upon as much as
it has in recent years, there are depictions of homosexual acts drawn by cave men
on cave walls. Archaeologists have found Egyptian pharaohs and mummies
buried together as same-sex mummies. There’s written history on ancient Greece
and in ancient Rome condoning homosexual activity. It’s not until about 500
years ago that views on homosexuality change to a negative one.

A student, Jared, asks, “what caused it to change?” Mr. Reardon promises to answer Jared’s
question later in the lesson, but for now he continues building his historic timeline. As students
take down notes the instrumental theme music for the film Brokeback Mountain plays in the
background. This is the first song Mr. Reardon plays during the lesson. He does not identify the
song nor associates the song with the film, which the students might or might not have known. If
they did know the film it was likely as a synecdoche for gayness and being gay. Teaching high
school students when the film was released and in the few years that followed, I noticed that the
phrase “Brokeback Mountain” could be used in any combination of syntactical formation to
indicate an insult or leverage disdain or scorn at someone (e.g. “Hey guys, look, it’s Brokeback
Mountain!” or “that’s so Brokeback, yo!”).
Additional information Mr. Reardon shares during this moment of the lesson works as a
fabulation across cultures and across time periods. In establishing a historical context, Mr.
Reardon mentions “ancient Greek society promoted relationships between adult princes and
adolescent boys” to how “Emperor Nero of Rome married two men in legal ceremonies, one of
whom is given the same honors as a wife.” Mr. Reardon does not break down this information or
explain any significance of these “facts” (which strike me as hewing more towards scandalous

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tidbits from legend and could serve to induce disgust or shame in students). Mr. Reardon next
plays the song “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys. The choice to play “Go West” is particularly
surprising in the context of a U.S. history course given the issues of American exceptionalism,
imperialism, and Manifest Destiny that undergirds so much of the concept of America as a
historical national construct. The Pet Shop Boys sing about a utopic future that Mr. Reardon
could have pointed out during the playing of the song, a future that his students are perhaps being
called up on to help create and bring about—a people yet to come, as Deleuze would say—given
the urgency Mr. Reardon highlighted in his opening framing of the lesson:
(Together) We will go our way/(Together) We will leave someday/
(Together) Your hand in my hands/(Together) We will make our plans/
(Together) We will fly so high/(Together) Tell all our friends goodbye/
(Together) We will start life new/(Together) This is what we'll do/

The togetherness of the song and the students’ own togetherness coincide with information Mr.
Reardon shares with students as the song plays out. Students record in their notes facts on a slide
titled “Gay History in North America.” They learn that “in 1624 a man is tried and hung for
sodomy in a Virginia colony” and that “in 1649 a Massachusetts colony woman is convicted of
lesbian activity.” The next historical event Mr. Reardon shares fast-forwards three centuries to
1903 when, he rapidly tells students, “NYC police raid a gay bathhouse, and several men inside
are convicted and sentenced to prison for violating sodomy laws.” A student, Ryan, asks, “What
is sodomy?” Another student, Brittany, almost eagerly says, “I know!” Mr. Reardon turns to her
and implores of her, “Are you really brave enough to explain sodomy because I really don’t want
to explain it.” Brittany replies that sodomy is “when people take it in the butt.” Surprisingly,

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students do not lose their cool or display raucous behavior that I was certain was to be exhibited
when I noticed the formation of this conversation. Perhaps this speaks to my own expectations I
imposed on the class based upon how I expected a classroom of 9th graders to react to hearing the
word sodomy used and explained in a less than clinical through legally accurate manner. I
wonder how much more of the lesson is going to proceed through an annual (anal?) chronicle of
“Gay History in North America.” Mr. Reardon displays a map of the United States showing the
different years each stake struck down sodomy laws before the Supreme Court struck down
sodomy laws in 2003. The thrust of this inclusion of sodomy laws on the map is presented as
progression, an evolution in American attitudes towards gay and lesbian persons. This
advancement produces a becoming-American that challenges the perceived preexisting notions
and feelings of and towards gays and lesbians. The intensity of having national history fabulated
through sex acts such as sodomy is an element in the students’ becoming-American. Recognition
and acceptance of national belonging do not require approval or liking or tolerance or empathy.

Findings from Mr. Reardon’s Second Lesson
For the lesson on day two of the LGBT history unit, Mr. Reardon focuses on political
events in the United States from 1947 to the present. Mr. Reardon positions America as a
protagonist in its own search for sexual acceptance and liberation, as he does in his explanation
of the famous sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey:
After Kinsey comes out with his findings America began changing its attitude towards
gays. Kinsey suggested 10% of people are gay and this allowed for consideration of gay
peoples’ existence in America. Then we have Evelyn Hooker’s published study on

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homosexuals being what she called “well adjusted” and this helped the cause for gay
people even more.

Mr. Reardon then makes brief, passing references to Vice Versa, “the first North American
LGBT publication” and the Mattachine Society, “the first American homosexual society founded
in Los Angeles.” These groups are not described in detail, nor are their histories explained in
depth, but they appear to work as part of the dizzying tour through a LGBT American history.
Mr. Reardon associates the “start” of the Gay Rights Movement with cafeteria riots in Compton,
California that in his words “brought transgenders (sic) into the movement.” He follows up with
a reference to 1967 when “a raid on the Black Cat Bar in San Francisco promotes homosexual
rights activity. The Student Homophile League at Columbia University is the first institutionally
recognized gay student group in the United States.”
As students write down these notes Mr. Reardon plays the song “Macho Man” by the
Village People. The long association with the Village People and gayness goes unexplained or
unannounced. Mr. Reardon goes into more depth in explaining the Stonewall Riots, emphasizing
the riots “are widely recognized as the catalyst for the modern-day movement towards LGBT
rights. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people had never before acted together in such large
numbers to forcibly resist police harassment directed towards their community.” He emphasizes
that the victims of the police raids were not able to prove any discrimination or targeted
unwarranted violence occurred. For gay people, Mr. Reardon insisted:
there’s still a big problem because back then just like today how would you know
about it? In the news, of course. Your name would be published in the newspaper.
This was a time when every gay person was closeted. So imagine if your name

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was listed in the newspaper, even if you weren’t prosecuted, what would everyone
think of that? Imagine that in a 1960s society.

A potential for developing new feelings and new affections towards gay and lesbian Americans
are opened up through the foregrounding of topics Mr. Reardon walks students through,
accompanied by the songs he plays without reference and the images he curated to include in the
slide show.
To usher students through considering the 1970s, Mr. Reardon plays Diana Ross’ song
“I’m Coming Out” to accompany information about activism in the 1970s. He shares in one of
the few examples of connecting the music to his instruction by proclaiming, “lots of gay people
in America, as you heard in that song, are coming out. No longer hiding who they are. They
started to have parades and marches in support of gay rights. Some universities begin
departments of Black Studies, Asian Studies, and later Gay Studies.” During a slide about the
1980s Mr. Reardon returns to the Village People to play their iconic song “YMCA.” He
mentions some gains gay and lesbian people made politically, such as electing Barney Frank
who came out during his tenure in office. He also mentions backlash towards gay and lesbian
Americans because of a “panic” over HIV and AIDS. A student asked about the connection
between gay men and AIDS and Mr. Reardon claims it is “about swapping bodily fluids.” He
seems to pause for a moment before elaborating, “Maybe you should ask your health teacher for
the details because I don’t want to get into it, but sodomy results in HIV/AIDS being transmitted
easily, so AIDS becomes more prominent during this time among gay men.” The student does
not ask for more clarification and without saying more about the proliferation of gay activism in
the 1980s Mr. Reardon moves to the 1990s with facts on a slide about transgender teenager

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Brandon Teena’s murder, gay college student Matthew’s Shepherd’s murder, and celebrities
coming out in popular culture such as Ellen DeGeneres. Cyndi Lauper’s song “True Colors”
plays during this part of the lecture.
The final slide of his PowerPoint shows current issues and the status of current
governmental rights for gay and lesbian people in the United States. He emphasizes that if
Michigan residents get married in a different state, they lose their rights in the United States. As
with each lesson in the Rights Movement unit, the “group-a-day” approach comes with a
handout of questions Mr. Reardon wrote for students to answer as homework. It is exciting for
me to imagine a 9th grader sitting at her kitchen table in her home answering questions such as
“What developments in the 1950s and 1960s inspired the burgeoning gay rights movement?” and
“What issues is the gay rights movement still struggling to have rectified?” But the most
interesting question on the handout may be the fourth question, “What is the history like for
homosexuals in the United States?” Students are encouraged to create variations of political
cartoons to illustrate what Mr. Reardon terms, “the struggle for gay rights” in a scrapbook to
which they will add more illustrations with each subsequent unit of study on a minority group in
the United States.

Discussion
If it all sounds too much, it may be because it really is too much. Schmidt (2010) locates
within social studies education a particular representation that places students in a thought
process that follows a certain logic, that gay “must be bad” if students only encounter “images
and discussions” pitched from a space of negativity, making such negative associations “the only
visible representations serve an unintended process of limiting imaginable categories of gender

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and sexual identification” (p. 320). Part of what I find striking in Mr. Reardon’s lesson is the
presence of sexuality and sex itself. Gayness begins to look dispersed and everywhere in
American life in this lesson, leading to a becoming-American in which an American citizen can
take on sexuality different than what is permissible, governed, or allowed in the school. On the
one hand, Mr. Reardon’s lessons follow a linear, chronological path to show advances, gains,
and evolution for LGBT populations in the U.S. And yet the more exciting trajectory of this
lesson finds Mr. Reardon along with students embedded in the situation of a struggle for gay and
lesbian rights, going in diverse directions instead of a single path, establishing, as Semetsky
(2006) describes, “the plurality of unpredictable connections in the open-ended smooth space”
the classroom and America itself became during this lesson (p. 168). Uncertainty over
conflicting experiences constituting what we call America and the history/histories of America
we express constitutes a curricular space open to becoming. Consider again Mr. Reardon’s
rationale he shared with his students: “And so I think because it is controversial, it’s a good
reason to learn about it and be more informed and have more to add to the conversation.” I am
drawn to his use of the word “more.” More is not often better, less is often more, and related
maxims cast doubt about the efficacy and validity of Mr. Reardon’s perspective. But when we
see in schools, and in the national imaginary, a set of practices that promote self-disciplining,
censoring, and silencing sexual diversity and a multiplicity of sexual personae who can belong to
the nation, then more options are necessary. So rarely does it seem we in social studies pose the
question “is this it? Is this all there is and can be?”
King and Langston (2008) suggest that arranging national narratives that highlight
national belonging for minority citizens can “make the familiar strange and thus exposes
unresolved problems capable of endangering comfort and harmony” (2008, p. 238). The

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unresolved problems of the crusade for gay and lesbian rights in the United States is
accompanied by more images, more songs, and more pronounced claims from Mr. Reardon as is
evident in this lesson. The lessons on LGBT histories that comprise Mr. Reardon’s unit disrupt
the normative working-class heartland identities of Springfield High School. Fabulation works
through the images and texts in the slides and songs Mr. Reardon curates across these lessons.
The active forces of becoming-American in this lesson—from the song “It’s Raining to Men” to
witnessing the assassination of Harvey Milk—draw upon the own becoming-American of gay
and lesbian citizens in the U.S. in affirmation of the civic potential all students in Mr. Reardon’s
class have in becoming-American. Such becoming opens a pedagogical space in Mr. Reardon’s
classroom for students to consider what Wallin (2010), following Deleuze & Guattari, refers to
in his reading of curriculum theory with Deleuze as a “people not yet seen, a pedagogy for a
people yet to come” (p. 39). In this lesson we see glimpses of national belonging that
problematize molar or majoritarian conceptions of America.
The classification of gay that Mr. Reardon conjures up in these lessons is a function of its
dominant oppositional term—straight, which goes unsaid in his lesson—constructed in order to
institute and sustain patterns of domination. The fixing of identities such as gay/straight in
Springfield High School and the establishment of a stable taxonomy that assigns individuals their
roles, characteristics, motives, abilities, and so on operates in Springfield High School as a
microcosm of similar yet larger forces that constitute national belonging. This is what Deleuze
cautions about the powerful potential of fabulation. The path of resistance to oppressive power
relations is not simply through struggle with dominant authorities but also through subversion of
the categories we live by, an unfixing of identities and inauguration of a process of
metamorphosis. A becoming is a passage between categories that can undermine or at least

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displace both poles of an opposition. Becoming-American is a passage between a student before
and after experiencing expressions of the nation and national belonging in social studies classes,
the curricular past and present of their lives, so to speak. If this is so, then is Mr. Reardon not
simply reifying and fixing stereotypical and oppressive representations of gay people by
dredging up seemingly irrelevant facts and statements about gay people? I argue that he is not in
this specific context precisely because the very mentioning and suggesting that America is
peopled by gay and lesbian individuals must, for Mr. Reardon, be extended to his students
through first showing that gay people have existed as far back as “ancient history”, a history that
is expressed as much older than America in far-away places. I did wonder if Mr. Reardon’s
rather risky slide listing sexual practices in the “ancient world” upheld staid conceptions of
ancient Greeks and Romans as always already gay, chasing after boys and holding court with
their decadence in white robes. But I think for many adolescent learners these notions are not
received as common sense as they are for older adults. In an America that began for these ninth
grade students in Mr. Reardon’s class with Will & Grace and Adam Lambert instead of Ryan
White and AIDS, gay and lesbian history is controversial, but not absent or foreign. In this
context Mr. Reardon’s curating of facts and images that make gayness old and preternatural is a
type of fabulation. Mr. Reardon greatly magnifies a zone of proximity for the students in ways he
chooses not to do or needs not to do in prior lessons given that so many of his lessons and units
are predicated on identity mappings of U.S. history—it is the history of people(s), not one
singular people (White, straight, etc.) Should we be dissatisfied with all of this? I think we
should recognize the possibilities and limitations of such curricular moves, much in the way
Donahue (2014) does in his evaluative assessment of eight lesson plans that treat the historical
biography of U.S. gay liberation leader Harvey Milk. As can be seen in the lesson plans Donahue

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studies, and in the examples from Mr. Reardon’s lessons, fabulation as a pedagogical concept
strives towards an “undoing” of stereotypical identities.

Conclusion
The becoming-American in Mr. Reardon’s class plays an important role in reconfiguring
what we may think of as a “safe space” for learning with/about LGBT subjectivities. Accessing
and retrieving a repertoire of actions and impressions, many of which are selected by Mr.
Reardon, restores what Britzman (1998) terms a “contested object” for social studies. Such
objects open immediate room for disagreement and discomfort through the difficult knowledge
(Garrett, 2011; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) of sexual identity that many adolescent learners may
struggle to come to terms with in their thinking and feeling, to say nothing of censoring habits of
thought that come from their families, friends, other teachers, and community at large. And yet
contested objects are at the very heart of a democratic social studies education open to the
possibilities of creating effective and thoughtful citizens. Fabulation and moments of becoming
(-American and otherwise) create unmapped possibilities through such contested objects for new
identities, including the identities of gay and lesbian Americans unmentioned and unseen in
schools. The contested objects that constitute the LGBT historical narratives through fabulation
go beyond “safe” representations of the traditional “canon” of LGBT history curriculum, as put
forward by Thornton’s (2002) call for curricular inclusivity and on the poster I had in my
classroom mentioned earlier, with its portrait gallery of “important homosexuals” ranging from
Michelangelo to Walt Whitman. Unruly topics and examples of LGBT cultural and social
history, even if made larger than life through pedagogical fabulation, make the boundaries of
LGBT history curriculum less stuffy, less predictable, and less “safe.” This may work to push

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students of all sexual identities to think in less reified or constricted ways about what “counts” as
LGBT history and expressions of LGBT lives, voices, cultures, and experiences.
The impact Mr. Reardon’s lessons have for promoting and furthering equality for gay and
lesbian citizens serves to engender for his students a new space that creates a space of becomingAmerican. This becoming-American can help position students away from being the dominant
and toward considering the experiences of those who are dominated. The uptake is that
becoming-American is an unpredictable affirmation of minority peoples in America Mr. Reardon
has tried to fabulate. This changes the capacity for his students to think about who has been an
American in the past, who is an American in the present, and who can be Americans of the
future, a “people yet to come” that require social studies education to help students not remember
and interpret the past, but improvise and improve the future (Deleuze & Guattari).

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SUMMARY

Review of the Study
This dissertation is both a beginning and an end to the research agenda I began with data
collection in 2013. It is an end because it culminates analysis and writing about the expressive
modes I associate in the pedagogical practices of the teachers I studied. I have talked about these
teachers and their teaching at great length for the past three years at numerous academic
conferences. I suspect both conference attendees and reviewers/readers of my articles are by now
more than familiar when encountering yet again another description of Mr. Bauer, Mr. Reardon,
Ms. Stewart, and their students. This dissertation is also an end in the sense that the findings
from this study have already given birth to a new project, a book length monograph I have been
drafting that takes in additional forms of data from the study to include interviews with the four
teachers; focus group interviews with students in each of the four classes I observed; content
analyses of the textbooks, content standards, and other curriculum materials used; and many
more classroom moments than have been shared in the articles collected for this dissertation,
such as an assembly with veterans of the Vietnam War, an informational meeting for students to
discuss a school trip touring Auschwitz, and a day in which a circuit judge holds real trials in the
Springfield High School auditorium for students to witness. In that project, I consider a larger
range of educative experiences across four social studies classes to consider how social studies
education can be read across different genres as opposed to narrative modes. Whereas the three
articles that comprise this dissertation focus on pedagogical expressions of fantasy, myth, and
fabulation, my book project describes different genres by which we can categorize different
ideological forms teaching about America takes on in social studies education. Building upon

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and expanding the critical practices I employ in this dissertation, I argue in the book that genres
actively generate and shape our knowledge of America, from interpreting America as a horror
story in the gothic conventions of teaching about slavery and genocide, to interpreting America
as an adventure story in the epic conventions of teaching about America at war, to interpreting
America as a coming-of-age story in the pastoral conventions of teaching about Manifest Destiny
and westward expansion. While both are drawn from the study I conducted in 2013, the
dissertation is focused on the ideologies and desires that shape expressive modes for teaching
about America; the book is about narrative modes and their conventions that make teaching
about America always a choice of plot, characterization, and narration.
But this dissertation is also, paradoxically, a beginning in the sense that it represents my
first sustained effort to synthesize what it precisely is that I read, write, theorize, and teach about
as part of my scholarship as an academic. In other words, part of the long, protracted delay of
writing this dissertation is that I wanted a coherent arc for the stories I wished to tell from my
research. When I went on the job market for my first academic position in 2014, a year after I
had done fieldwork for the data in this dissertation, I had completed much analysis, but very little
authoring of a story. I had coded (too much and too often), but had not encoded a plot. Thus, my
research talks during campus visits were unfocused and without a plot. I talked about theories,
participants, and data, but I did not have a story to tell. This came to its logical climax when,
during a job talk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a senior scholar in curriculum
studies interrupted my job talk to ask, “this is all very interesting, but what is your dissertation
about?” I finally feel that I have a story to tell. While I cannot go back in time two years ago to
answer his question, I am now able to tell it. I hope this dissertation has made the telling
convincing and worthwhile, despite its limitations I discuss in this next section.

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Limitations of the Study
This dissertation appears to me in a different form than I how imagined it would look
when I proposed it to my committee in 2013. When I proposed this study I was chiefly interested
in applying affect theory to aspects of social studies education as issues and topics related to
affect theory were only then beginning to appear in educational research literature. Some
preliminary work I undertook in theorizing affect in social studies education gave shape to an
article I published in Theory & Research in Social Education (Helmsing, 2014), leading to what
I prepared for my dissertation proposal. At the defense of my proposal a crucial question was
posed to my intended research: how will you know affect when you see it? The answer,
according to most tenets of affect theory as it is operationalized in the humanities and conceptual
social sciences, is that one does not ‘see’ affect; affect itself is imperceptible to humans and
when it is perceived affect turns into what we would call emotion or feeling. Soon I began to
realize not only the immense difficulty in undertaking an empirical qualitative study of affect in
social studies classrooms, but also a realization that affect theory was an unsatisfactory theory
for the kinds of critical work with which I most closely identify. The whole of my work,
spanning my reading, writing, and teaching, is on representational issues: how we represent
different conceptions of America; how we represent time and the past; how we represent
different ideologies and beliefs about social studies concepts. Thus, my work cannot give up
theories of representation and its discontents, limitations, possibilities, and alternatives. In the
middle of data collection I realized this problem perhaps too late. A study I designed to study
affect in social studies began moving away from considerations and analyses of affect towards
critiques of different ideological forms in which curricula and pedagogies of social studies
education may appear. The three forms that appear in the examples I analyzed for this

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dissertation, myth, fantasy, and fabulation, are the three examples I bring together in this
dissertation.
A second limitation of this study lies within the kinds and quantities of data used in this
study. I spent one trimester (approximately 12 weeks) in schools almost each weekday observing
classrooms. This resulted in several hours of audio recorded class instruction, some of which was
transcribed and some of which remains to be transcribed. Each semi-structured teacher interview
and student focus group class interview has been transcribed, but very little data from those
interviews appears in this dissertation. My reason for omitting interview data from the articles in
this dissertation is one of scope. I wanted to remain as close as possible to descriptions and
analyses of classroom interactions, chiefly in the form of a teacher’s pedagogical practice. This
meant the student focus group interview would have had limited relevance and applicability to
the issues I discuss in each article. The student focus group questions ask students to speak freely
and openly about how they define America, what America means to them, and to reflect on how
they have learned about America in schools and elsewhere. Few of the questions specifically
inquire into how students connect lessons from their then-current social studies course in which I
interviewed them to the lessons and topics they were studying at the time of the interview. On
the one hand this means I have numerous hours of focus group interview data to code, analyze,
and write up for future articles that inquiry into how adolescent learners understand and talk
about America.
Similar to the limitation of excluding focus group interview data from this dissertation, I
perceive another shortcoming in my decision to omit the semi-structured interviews I conducted
with teachers. I conducted two hour-long semi-structured interviews with each of the four
primary teachers who participated in this study. While I have transcribed, coded, and analyzed

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those interviews, I left the teacher interview data out of the study for similar reasons mentioned
above with the focus group interviews. My aim in focusing solely on classroom interactions
made me feel I had to bracket out as much as I could about the intentionality teachers ascribed to
their curriculum and pedagogy. I wanted to look at how a teacher’s social studies pedagogy was
enacted in classrooms, not intended to be implemented, which I felt was the central viewpoint
presented in the teacher interviews. In hindsight I see this as a major flaw because my
dissertation presents the teachers with little to no contextualization as to the beliefs, values,
principles, and commitments they bring to their teaching. I felt that by omitting such context
from my study I could be given a greater affordance to issues of form, offering to the social
studies education research field a typological study of different forms of ideology we may see in
social studies classrooms. To do so, I reasoned, would mean not historicizing, contextualizing, or
grounding the teacher participants; to read them rather as placeholders for larger constructs and
ideas that could travel interchangeably to other social studies classrooms. At the same time, the
kind of formalist stance I adopted for this study responds to what I see as particular ethical and
political demands of curriculum and pedagogy that a focus on context seems less able to achieve
when formal, rhetorical, and modal explorations of classroom instruction are subsumed to
context.
These data omissions, however, mean I have more data to use in future writing, but there
is a considerable question to consider as to the appropriate ‘shelf life’ of the data I have from this
study. Beyond the programmatic, ethical, and legal qualifications of how long data can be
utilized in keeping with institutional review protocol, I face a more interpretive dilemma of what
it means to be writing in the year 2017 about data produced in 2013. Four years have elapsed
between the spring 2013 academic year when I engaged in data collection and what is now at the

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time of this writing the spring 2017 academic semester. The freshmen in Mr. Reardon’s U.S.
history course at Springfield High School would now be freshmen in college if they were on
track to graduate as expected. President Obama was only in the second year of his second term of
office and the undeniable changes wrought by President Trump’s election campaign and first few
months of his presidency were not present in the social studies classrooms I observed. Would the
myths, fantasies, and fabulations of America in the classrooms I observed be different today? I
think the answer is inarguably yes.

Implications for Social Studies Education
One connective tissue that most strongly binds and strings together the case studies and
articles together for this dissertation is how expressions of America often are taught within and
as practices of othering. In contexts of teaching, we can think of othering as a concept that
indicates various pedagogical practices in which beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives a teacher or
student possesses about a person, group, or community serve to objectify or exotify said person,
group, or community (Freeman, 2010). The person, group, or community can appear “in an
essentialized or overly simplistic manner” (MacQuarrie, 2010, 635). This results in a type of
framing through which educators teach and students come to learn about others in a process that
highlights differences of “them” from “us.” In this way othering works as a practice, unintended
or otherwise, of marginalization and exclusion. Practices of othering often result in “overly
generalized perceptions of particular groups of people based on behaviors associated with a
stereotypical notion of place” (Freeman, 2010, 2107). Pedagogies of myth, fantasy, and
fabulation express America in ways that permit othering to occur during social studies
discussion, as I discuss in the examples below.

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In the lesson on the common good in Ms. Stewart’s civics class, Ms. Stewart uses the
example of Greektown in an instance of othering. Ms. Stewart teaches her social studies concept
of homogenous communities through mythic constructions that enact a form of othering,
specifically “ownership, belonging, segregation, and racialization” (Freeman, 2010, 2107.).
When Ms. Stewart asks her students if they have “been to a city that has neighborhoods,” she
presents the idea of neighborhoods in general as the same as ethnic neighborhoods. Cities are
places that have neighborhoods. The America that exists in Ms. Stewart’s class consists of two
kinds of places: small communities that are desirable and large communities that are not
desirable. Ms. Stewart others spaces that are not like Oakdale, even when students passively
uphold othering, such as when Suzie confirms people in Taiwan lock doors to their homes. The
interplay of social, cultural, and geographic factors that give shape to the Taiwan in which Suzie
lives, and from which Ms. Stewart’s students can learn, disappears when Ms. Stewart’ teaching
others Taiwan from America. Many of the mythic expressions of America that appear in Ms.
Stewart’s civics class cultivate and promote a curriculum of belonging that works through
othering. China, Taiwan, and other foreign nations exterior to and ‘other’ than America serve as
“diverse” places in Ms. Stewart’s curriculum. These places are other-ed from Oakdale in many
ways, including Ms. Stewart’s assertion that “places with lots of diversity are generally places of
war.”
Othering also occurs in Ms. Stewart’s class when kinds of people, or their conditions of
personhood, are essentialized through actions and dispositions that are other-ed from those
associated with belonging as an American. During Ms. Stewart’s lesson on national symbols,
Ms. Stewart’s student Alice argues someone belonging as an American “can still be a good
person and not say the Pledge [of Allegiance],” but this condition of difference or differing from

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an essentialized American belonging is challenged by Ms. Stewart’s student Judd. For Judd, not
reciting the pledge is to be a “Commie” and thus a failure to perform an expected kind of
American belonging. Practices of belonging, such as reciting the pledge or listening to the
national anthem at attention, essentialize who belongs in/to/for America. Othering works through
these examples to exclude or expel those who would choose to dissent, refuse, or reject
performing such actions.
In Mr. Reardon’s lesson on the history of gay and lesbian rights in the United States,
othering occurs during moments in which Mr. Reardon expresses gay and lesbian identity
through cultural markers that put gay life on display in stereotypical ways. By playing songs for
students that ostensibly share some connotation to gay history, such as the Pet Shop Boys’ song
“Go West” or Cyndi Lauper’s song “True Colors,” Mr. Reardon both embellishes and flattens
queer identities through this gesture. This othering could have been minimized or challenged had
Mr. Reardon explained what the songs signified, why they can be associated with gay history, or
analyzed for lyrical meaning that would inform students’ historical understanding of the
struggles in the associated civil rights movements for LGBT peoples in America. Mr. Reardon’s
curriculum and instruction positions LGBT peoples as others as a way for the students to come to
terms with LGBT persons as yet another minority construct that deserves passing attention in a
unit that groups minorities together for students to study. In this way Mr. Reardon controls all
minorities as others in the sense that they gain visibility only as a conglomeration of other-ed
Americans to study in a unit at the end of the academic year after having studied all other
existing units surveying America’s history. Despite Mr. Reardon’s attention to how LGBT
groups organized for representation and equal rights, his pedagogical expressions of LGBT
peoples are themselves a way of organizing power and controlling their representation within his

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expressions of America. There are moments when some of the expressions of gayness as a part
of American identities threatens to transgress what is acceptable to talk about, to study, and to
know in social studies classrooms. When, for example, Mr. Reardon evades the question a
student poses about how AIDS and gay men are connected thematically within this U.S. history
lesson, Mr. Reardon is controlling this expression of gay America, othering both peoples with
AIDS and gay men, suggesting that students ask their health teacher for this knowledge.
Similarly, Mr. Reardon reaches the transgressive potential of discussing gay sex practices when
he becomes demure at a student’s question about sodomy. Rather than attempting to normalize
sodomy, or to deconstruct how sodomy as a construct is itself an instance of othering and
disciplining bodies through categorizing sexual practices, Mr. Reardon admits he does not want
to explain the concept. By othering sodomy as something that transgresses notions of acceptable
sexual behavior, Mr. Reardon upholds a boundary between what students can or should talk
about and what they cannot or should not talk about in terms of human sexuality and in terms of
belonging as a ‘normal’ American. As the teaching of LGBT history takes on new traction in
U.S. social studies curriculum, normalizing certain sexual practices may be one of the next
significant moves teachers of LGBT history undertake if they wish to destabilize the stigma and
shame that surround discussing and thinking about diverse sexualities in the service of how we
learn about belonging to or fitting in America both past and present.
Practices of othering flatten economic and cultural differences of national and global
markets other than, and outside of, the United States in Mr. Bauer’s lesson on the decline of the
automobile industry and industrial manufacturing in the United States. Mr. Bauer and his
students learn within a worldview that presents America as an entity, a beleaguered hero,
working with and against everything and everyone else outside of it. Ideas of othering in Mr.

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Bauer’s lesson occur through how notions of a global economy, and of globalization itself as an
economic force, both thematized in Mr. Bauer’s world history curriculum, present the world as
America’s other in a rather melancholy manner, mourning as Mr. Bauer appears to do over
something lost. Indeed, this sense of loss or mourning for an America that once was but may no
longer exist also occurs in Ms. Stewart’s mythic expressions of America through her instruction
on the Founding Fathers, as well as in how Mr. Reardon fantasizes U.S. involvement in the
Vietnam War as an epic quest that included lost innocence and a loss in trusting governmental
powers. The sense of loss that pervades the many points Mr. Bauer makes in his lesson creates a
faultline between an America that is stunted, defeated, and beleaguered. As a practice of
othering, this sense of loss contrasts an economic identity and history of America with an
economic identity and history of the rest of the world. The epic expressive form through which
Mr. Bauer teaches his lesson on the Industrial Revolution invites students to think historically
about its industrial identity as one of tension and competition, narrating a history of America in a
quest or struggle against other-ed parts of the world, or the world itself as one large Other. A
different instance of othering occurs when Mr. Bauer separates an idealized countryside from
what is figured to be less desirable city spaces. Forewarning his students they will “have to move
to big cities” if they wish to have “a good quality of life,” Mr. Bauer others the industrial city
from rural areas, ironically the places where industry “died out” and left. The object that Mr.
Bauer holds as the lost essence of America, its industrial might, does exist, apparently, but only
in the city spaces, spaces that are other than where he and his students currently exist.
Mr. Bauer’s lesson brings to the fore issues of cooperation against competition and
strength against weakness. Mr. Bauer reduces this sense of loss into one singular condition that
characterizes (and others) the world from America, a condition that can be seen all that is

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“different about the American economy now from the past,” as he suggests to his class. Indeed,
this one large Other as a role for the idea of the world as a global entity to occupy in Mr. Bauer’s
world history class is an important implication for social studies educators to consider how world
history curriculum always already others the world from America. Myth, fantasy, and fabulation
are expressive forms of curriculum and pedagogy that can both reinforce yet also complicate
national identity and national narratives and a world history curriculum aware of such practices
and possibilities can work on the very tentative nature of both “America” and “the world” as
constructed ideas. Critiquing practices of othering and pointing out how they operate in social
studies education demonstrate how nations exist as unfixed and flexible constructs (Bhabha,
1990, 1994). An overarching theme of the studies collected for this dissertation is in how
America often appears as a concept to be taught or learned only in relation to “what lies outside
or beyond it” (Bhabha, 1990, p. 4). Othering helps create this relation when a curriculum and
pedagogy of myth, fantasy, and fabulation render ideas in social studies instruction to appear
simple and straightforward. An alternative can be found in how Bhahba (1990) presents the
problem of othering, a problem of “outside/inside” that can instead be taught by “incorporating
‘new’ people in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in
the political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces
for political representation” (p. 4).

Future Directions for this Research
Since 2009 I have taught methods courses to students learning to teach social studies
education at the secondary level. This teaching engages students in considering different
methods, materials, approaches, practices, problems, and styles of how we teach and learn

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content matter associated with social studies education. Through this teaching I have engaged
preservice teachers in considering how they choose, select, design, and implement particular
orientations to social studies curriculum. One implication this dissertation has for my teaching is
in how I ask students to attend to their own style of teaching social studies. Asking students to
become conscious of the choices they make in selecting content, as constrained as such
selections are by standard, testing, and textbooks, is in a way an aesthetic choice related to
formal considerations of one’s pedagogical style. This instance of asking is in service of a larger
question guiding my teaching: what are we doing when we engage learners in social studies
education? This dissertation has given my teaching an array of ideas to use in my teaching when
helping students conceptualize teaching practices in social studies. While no social studies
educator consciously approaches planning an instructional lesson or unit with an intention to
teach through myth, fantasy, or fabulation, the educator must, however, pause to reflect on what
their teaching intendeds to do—or could do—during moments of instruction in their classroom.
Many of the topics and concepts I include in my methods courses have focused on
learning practices adolescent learners undertake as students in social studies methods courses.
The orientation this approach offers is one focused on placing teenage students as the central
object of inquiry in methods courses, asking questions about how to engage students in historical
thinking, how to support adolescent literacy practices through specific instructional strategies,
how to design assessments that will measure student thinking and represent patterns of growth in
terms of acquiring content knowledge, facility with critical thinking skills, and competency in
civic practices, such as discussion, deliberation, and debate. In short, my methods courses have
focused on what students do (or can or should do) rather than what social studies teachers do. In
a way this is perhaps a consequence of what I see as a desire to appease my own methods

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students when they remark that their teacher education program has not served them well to meet
the challenges and demands of working in secondary classrooms. By focusing on students, we
can remove ourselves from speculation, critique, and consideration. We can dissect what it is that
students do, or fail to do, that result in the realities we face in social studies classrooms. But
working on this dissertation for the greater part of the past four years of teaching social studies
methods courses has placed the form of the teacher more clearly in view of how I construct a
social studies methods course.
With this study I had planned to construct a theory as to how America as a concept
constructs and deconstructs in social studies education. In early stages of formal data analysis,
for each amount of time I began coding moments when the teachers and students offered specific
examples of America as a concept or construct I spent twice as much time reading the research
literature about nationalism, nationhood, and theories of the nation. I soon realized I would have
needed a more coherent study design and theoretical framework that took into account how
students and teachers approach the idea of a nation and how America as a nation fits (or not)
within different approaches offered by teachers and students in this study.
The challenge of doing such a study is also one of its more alluring aspects of inquiry for
me because of the lack of overt attention in secondary social studies education to discussions of
what America is. In secondary social studies classrooms America is an implied concept,
operating as part of an implicit curriculum rather than in an explicit curriculum. There is no unit,
for example, that I can find in a secondary social studies textbook or curriculum document that
asks students to define America; no unit with the title “What is America?” or “Elements of
America.” One way to respond to this is to acknowledge that a study about the United States in
the United States would presuppose students and teachers begin social studies education with a

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shared understanding of what America is. However, when I discussed this dissertation in its early
states, and indicated I was studying “how teachers and students study America,” an immediate
response was often “America means much more than the United States, and so you need to be
sure you are aware of that.” I met such responses in part with slight irritation on the notion that I
would not have yet considered this possibility, but I mostly met such responses with a sense of
acknowledgment that I was studying something of importance if my topic consistently produced
such a response from other people.
If I positioned myself as an elementary social studies education researcher, my
dissertation would likely have attended more to specific instances in the explicit curriculum.
Studying elementary social studies education, especially with its dominant design of presenting
curriculum in the form of “expanding horizons” (Halvorsen, 2009, 2012), would likely have
provided this study with a more direct accessibility for examples in the explicit curriculum that
explore how teachers and students conceive of America. Questions of “what is a nation?” and
“what do Americans believe?” can be read more directly in elementary social studies curriculum.
The more common disciplinary approach to social studies education in the secondary grades
seems to presume teachers and students have no need to grapple with questions of defining
America; conceptualizing America is a foregone conclusion when the terms of inquiry fall into
disciplinary modes of learning the history, geography, culture, political systems, economic
systems, and social systems of the United States (as America).
As the study unfolded, however, it has enabled me to practice a form of research that
examines ideology in different forms and has required of me an interpretive methodology
grounded in critical practices of reading classroom pedagogies as a “text.” One overarching
argument that connects the three articles in this dissertation offers social studies educators the

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argument that an inherently ideological aspect of social studies education is in the particular form
of its pedagogical and curricular expression, indivisible from any particular pedagogical and
curricular content (especially the content found in textbooks and standards). By examining the
expressive modes of instruction in social studies classrooms we can shift our attention to how
social studies teachers constitute the objects of their pedagogy, which in this dissertation study
have been particular fantasies about America. To think in this way requires reading curriculum
and pedagogy not as distinct objects, but as expressions to be read that make certain readings of
the world and of ideas possible. Reading curriculum and pedagogy as text is one methodological
orientation suitable for critical work in social studies education research. As Segall (2002) asserts
“there is no one, single, authorized text of any phenomenon…from which to start one’s
(different) reading; no agreed-on version on which to base one’s investigation” (p. 8). The
expressions I have analyzed in this dissertation are ones that appeared to me not only through the
processes of coding I employed to find emerging themes, but also ones that I felt to be of crucial
significance, samples I selected to exhibit and explain. They came to me just as much as I came
to them. They stuck out and demanded to be read. The analyses of the findings I assembled in
these three articles are by no means generalizable nor final; rather, they are examples that allow
me to construct a theory of expressive modes and pedagogical forms that give shape to
ideologies about America in social studies teaching.

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WORKS CITED

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WORKS CITED

Bhabha, H. (1994). Locations of culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (Ed.) (1990). Nation and narration. New York, NY: Routledge.
Freeman, L.M. (2010). Other/otherness. In B. Warff (Ed.), Encyclopedia of geography: Volume
1 (pp. 2107-2108). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Halvorsen, A. L. (2009). Back to the future: The expanding communities curriculum in
geography education. The social studies, 100(3), 115-120.
Halvorsen. A.L. (2013). A history of elementary social studies: Romance and reality. New York,
NY: Peter Lang.
Helmsing, M. (2014). Virtuous subjects: A critical analysis of the affective substance of social
studies education. Theory & Research in Social Education, 42(1), 127-140.
MacQuarrie, C. (2010). Othering. In A.J. Mills, G. Durepos, & E. Wiebe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of
case study research: Volume 1 (pp. 635-639). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Segall, A. (2002). Disturbing practice: Reading teacher education as text. New York, NY: Peter
Lang.

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