Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Kristen, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me this week. It is amazing how much has changed since we first connected on Twitter, and I’m just extra excited for us to have this conversation. So thank you.

Kristen Duncan:        Thank you for having me.

SC:        There is a fly around, which is why there are cats. So very excited because — let everyone know what kind of conversation this is going to be. Before we get started, do you want to introduce yourself?

KD:        Sure. I am an assistant professor at Clemson University, so I prepare pre-service teachers who are going to teach high school social studies. My research focuses on Black teachers and the ways they talk about race as well as their experiences, and I also study the way race plays out in social studies texts. Now, when I say text, that is like a large umbrella term that could mean actual, like literary text with words like textbooks, or it could be like historical sites that students might go on field trips to visit.

I got my Ph.D. at the University of Georgia. Go Dawgs! And I’m a former middle school teacher. I’m really grateful to the students I taught because I learned more in those years about life probably than in the decades leading up to that time. So, yeah.

SC:        It’s funny you said, “Go Dawgs!” because in my introduction to you, I was like, in her bio she sent me, she said, “Do Dawgs!” I don’t know what that means, but like sure. So it’s funny you said that. I’m glad I put it in the introduction. Your middle school teaching, was that in Georgia?

KD:        It was.

KD:        So I taught in the Metro Atlanta area, and then I also taught in Athens, Georgia.

SC:        And it’s like middle school seven, eight, which are already difficult years to teach.

KD:        Yes. Middle school students are full of energy and questions and are trying to figure out how to cope with the changes that are happening in their lives, but they are fun and they’re interesting, so it was a good time.

SC:        If you’re like with middle school, it’s either they’re still very young and that’s surprising or they are very mature and that is surprising. And that it takes a lot of trust to be able to develop a good community. But when it happens, like that middle ground between being really matured, being really immature allows for some really positive things to happen. So thank you for bringing your experience as a middle school teacher, but also as a social studies teacher educator to this conversation.

KD:        Thank you.

SC:        So we’ll get started. I asked everyone the same three questions, but the context has changed quite a lot since when we first started talking about pandemic pedagogy. So the first question that I asked people is whether or not the pandemic — just one second because there’s a truck. Good times. At least there’s no lawnmowers. Okay.

So the first question is about whether or not your ideas about history have changed during COVID? And what I find interesting was I had talked to some historians that were like, you know, after things like the Spanish Flu, there were pushes for greater rights and greater equity. And what’s so interesting is this revolution is happening. Like that’s a word that you used right in the middle of it, which demonstrates how like the importance, but also like how it was so close to being there to begin with. So do you have any thoughts about how your ideas about history have shift and changed if it all during this time?

KD:        So until about two weeks ago, I would have said no.

KD:        But the last two weeks have really led me to ask a lot of questions about how change happens, right? So what we’ve seen in the last two weeks, I feel like it’s something that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. And so I’m wondering what are the conditions that allow this kind of rebellion, this kind of uprising to happen because George Floyd was not even the first Black person to die at the hands of police during this pandemic, right?

KD:        So what happened now, it took me back to 2012 when Trayvon Martin was murder to 2013 when George Zimmerman was acquitted, to Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, to Eric Garner, and it just made me wonder what has happened in those last few years for us to get to this point. And the reason I ask that question is because I went to a protest in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted, and nearly everyone in the crowd was Black. But if you look at the protests today, they are in actual multiracial coalition out there protesting. So I’ve been wondering what has happened? How do the stars align for this moment to be happening where corporate entities are putting out statements saying that Black lives matter when just a few years ago, there was like a serious — pause on this while I get my word right.

But just a few — so just three years ago, Colin Kaepernick was essentially blackballed by the NFL for protesting police brutality towards Black Americans, right? And there was a whole lot of hubbub that involved the president of the United States, but what happened since then? Like how did we get to this moment? So is it because 40 million people are unemployed and they don’t have sports or work or kid’s activities and those other things to distract them? Is it because of the continuous new cycle of this, right? So I don’t watch the videos when they come out because it’s traumatic and I don’t need to watch the video to know what happened essentially, right?

KD:        But the video of George Floyd in particular, that image was everywhere. I don’t watch — I’m not a consistent cable news watcher. I usually watch like the morning news and the evening news and that’s it, but that image was everywhere so you couldn’t get away from it. Was it people watching that long video and watching the life like leave his body? I really am really interested in what happened to create this kind of energy around the need to address different forms of racism. So, yeah, it has really garnered a lot of questions for me more so than like changing the way I think about history.

SC:        Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because Angela Davis said on — well I saw it on Twitter, but she did a video that said she also has never seen anything like this, right? And it’s like — I mean, Angela Davis has been such a foundational person from Black Power onwards for her to say that. I saw someone in Twitter saying like, “Thank you for just validating that because I’m so confused right now about like how this is placed in in history?” Kind of like the questions that you’re having. And so to say that, it’s like, yes. Like what is happening at this moment? And it’s interesting you say distraction because like there aren’t distractions like sports and childcare because that’s not something I’ve heard a lot. I’ve heard a lot more of like in more of this like kind of like charitable discourse like, oh, the pandemic has really highlighted the structural inequities, and so this has provided a space for people to talk through. And so it’s kind of — I mean, both of those things can be true, but it’s kind of interesting how they come together. And to me, it really highlights like how multilayered mystery is? Like what are those elements that are going to be remembered when historians are writing about this?

KD:        Right. That’s really interesting. I posed this question on Facebook maybe on Sunday just because I have been thinking about it for a while and I checked a little earlier, so far there are 62 comments.

SC:        [inaudible 0:11:43.1]

KD:        They have lots of thoughts about this, but people also mentioned like there’s a growing distrust because we’ve been given different kind of information around the Coronavirus and what works, what doesn’t work, lots of untruths have been told or mistruths, but yeah, there are —

SC:        Do you mean alternative facts?

KD:        Indeed. Indeed.

SC:        Because there’s no facts, there are just alternative.

KD:        Right. But, yeah. So before George Floyd’s murder, we were already given all of these things to create a what I would call a pretty unstable environment, right?

KD:        So it’s kind of like the powder keg was loading and being ready to be ignited. And before George Floyd was murdered, there was the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and the video of that murder ran the course of social media and the news networks. And Breonna Taylor was murdered in her sleep at her home. So a lot is leading up to this moment. And as a Black woman, I’m excited. I hope that substantive change comes. The symbolic gestures are cute, but I would love to see substantive policy changes come from this. The history teacher in me is really interested in what creates this moment, but as an activist and a person who realizes that there is much more change that needs to be made, wants to know what happens to create change, right?

So if we can figure out how that happens, then we can get necessary change created. Hopefully, it doesn’t require a pandemic every time. You’re muted.

SC:        Yeah, I said here’s hoping.

SC:        [crosstalk 0:14:09.1] every time. But I mean, right the day before he was murdered, there was also the video of Amy Cooper, right? Threatening, like weaponizing African-American, like that is clearly a weapon. And so I think also, like people that maybe didn’t really understand how and why that was so problematic could see it literally the next day.

SC:        And maybe that’s why more people have wanted to become involved than they did for Black Lives Matter a couple years ago. I mean, of course, there’s all these different things at once, but hopefully, it doesn’t take a pandemic.

And I had spoke to Natasha Henry, who’s the president of the Ontario Black History Society here in — well, obviously in Canada like two days before all of this happened. And one thing we were talking about was with remote online teaching, she was saying that like there is even more of a focus on kind of a “traditional curriculum”. So less room for culturally relevant teaching practices and resources, and so there’s a lot more White focus, Eurocentric focus.

And we were both kind of talking about like when we get back to our classrooms, what will that feel like for people? Will there be such a desire for things to feel normal that it will go back to the same in ways that are even more problematic than they were before? Like exacerbating the inequities of education was such a big theme across all the different videos and like this, this moment is highlighting that in such strong ways.

KD:        Yeah. I honestly feel like if we go back to teaching history the way we did six months ago, we have wasted this moment. There are lots of teachers who want to do better, right? So like you were just saying about history in layers, there’s lots of layers to teaching history, right?

KD:        Because one, people can’t teach what they don’t know, right?

KD:        So one, we have to help teachers, history teachers in particular, become more knowledgeable of Black history and the histories of other people of color. We have to — and I know this is a question, so I don’t know how you’re going to frame this in the video. Sorry.

KD:        But we also need to make our history more inclusive, right? So in the US, Black Americans usually show up at enslavement, reconstruction, and civil rights movement. Like no Black people lived through the Great Depression or something like that. Like that’s how it plays out. Asian-Americans usually only show up at the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese incarceration. So that’s really problematic for a number of reasons. But if we can galvanize this moment, teachers can really take advantage of resources and professional development, and go back into classrooms in August or online. I have no idea what’s actually going to happen, but be prepared to teach a diverse group of students the history of a diverse group of people.

SC:        One of the things that I try to advocate in my work is like, it’s okay for you as a teacher to be like, “I don’t know this stuff. Let’s explore together.” Because when you hold yourself so tightly to being an expert, you are setting yourself up to only teaching what you know. And if you have never been exposed to these histories, you don’t know them. And so it is extra scary, and you might — like that combine for White teachers. That combined with like a fear of desettling their only privilege means it just gets replicated.

Like for me, a lot of things that I’ve been hearing in the series is people really wanting to prioritize like student care and emotional wellbeing and building relationships with students. So we can like bring that to our classrooms. We can explore these histories together and be like, yeah, I didn’t know this. Let’s learn together.

KD:        Right. Absolutely.

SC:        Oh, sorry.

KD:        No, I was agreeing with you. So do I.

SC:        Okay. So, well, this brings me to my second question, although we kind of already like talked about it. But do you think history teaching will change after this moment? Like a lot of people say should, right? You’re saying should. Everyone is saying should. Do you think it will change? What would that look like? What would that work look like?

People can’t see right now, but you do not look — you do not look up your mistake.

KD:        The difference between will and should is a big one, right?

SC:        Mm-hmm.

KD:        So it involves helping teachers learn new material and involve the actual structural changes right from the state level because in a lot of cases, teachers are held accountable for teaching like state standards. And so they stick to that for that reason. So if we could get state standards that are more inclusive or actually allow more room. Like the state of South Carolina actually just moved to a new set of history standards that are all inquiry-based, and so they allow a lot more room for teachers to bring in different kinds of content because the standards aren’t content-based. They’re actually based on students engaging and inquiry.

So lots of stakeholders would need to be involved for those structural changes to happen, and those structural changes take a long time. So I think that history teaching will look different in some places where the teachers might be more equipped to do so, but I am concerned about whether or not it will actually happen at large. But I would love for teachers to even take advantage of like oral histories or having their students interview people to talk about like their engagement. So if they know someone who marched or who protested in some other form or fashion to talk to them about that and what that was like and why they engaged in it, I think we don’t take advantage of that kind of stuff nearly enough.

KD:        Yeah. Schools have looked the same for a very, very long time. So I am cautiously optimistic that some change — well, I feel like I said like a politician. Cautiously optimistic —

SC:        I was actually gonna say you sound like Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come.

KD:        Yes, but it takes time, and my concern is about the momentum slowing down in that process. But another one of the changes that should happen would be this moment didn’t happen because of like one leader, right? That’s what I love about the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s really grassroots, right?

So my colleague Ashley Woodson talks about Messianic Master Narratives. And let’s take Martin Luther King, for example. So this is going to be an oversimplification, but it’s pretty realistic.

Students essentially learn that like Martin Luther King marched and gave speech, and then Black people got their rights. What that does is actually way more harmful than a lot of teachers realize. So it makes kids feel like if they can’t be Martin Luther King, they can’t contribute. When in reality, the movement was lots and lots and lots of people, right? So there are even lots of other leaders.

Women in particular, I’m still a little upset that I didn’t learn about some of the women involved in the movement until I was in graduate school, but like the Ella Bakers, the Diane Nashes, and the Fannie Lou Hamers of the world also were pivotal to the civil rights movement. The students don’t learn about that. They learned about White guy who marched and gave a speech. Maybe you learned that he went to jail and wrote a letter there, but that’s about it. So hopefully, we can at least start there with reforming or revolutionizing the way that we teach social movement in schools.

SC:        There’s a couple things there that I wanna pick up on, and I’ll just immediately start with the last thing you said. Like that you are upset that you didn’t learn about women that were involved with the movements. So the John Lewis Trilogy, graphic novel trilogy, and also Selma directed by —

KD:        Ava DuVernay.

SC:        Yes, thank you. Both of those texts really highlight women’s presence in a way that I have read other graphic novels, like one by the same artist that did the John Lewis book that have women like totally absent. And you can watch whole documentaries about Martin Luther King and never see women, and both of those sets of text show that women are there and they are involved. And, yes, it’s a different type of patriarchy during that time, so women weren’t involved in the same way that like you and I could be now, but like that contribution of like cooking and housing, some of these leaders, it was as essential to the leadership of that work.

And I think that — one of the things I — one of the concerns that I have and I know that a lot of people share this is that people are going to bring these narratives in their classroom in harmful ways and in very simplistic ways. And I think that being thoughtful about text, which I know what your research is on, being thoughtful about text and just like thinking about deconstructing what am I looking at, what am I hearing, what am I seeing can help work through those histories, but in ways that aren’t like, hey, guys, racism, right? You know? Because that is going to be more harmful.

KD:        Right. So one of my favorite activities to do with my pre-service history teachers is to talk about narratives and the way they’re constructed, right?

KD:        So we watch this video about Thomas Jefferson that is very typical of the narrative we all learned in school. And then I teach them about Sally Hemings, and usually most of them had never heard of her or her children. So Thomas Jefferson is usually glorified in history classes, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he’s one of the founding fathers of this nation. He did a lot for — sorry, it just started like monsooning outside.

SC:        I could hear.

KD:        Oh, okay. He did a lot for the foundation of our nation, but he also was a slave owner who repeatedly raped one of his slaves, right? And she bore his children. People need to learn more complete histories [inaudible 0:27:28.0].

So in that same day, I have them read a page of the textbook from the first year I taught, and the section that they read is about Rosa Parks. So Rosa Parks is usually the one woman that students learn about in the civil rights movement. So the textbook section about Rosa Parks describes or it says, Rosa Parks, a tired middle-aged seamstress blah, blah, blah. And then I teach them what actually happened and how the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery had actually planned the entire Montgomery bus boycott before she got on the bus, how she was actually a freedom fighter and had been working for years if not decades. With the NIICP, she had attended the Highlander Folk School. Like Rosa Parks has done all this activist work and she’s reduced to a tired middle-aged seamstress in this textbook that thousands of children are reading every year.

It’s pretty infuriating. So giving teachers access to that kind of information is really important.

SC:        I think one of the things that infuriates me about that Rosa Parks’ narrative is that her work with the NIICP was based on like gendered and racial violence, right? Because she was a sexual assault investigator.

SC:        And like to take that away from the narrative is such a different form of violence on top of the work that she was already doing. As someone that’s interested in women’s history, to be able to take that very gendered nature out is just, yeah, it’s extra infuriating.

So this could lead to the third question about whether or not this moment will allow us to imagine a new we after this? So imagining a new we is something that I started to articulate when I was watching how teachers, particularly White teachers, would really other their students of color. And even though they’re like, oh, no, you know, it’s all Canadian history, it’s all American history, but we will get to those histories for those students and those other things later. Let’s just focus on our national history first, and that we really need to have these greater circles of inclusion to force ourselves to understand that we are nations, that we are transnational countries that are made up of different things in the stories we tell ourselves. So do you see this moment as allowing us to be able to imagine a new ‘we’ in different ways or in better ways? Or maybe you don’t think that’s a useful concept at all? Any thoughts?

KD:        I think we have to imagine we as the most inclusive we possible, right? So if Black Lives Matter, that means Black women’s lives matter, that means black LGBTQ+ lives matter, that means Black kids’ lives matter, that means Black trans lives matter. So when we’re talking the histories of Black people or Black Americans at least, we need to be teaching all of those. So as far as women, that includes women of all stripes of life, right? We have to bring the margins to the middle essentially.

SC:        Oh, I love that. Is that yours?

KD:        Kinda sort of.

SC:        Just kidding.

KD:        So a friend of mine has a paper called From Margin to Center, and I just traded middle for center.

SC:        Because the alliteration works better.

KD:        It does. It does.

SC:        Yup, trademark.

KD:        But yeah, I think we have to — one of the things I think happens is people in the center forget about people at the margins. And they’ll bring a few more in and leave most people at the margins. But the people at the margins right now are fed up, right?

KD:        So if the people whose lives have been centered in everything actually want some kind of structural change, which seems to be the case right now, right? Like I was talking about that like multiracial coalition that seems to be happening right now. I do think that we can leave this moment with a more inclusive we than we have right now. At the same time, I’m sure that there are people that are being left out and we who have more privilege than they have to make the effort to bring them towards the middle.

SC:        Yeah, I love that. And I think that like we should be imagining different wes as well, because when those margins come to the middle, it shouldn’t just be the same thing replicated, but just looking slightly different. Like those margins should really shift what the we looks like, you know? So thank you for that. That was great.

KD:        Thank you. And I did want to say something about you mentioning earlier teachers who would like say, “Oh, we’ll teach about the histories of people for color for those students.” Then White kids need to know the histories of the people of color too, right?

KD:        So White students also need to know that people of color have made incredible contributions to the history of their countries. So histories of people of color are not only for students of color. So I think it’s really imperative that teachers understand that.

SC:        Yeah. I mean, an example I often use with White teachers as a White person myself, obviously, I feel like I’m like glowing right now with this particular light and fact I’m so hot in the middle of summer that like I see Black history as fine history too because the changes and the resistance and the resilience inform the world that I live in, but also the white supremacy that informs so much of that activism is part of who I am as a White person and understanding that. It’s a lot easier to understand that this is not separate history from me. This is something that I have to think about and grapple with and learn from in order to teach better and think better and do better.

This separation, for me, has never felt — I never understood it. And I went to elementary school for a couple years in Florida. Actually, in the southern United States. And the most like isolated from histories I felt was during the — was in 1992 during the 500th anniversary of Columbus coming to America and I was just like, this is so confusing. Like as a young Canadian student, I didn’t understand this patriotism. I felt so isolated. But, to me, it demonstrated a type of nationalism that did not like fit with how I understood the world. And I think that if those types of narratives are comfortable, then those are good invitations to push. Like it’s okay to be uncomfortable to change things. Like that’s how change happens.

KD:        Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I was in elementary school in ‘92 and I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember [crosstalk 0:36:05.6]

SC:        I think you’re a little younger than me. I was 10 in 1992.

KD:        Oh, I was eight.

SC:        Oh. I mean, it was a pretty traumatic year. Like I went from Canada to Florida, [inaudible 0:36:17.9] and everyone was like singing these songs and I was like, I don’t get it. I have no idea what’s happening.

KD:        I can imagine. Yeah.

SC:        Kristen, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me this week. It’s been a real pleasure, and I hope we stay connected.

KD:        Thank you. I hope so as well.

SC:        Well, and you know I was saying to people too like it will be interesting to touch base when things settle, although that feels so different to say that now to see how things have changed. So I will definitely be in touch. So hopefully, we can continue.

KD:        Thank you.

SC:        Okay, bye.

KD:        Bye.