TL;DR:

• To effectively teach English, it is important that educators also teach history.
• Language arts gives us the opportunity to add dimension to our students’ understanding of a specific event, idea, or person. Use historical texts to create experiences.
• Our students’ futures are contingent on events happening now. They can use the skills they’ve built upon as readers and writers, and apply this knowledge to view and critically analyze history and text in real-time.

I will always believe that in order to effectively teach English, one must be ready to also teach history.

I, like most American students, have been taught limited perspectives of history by design. This education and knowledge was—is—often steeped in the elevation of white paternalist ideology.

Teaching History in English Class: Why?

Language arts instruction is about more than proper grammar and reading the classics. Students must think about how they arrived in the world if they hope to understand the world. This involves critically examining the media, books, and texts they are consuming in our classes and beyond.

Language arts instruction is about more than proper grammar and reading the classics. Students must think about how they arrived in the world if they hope to understand the world. Click To Tweet

Teaching English is all about creating experiences for students to respond to and analyze information, think critically and create.

ELA teachers have an opportunity to give students access to the stories that don’t make it into their history textbooks. English classes hold space for fuller pictures of history to be constructed through multiple genres, visual and written. Students can thus de-center conventional (and often one-sided) national heroic perspectives through story. It enables them to step away from binaries and center multiple representations, ideas, and truths. Through windows and mirrors into different events and eras, we can avoid telling our students what to think and instead teach them how to think.

Be the Researcher You Ask Your Students To Be.

As English teachers, if we want to teach the histories our students might be missing, it’s important that we get it right. This will require research, commitment, and time. It also involves a sense of positionality, especially if that history is outside your own cultural frame of reference.

Do this work alongside your students.

After all, if we want students to be effective readers, researchers, and thinkers, we have to model what that looks like.

My favorite historical quest I’ve gone on to benefit my students came out of a reading of Javier Zamora’s poetry collection, Unaccompanied. Zamora includes a powerful piece in this collection titled “Disappeared.” In the poem, Zamora employs a list of all the people, entities, and agencies he feels are responsible for the current state of his native El Salvador.

Naturally, I had to know more, because I was teaching predominantly Salvadoran students on Long Island. It led me to an understanding of our nation’s own problematic relationships with Central America. I made a historical connection, which was ultimately rooted in a literary text.

Connecting History to Literature Should Be Culturally Sustaining.

Similarly, you can invite historical speeches and texts into your classroom to provide students the space to have conversations about different stories, cultures, and perspectives. This year, I taught Black Panther as a visual text, rather than teaching Homer’s The Odyssey. I made this decision to reflect the interests and learning styles of my students. I made sure that the hero’s journey and theme of identity, integral to their ninth-grade thematic experience, remained intact.

Ninth graders gained skills like visual analysis, looked for symbols and motifs in the film, and added a layer of identity study framed in Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism.

We discussed and developed norms around the African concept of ubuntu: I am, because you are. Mid-unit, students reviewed our community agreements to reflect a collective culture of mutual support.

From here, students centered a culture that, for many of them, was not immediately familiar. They obtained racial/cultural literacies along the way.

We will continue those literacies during this Black History Month, where we will read a poem a day by a Black author or poet.

Disrupting with Love

My love of history is not the sole guiding factor of my suggestions to ELA teachers (and all teachers). What ultimately guides this is my love of wanting to do right by students. I want students to have the most complete information they can in order to inform their ideologies, interactions, and relationships. That’s what being truly literate is.

These, I like to think, are the same goals forged in the #DisruptTexts movement and the New York Times 1619 Project, both of which have guided much of my pedagogy in recent years.

The texts we read cannot exist without the historical phenomena that birthed them. Reading A Raisin in the Sun without teaching students about redlining or systemic discrimination limits students’ capacity to understand the ways that FHA laws and racist restrictive covenants still impact American neighborhoods.

If you’re teaching The Crucible without talking about the Red Scare/Lavender Scare, students don’t have an opportunity to learn about where prejudice, misogyny, and mass hysteria have negatively impacted our actual culture. What if, in reading the Crucible, we looked at Joe McCarthy’s speeches and compared them as paired texts?

What if we taught that Black Lives Matter is not only a movement that addresses tangible systemic racism and inequality, but that “Black Lives Matter” also functions as a declarative statement?

I’ll clarify here that this is not an argument to reject the classics, but to use them as frames of reference for supplementing student learning experiences. What if we paired A Raisin in the Sun or The Great Gatsby with Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law? Homer’s The Odyssey with Black Panther? George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy with FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech? To Kill a Mockingbird with Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy?

Teach History: Use Historical Texts to Create Experiences.

As I mentioned, language arts gives us the opportunity to add dimension to our students’ understanding of a specific event, idea, or person. Last month, I engaged students in various texts by and about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. People often reduce Dr. King to his “I Have A Dream” narrative. The speech’s message has been whitewashed and repackaged to maintain the status quo in conversations about how to ‘acceptably’ address racism.

I aim to introduce my students to a fuller picture of Dr. King’s impact; students had several directions and options for analysis this year. We viewed images of the Chicago riots following his death in 1968. There was also the option to unpack quotes from his writings that could easily be mistaken for his contemporary, Malcolm X. Some students chose to examine images of his open and unapologetic resistance.

Students examined the many dimensions, contradictions, and perceptions of Dr. King’s work. He was met with respectability politics and contempt because he threatened the notion and acceptance of white supremacy that we are still reckoning with now.

Teach History: Teaching Texts as They Are Happening

History is happening now. The events that our students’ futures are contingent on are happening now. For instance, the insurrection that occurred in January can serve as a text. It can be studied in images, Tweets, briefings, and more. We can teach students strategies for explicitly naming such events with precise language, in order to face history as it happens. Using the skills they’ve built upon as readers and writers, students can apply this knowledge to view and critically analyze history and text in real-time.

History is happening now. The events that our students' futures are contingent on are happening now. Click To Tweet

Using actual events and the texts created around them engages students in critical thinking. It allows them to compare now to points of reference they have from the past. Ask them:

• What do you see/notice? What stands out?
• What’s missing?
• Has this happened before?
• What are the possible results?

Holding space for students to process current events allows them to reflect on what they—what we—can learn about ourselves and our behaviors, good and bad. They can learn to sort through rhetoric and understand truth as having many different dimensions and angles. “I’m entitled to my opinion” is often invoked while trying to assert our truth as the truth. Teaching students the value of history with respect to rhetoric and argument, compare/contrast, and understanding narrative structure can help shift that.

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Teach History: Reflecting on the Why

Students must reflect on how they and the people, characters, and themes in stories came to be. Understanding a text is the ability to connect to that text. Connection requires knowledge of the self and our origins. Literacy skills for the 21st century are more holistic and expansive than ever before.

Studying print and media and discussing current events as they are happening are all part of what it means to be a reader and writer in today’s world. Teachers of English, and by extension, all teachers, must prepare for this as much as their students. Learn the histories of your students and their communities. Most importantly, learn the context and positionality of the reading you experience together. As educators, we often talk about our “why,” and contextualizing student reading by anchoring it in historical lenses offers teachers a “why,” a task, a mission to read and learn on.

History allows teachers across disciplines to show students a linear trajectory of repeated patterns, ideas, and actions that an entire classroom community can learn from, together.

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About Cait O’Connor

Cait O’Connor is a fourth-year public school English/ESOL educator in New York, committed to social justice and equity in education and beyond.