More on Fighting Bias in History Textbooks

Texas Church

In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant military commander in American history and certainly the most pious. United States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, “Soldier of the Cross,” and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant.
--Jeff Sharlet, "Through a glass, darkly: How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history" (Harper's Magazine, 2006)

So let's assume the worst: the Texas fundamentalists on the state Board of Education succeed in their new attempt to impose an extreme religious right bias on the state history standards. The textbook industry predictably runs its race to the bottom by appeasing these ideologues, adding chapters claiming America was founded as a Christian nation, framing social issues from women's rights to gay rights to the environment in a faith-based, fundamentalist "light," and so forth. And high school history teachers in Texas - and, since all textbooks aim to capture the Texas market, practically every other state in America - find themselves having to teach with these blindered texts. How can the teachers simultaneously use the textbook and, as James Loewen urges, "teach against" it?

By a delicious coincidence, the Texas news came out just as I was writing about plans to teach history next school year by having students create an online, wiki-based "critical companion" to whatever textbooks we'll be using in our classes. The Texas agenda makes the project more relevant still. And best of all, several readers have weighed in on possible weaknesses of the idea, helping me think harder about how to structure it to optimal effect. I hope you'll do the same.

Claus von Zastrow summarized the idea best in a comment to the "Calling Bullsh!t on Textbooks" post:

You describe a wonderful learning process: Read a textbook for what it is worth; Call bulls**t when it seems facile or exclusionary; Do research online or elsewhere to verify/challenge the textbook's assumptions, or to discover a fuller account. At the end of this process, you know enough about the textbook to render a critique, you know about ideas/facts/perspectives not presented in the textbook, you know a bit more about how and where to find information, and you have a more fully refined bulls**t sensor. And you've broadened your body of knowledge considerably.

This goes well beyond the argument (or perhaps straw man?) that we don't need to know facts because we can look them up online.

The approach, it seems to me, values both knowledge and skills.

Then Jodi Rice identified a possible pitfall in the "Why Teachers Should Blog" post:

There *is* always the danger that some people might take things too far in the other direction, using what they believe are their "critical thinking" skills to criticize and eschew legitimate sources of information and replacing those legitimate sources with their own. Cf: Conservapedia.  (Their question would have seemed to be "to what degree, and in what ways, are fundamentalist Christians and other ultra-conservatives represented in Wikipedia?") Not that I'd advocate Wikipedia as a replacement for a good text or other sources of information, but I do think it goes a bit far to say that "Conservapedia is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, because most of the senior staff are real people." Oy.

I replied:

Jodi, it's a good point, but actually an event I'd welcome as a teachable moment re: internet literacy, website evaluation and, best of all, open debate about any controversial directions students might take such a project.

A great thing about making the project wiki-based is that any student making the move you imagine would be doing so publicly, and would be open to equally public challenge on the same wiki page. I can't help but think it would lead to deeper learning. (I actually saw this happen in a Moodle forum a few years ago, in which Christian students, apparently assuming all of their classmates shared their beliefs, characterized atheists as "immoral," and opened a floodgate of atheist, agnostic, and Buddhist students in the classroom challenging the caricature - totally unplanned, and one of the most valuable learning experiences for many students, and their parents, in the class.)

Jodi agreed with the website evaluation and internet literacy points, but pointed out some possible "instructional design" flaws that demand attention (emphasis added):

I guess my point about Conservapedia, in particular, is that it is moderated such that people posting attempts to balance its point of view will be excised -- Conservapedia's own statement about how it is moderated is quite revealing. They believe they are being "truthful" and unbiased/unpartisan, but the fact that their site is named Conservapedia already undermines that claim.

What I worry is that, in the name of doing the same kind of activity you are doing by having students create their own texts through wikis, some people may be creating texts that are just as limited as the textbooks they're setting aside, with the added danger that because they're creating their own texts, they're not objective about them at all. After all, Conservapedia began as a classroom project by a history teacher who believed Wikipedia was "anti-Christian" and "anti-American." I'm thinkin' he ain't so much about the objectivity.

That's as far as we've come.

A few responses, before I turn it over to anybody out there wanting to play:

First, it bears pointing out that I'll be implementing this project at an international school in Singapore, with students from Asian, European, North and South American, Middle Eastern, and African backgrounds. So the danger of a single ideology dominating the project is minimal (except, perhaps, in an economic sense, since all of these students will occupy positions of economic privilege).

Second, I picture the students not so much "creat[ing] their own texts [and] setting their textbooks aside" as putting their textbooks front and center, and creating critical responses to (quoting Claus) those textbooks' biases, omissions, perspectives, and assumptions on the wiki. Concretely, I'm picturing chapter by chapter summaries, each followed by a "controversies" section a la Wikipedia.

Using our hypothetical example of the Texas fundamentalist U.S. History textbook, that would mean students would summarize, say, its section about America being founded as "a Christian nation," and then would address the controversies surrounding that view in the "Controversies" section.

Imagine "Billy" adding a critique of the founders-as-Christians perspective by citing the many Deists among the founders, and "Jane" disagreeing with that. A poorly-moderated wiki would allow Jane to simply delete Billy's text; a better-moderated would one require her to edit it with her own, sourced, refutation of Billy's claim. And, as in Wikipedia, the "Discussions" page would be run by a moderator playing umpire to all changes, based on the background debate between the disagreeing parties taking place on that discussions page.

Third, as for "objectivity," I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the term. Historical narratives are never objective, as far as I can see, by virtue of the simple fact that the historian selects what to include and exclude, what to emphasize and marginalize. So rather than aiming for objectivity, "accuracy, veracity, validity, and balance" might be better grails for the quest.

Jodi's input makes me think that perhaps certain key historical "angles of analysis" should be parceled out to students from the start: the "lenses" of gender, race, economic class, religious viewpoints, international relations (e.g., colonizing v. colonized), bourgeois and workers, for starters. Each student or group representing each factor would criticize the textbook in each "Controversies" section following each summary.

That's as far as I can take it right now. What excites me most about the idea is that it seems sure to lead to real debates among the students, rather than "schooly," teacher-assigned ones. Equally exciting is the idea that students will learn not only how to read what is in texts, but as importantly - what isn't.

This was long, but if you made it this far, I really hope you'll extend or strengthen the idea in comments. (Thanks to those of you who have already.)

Who knows? It might one day help Texas avoid an educational Alamo.