By Ousmane Power-Greene, Worcester Clemente faculty member
“Professor, you’re not gonna believe it!” my student Rachel announced as I rushed into my US history class two minutes late.
“What’s that?” I asked, pulling my laptop from my leather bag and setting it down.
“My daughter’s teacher didn’t like the paper she wrote on Christopher Columbus—you know, based on what we read in our book?”
There were scattered chuckles, and one “oh, lord” from the other adult students who appeared eager to see the look on my face once I heard the story.
“Really?” I patted my front pants pocket in search of the toggle I needed to connect my laptop to the projector.
“Nope. In fact, she even called me in for a parent-teacher conference about it.”
I raised my eyebrows, intrigued. “So, what’d your daughter write?”
Rachel motioned to our book, James Loewen’s, Lies My Teacher Told Me. “The stuff in there? You know, about Columbus and the genocide of the Native Americans? The teacher asked my daughter to write a paper for Columbus Day. So that’s what she did. But the truth, you know?”
Apparently, when Rachel’s daughter summarized Loewen’s first chapter, which exposed the unsavory truth about Christopher Columbus for this paper, her teacher assumed she had made it all up to get attention. But when Rachel told the teacher her daughter got all of it from Loewen’s book, the teacher was stunned.
“But good news, Professor. By the end of the meeting, that teacher asked if she could copy the chapter and give it to the other fourth-grade teachers!”
Someone clapped, then the rest of the class joined in the applause, and Rachel stood and bowed as if she had just performed a magic trick. And, actually, in some ways the turn of events in Rachel’s story represents a certain kind of magic—an act that might seem to some as impossible. I’m not sure about you, but I never heard of a teacher so dramatically changing his or her perspective when confronted with a new set of ideas. Miraculous, indeed. Hopeful, too.
During a time when the United States confronts a new “moral panic” over what is taught in schools, Rachel’s story epitomizes the reason the Clemente Course in the Humanities has meant so much to me. In fact, my entire career as a community educator, camp director, high school teacher, and college professor has been rooted in my desire to share with my students ideas that challenge the grand narratives that inform so much of how we think about the human experience. I didn’t begin teaching—let alone teaching history—to force my students to memorize trivial factoids about this or that president, or to impress them with my catalog of knowledge about the Civil War (or any war, for that matter).
Rather, I teach because I love to share with people what I learn about the decisions people make (despite risking bodily harm) to challenge policies and practices that perpetuate inequality. Humanities courses provide us with indispensable intellectual tools necessary to take us one step closer to making the world a more just and equal place. This passion for justice is what informs my teaching—whether in a classroom, in a park, or on a street corner. For this reason, teaching a Clemente course has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. Writing books and articles are meaningful, too. So is teaching college students. But community education geared toward adults who have not had the opportunity to complete their college degree is particularly gratifying because it offers a more direct path to promote an important human right: the right to education. Thus, in my opinion, teaching adults who have, for whatever reason, been denied this right is a moral imperative.
Yet, this does not mean teaching US history to a heterogenous group of adults—some of whom only recently arrived in the United States and have never taken US history—is without its challenges. I learned early on to abandon conventional pedagogical approaches that emphasize “coverage” and focus instead on deep, thoughtful engagement with history that promotes further inquiry beyond the classroom, or even promotes social action. In my course, students read the words of the conquerors and the conquered—the
oppressor and the oppressed—readings that encourage them to see events from a multiplicity of vantage points. I then ask them to develop arguments rooted in evidence. I make certain our class activities and discussions open the door to further inquiry instead of forcing them to “master” a series of “facts” that shut out inquiry. My students are also encouraged to explore the history of their own communities by, for example, writing essays about a statue or memorial that they pass every day but know very little about. This type of assignment does two things: First, it allows them to focus their historical lens on something in their community. Second, it provides them with an opportunity to think critically about the way historical markers represent an uncritical, often exaggerated or romanticized, view of people or events in the past.
Like my lessons about recent efforts to end the genocidal mentality perpetuated by the representations of Native Americans on the Massachusetts state flag or the shift from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, my imperative as an educator is to provide my students with ways to consider how the past informs our ideas and attitudes about our society today. Oppressive regimes depend on keeping the truth from people in their efforts to legitimize and protect their power. This deception has been true in the past and is true today. Likewise, those who benefit—financially and otherwise—from exploitative institutions, practices, and policies are most often aggressive in their effort to promote ignorance under the guise that the lies they perpetuate are for our own good. For this reason, those of us who are committed to teaching what we learn—whether we’re professional teachers or not—are engaged in one of the most noble human practices.
Does learning history prevent people, or nations, from making the same unethical and immoral decisions today? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But whether or not we choose to use what we learn about the past to inform how we approach making our society and the world more humane and equitable is on us. As the late great poet June Jordan once said, “We are the ones we are waiting for.”
