Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Hi, Andrea and Sarah, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me. It’s so wonderful to have both of you here to be able to talk about the book and teaching history during this time, especially from both of your perspectives being in the States, but being in different state. So, thank you again.

Dr. Sarah Shear:        Thank you.

Dr. Andrea Hawkman:        Yeah, thanks a lot.

SC:        Could maybe we just do some introduction.

Andrea, do you want to start?

AH:        Sure. I’m Andrea Hawkman. I’m an assistant professor of social studies education and cultural studies at Utah State University. And I’m a former high school social studies teacher, coach, curriculum designer. I kind of did it all. I wore all the hats in a small school in Missouri in the United States.

And my research explores how teachers in social studies and students in social studies talk about racism and white supremacy.

SC:        Great, thanks. Sarah?

SS:        I’m Sarah Shear. I’m an assistant professor of social studies and multicultural education at University of Washington-Bothell. Currently living in Seattle, where COVID kind of all started here for us in the US. So we’ve been homebound for a while teaching online in whatever this “new normal” is.

I am a member of the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective. So my work is primarily in looking at the ways of representations, largely misrepresentations, erasures. I write lies about indigenous peoples and native nations in relationship to US history and US native relationships looking at civics and history standards primarily, but then advocating, of course, across all social studies curriculum and all curriculum to have an anti-colonial approach to our teaching.

SC:        That’s great. Thank you both for bringing your perspective to this conversation, and I’m excited to draw on both of those expertise, but also to talk about the book that you two co-edited.

When this first started, I really got to think about history differently. And in some ways, I guess it, like, reaffirmed things I already thought about history, in terms of we need to focus on and how it’s easy to miss perspectives and to miss particular experiences in our telling of history. So I start these conversations by asking if the idea of history has changed at all for you because of this moment?

AH:        Yeah, I think about how in moments that are challenging, like the one we’re experiencing right now, and there’s a lot of social and emotional issues that folks are dealing with, and how communities are struggling and dealing with the challenges in different ways. How history is taught within these times. And that there are sometimes a push to think to focus on the good and the positive to kind of uplift us out of these times that are challenging outside of content. Which is appealing.

But I think we have to be willing to resist that in some ways, because what can happen is the stories tend to get told wrong, the stories are inaccurate, the stories leave out communities that, or struggles that communities were forced to face due to large scale issues at a certain time.

So I think we really have to be careful when we’re talking about history in moments like this because we don’t want to sugarcoat or hide problems that we have faced because we’re currently feeling problems as well. So I think we have to be kind of careful about managing that load with students to make sure that we’re not making everyone feel better by our content, because that’s not really the purpose of history teaching.

SS:        Yeah, I think I’ve been thinking a lot about history and relationship right now to the ways, which historically and even just in parts contemporarily, when there is something that’s scary such as COVID-19 or any other thing that we don’t understand and can’t control, the ways in which narratives can be used, have been used, to manipulate people in order to seize greater power, in order to manipulate legislation in different ways towards not so good ends because people are afraid. And we’ve seen that in history. People will take out of fear and desperation for an answer and for a solution. Whatever the easiest, most palpable solution is. And oftentimes that’s not for the good of the people, and it’s not even accurate.

So just even thinking about the ways that the news media have started to push back and stop airing some of the USA administration’s briefings in order to fact-check them before they show them. Just really thinking about the ways that power operates in these kind of scary times I think is going to shed a whole new conversation for students now and in the future.

AH:        And there’s a lot of great opportunities to make connections to how power has been manipulated in the past and also right now, right? So if we look at how Asian-Americans and people from the continent of Asia are being discussed and treated in our current context in relation to previous examples of ways that racial and ethnic groups have been marginalized and targeted during times of crisis, there’s not an insignificant connection there.

The fact that this continues to happen is relevant and speaks to the larger system it gets used of oppression that are present in both the United States and international context. So I think using modern contemporary examples to make those connections and historical context can be a really powerful way to show systems of oppression, which oftentimes are difficult to put your finger on in a single lesson because systems are often difficult to see. But when we have these really obvious examples, it kind of highlights these – what some people would call invisible, though we know that they’re not – these systems of racism, the anti-immigration feelings, those sorts of concerns of white supremacy in a way that is really concrete. I think we have an opportunity to really dive in and think about these.

SC:        One of the things that has come up in a lot of the discussions is that this moment really has, or can allow for, the unearthing of structures. Or, and I’ve brought in some postmodern theory, about how we can really witness the deconstruction of structures that already were broken, that we could pretend were stable.

And what I’m hearing from both of your answers is really the importance of doing that in this moment and not just use history as a draw to help people think everything will be okay, but to really help us challenge the things that we are thinking about and dealing with right now. Am I getting that right?

AH:        I think you’re right, Samantha. And that we can highlight the seemingly brokenness, but it’s not broken. Like, the system is operating exactly how it was designed to operate. Which means it’s letting down communities that are often marginalized. Workers who are working paycheck-to-paycheck, communities that have been forgotten by the social safety net.

The problems that we’re seeing highlighted right now, why people are demanding to go back to work so they can get their hair cut is because we have a system, at least in the United States, that doesn’t support anyone except the elite. So I think we’ve been given some opportunities now, if we’re really being honest, to recognize that things are operating exactly as they were intended to be operating.

It’s what we have to decide as a country, as teachers: what does that mean for us? Are we going to take the opportunity to make change to talk to our students about ways that they can make change or to recognize the problems that exist? Or are we just going to lament how difficult it is and be grateful that we have whatever level of privilege that we have that allows my family to be home and to be safe and be comfortable while others aren’t? What level of engagement are we willing to take? If we’re going to recognize that the problems are there, we have to also think about what happens next.

I think that’s an important part of the conversation too that we want to think about agency and activism coming out of the times that we’re in.

SS:        And I think just going to something that you were saying, Andrea, about the teachable moments and really this whole conversation about really just kind of opening up, exposing, challenging our students to think about the system has been working the way the system wants to work, right? The way that this system has been set up.

I think something important right now, I don’t know how much either of you have been engaged in hearing from teachers or hearing stories across the wires, but teachers being policed right now because they’re teaching via Zoom or other online platforms where they’re being recorded, I just recently heard about a teacher asking a question of how can I teach difficult history and challenge my students to think critically about our curriculum when we’re being surveilled via video by administration?

So thinking about advocacy, thinking about the work moving forward, how do we do that in support of teachers, in support of our students to do the type of teaching and learning that all three of us advocate for, and teachers protecting themselves and protecting each other and addressing the problems of oppression within our education system?

SC:        To me, this seems like a good segue to think about challenging our practice through understanding critical race theory and understanding the ways whiteness gets embedded into our teaching and learning.

Could you maybe talk a little bit about the collection in how you envisioned it helping to shape teaching and learning, even though you didn’t know that this moment was going to be something that was going to be this moment?

AH:        Sure, yeah. So the book Marking the Invisible, which is out now and we’re so excited about!

When we started the project, I think Sarah and I were both recognized that there needs to be a recognition of the ways that whiteness has permeated social studies and history teaching, because we all kind of know it’s there. At least critical scholars in the field have acknowledged that race is a thing that we have to talk about.

But I think the depths to which whiteness has invaded and informs the field doesn’t get acknowledged, hasn’t been acknowledged formally within the field. I think some scholars of color have always been kind of knocking on the door, saying, “Hey, you need to do a better job about this.” But for a long time officials, leaders in the field have ignored those calls. And I think we’re at a point now where we can’t just pull the curtain over our eyes anymore. We have to be willing to recognize the institutional ways that social studies is wrapped together with whiteness and white supremacy. And the ways in which social studies promotes white norms, white ideas, white concern, white beliefs.

SC:        …white stories, white narratives.

AH:        Right. Exactly.

So the volume tackles that, and we try to curate chapters that do it in a variety of ways: in teacher ed, in K-12 classrooms, in teachers and curriculum through own personal reflections.

SS:        When we were working on the book, one of the things that was also really at the forefront of our mind was there’s a several white scholars in the field of social studies who proclaim to be doing this type of critical work and advocate for the changes that we’ve been talking about, but really don’t take the time that is absolutely essential to very hard self-reflection and really think about our own [/their own] positionalities.

And so that was something else we really wanted to amplify in the book is that positionality and doing the work we do, whether it’s museums or curriculum or with teachers, is that we are not outside of the critiques of whiteness, talking about the power that we have in these spaces and how that is really is.

It’s that elephant in the room when you go to a session at CUFA or NCSS and it’s 98% white people talking about race issues, and it’s like, “Hello! Are we going to talk about who’s in the room?!”

So I hope that the book really spark some really important conversations that our scholars of color in social studies have been calling for way longer than we conceived of the book.

If this book contributes to pushing that forward and being an ally to that cause for social studies to finally deal with itself, that would be great because we haven’t. I’m sorry! Sorry, social studies, we haven’t.

AH:        Yeah, I was thinking about students that I have in my teacher education program, and we talk about what the job of social studies teachers is. And we talk about ‘how do we talk about complex issues?’ One of the first things that comes up is their belief that they should be neutral in the classroom. We spend a lot of time wrestling with that idea, that concept. And the quote from Howard Zinn always comes up, “How you can’t be neutral on a moving train,” something like that. I think for history and social studies teachers, for so long they’ve been programmed that neutrality is the goal. But that neutrality promotes whiteness.

I think this book really tries to acknowledge the role that neutrality plays. I don’t think that was ever a stated goal of ours, disrupting neutrality, but I think in a sense, that’s what the text does is that it shines a light on the fallacy that neutrality can exist. Any push towards neutrality is really a push towards promoting whiteness in the field.

Through reading the chapters, you can’t help but come away with a recognition that neutrality isn’t possible, and anyone who pushes towards that is, whether they know it or not, promoting a goal of white supremacy. The chapters I’m thinking of are specifically are ones dealing with curricular documents. The National Council for Social Studies, statements that they’ve made, that are very clearly true that the analyses of our authors promoting white ideals.

The volume really does make you come away thinking, “Okay, the system is really rooted in this whiteness and now that we know that, we have to do something about it.” And we end the text in our concluding statements trying to push readers towards going beyond recognition. This book is on the recognition part, now we’ve got to move on.

And we’ve built from the foundation that’s been laid from dozens of scholars, mostly of color, that have come before us. But now, we’ve got to keep going and continuing to find ways to push whiteness from the center of the field.

SS:        Yeah. And just to kind of add to that, what you’re saying, Andrea, was really making me think about the numerous ways scholars, in social studies and in other fields, and particularly white scholars, they kind of like pat themselves on the back and like, “Oh, look at the great job I did. I did this critical analysis.” I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be proud of the work that we do, but it’s we can’t just sit back on our laurels after we’ve done a curriculum analysis or a study with teachers.

It’s like what Andrea is saying ,and what we’ve talked about in the conclusion, and we even call it A Call to Action: What are we going to do next? Like this is the work. We can’t just be, “yay, we did a book.” Everything is fine, everything is fine. Everything is not fine!

Publishing a book is not the panacea, right? Publishing a study is not the panacea. It’s the these all contribute to actionable changes we can make, but we have to stay vigilant and we have to keep working. We have to keep dedicated every day, in the various ways that we are capable, from day-to-day to work against the system. Because the system will continuously change itself, because that’s how colonialism works and that’s how white supremacy works. It will adjust itself to stay in power. And so we have to be vigilant, and keep working, and support each other in those ways.

And that’s one of the things I loved most about working on this book with Andrea and with the authors was just that we were together through this. Whether it was through providing feedback in the review system that we set up, or people just checking in in various ways. It felt really powerful to have scholars and not just be like, “Oh, here’s my chapter,” and then ghost for three months until they get their edits back. There was a lot of checking in across various spaces. And so I think that was a really powerful moment for me in that occasion. “Okay, what are we going to do next?” Because that’s what we need to do.

SC:        I want to think about the last question right now because it actually really draws from the chapter that I contributed to the collection about whiteness.

I found in research that I did that it was easy for white Canadian history teachers, for example, to really identify that like they were doing the work of telling immigrant students of color what the Canadian story is. And once they do that, everything else will be fine.

And one of the many problems with that was that these students were not even immigrants. They were first, second-generation Canadians. Some of them much longer than that, but because they were students of color, they were read as immigrants. They were read as non-Canadians. And this really was so complicated for me to be able to watch what was happening because the teacher was very awarded in a lot of other context.

And I really advocate in my own book Imagining a New ‘We’ about how important it is to challenge our own perceptions of what and who is in our countries, on our land, and to really broaden this notion of ‘we’ to be more inclusive. To be more critically inclusive. To be able to challenge what we already anticipate. So we’re not just saying, “Okay, yeah, we’ll bring these people in, but I’m going to challenge you I am in this space in order to develop a greater sense of we.

So the last question that I end with is this notion of imagining a new ‘we’. Do you think that this notion of imagination, which can also be about creativity and collaboration, do you think this notion about ‘we,’ which can also just mean about community, do you think this notion of imagining a new ‘we’ will and should change after this moment? In what ways can we make that happen? What are those calls to action that we can help expand this work even more?

AH:        So I think a general answer to your question is yes, but I think about who is at the center of the ‘we’? Who gets to decide? And from whose perspectives are we generating this collective?

And when you mention the word ‘imagination,’ I immediately thought of the concept of the Black imagination and how that, in contrast with the white imagination, it allows for certain things to be seen and unseen. And that there are some things from the white perspective that are difficult to grasp, but you have to find ways to step outside of through literature, through research, through perspective sharing to be able to gain a glimpse on the ways that the white imagination has limited your ability to see things.

So, if the imagination is only grounded in whiteness, I would say that no. That it doesn’t offer us any opportunities to craft a new ‘we’. But if we are intentional about the voices and the centering of non-whiteness in that configuration, then I think, yes, there’s a lot of possibility there. But we have to be honest about that work and about who’s taking credit for it. And it’s not like that you were talking about this teacher in your chapter. I think a red flag always pops up in my head when someone seeks credit or validation, particularly a white teacher scholar. And I’m a white teacher and scholar, so I’m throwing myself in here, and it’s something that I always think about in terms of in my own personal reflection.

But if someone is seeking validation as the number one goal, then I think they need to reprioritize what their mission is either what their intended outcome is. So it’s not about me being this great, good white person. It’s about recognizing that there’s problems, and that the problems have harmed people who are not like me. And it doesn’t make me any better to work to solve those problems because the problems need to be solved. It’s not about how good I feel, it’s about rectifying these problems that I am in part responsible for.

So I think it really depends on our willingness to acknowledge the ways that whiteness has influenced the definition of ‘we’ and the imagination that we use. And if we’re willing to step beyond that, then absolutely I think there’re some hope there for the future.

SC:        Yeah, thank you for that.

SS:        Yeah, everything Andrea said, I totally agree. And a lot of what was being said there made me kind of think, Andrea, about the ways that multicultural education has kind of been taken up by whiteness and continuing to center a white imagination, but under the cloak of something, of a ‘we.’ So I really just want to amplify that I think a ‘we’ as possible if we are vigilant to decenter whiteness and we remain vigilant to the ways that white supremacy will remake itself to look differently, sound differently, and that we keep working at that.

I think another important aspect of a ‘we’ that I want us to attend to is that, I think there is a ‘we’, I think that we can move together as a humanity by relocating who we are as humans in relationship to each other, but also not requiring people to give up what makes them who they are, right? In order to be part of that ‘we’.

So thinking about the need to continuously learn and be part of the celebrating and upholding indigenous sovereignty as one example, and the ways that that has oftentimes been pushed aside, erased, minimalized in the efforts towards multicultural education, which are very important. But when we’re talking about indigeneity, for example, citizenship as members of tribal nations is essential, and that is different than culture. So what are the layers of ‘we’ that we need to identify, and celebrate, and push that doesn’t lose who people are.

And I think another aspect of the ‘we’ is, particularly in the context of the United States and Canada, is really having this conversation about what democracy is because it doesn’t work for everyone, it hasn’t worked for everyone, and it wasn’t set up for everyone. So I see a lot of scholars and teachers talking about, “You know, we live in a democracy. We’re free.” No, we’re not. So if we are going to have a ‘we’, which I would love to have a ‘we’, that’s an essential component of what kind of world do we actually live in and want to live in?

SC:        Thank you both so much for this really great and powerful talk. I think it really complements so many of the things that we have talked about. I’m thinking particularly of Sean Carlton’s work about how important it is that we can’t forget that nation-to-nation relationships. Colonialism hasn’t stopped, during the pandemic. I think of Dr. Geoffrey Reaume’s talk about the importance of understanding critical disability studies at this moment for being aware of things like vulnerability and access for the majority of the population, as well as for people that have always had these issues with things like vulnerability and access.

So thank you both so very much.

SS:        Thank you.

AH:        Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation.

SC:         Where can people get the book?

AH:        So, it’s a variable for order right now on Information Age website, hardcover and paperback. And the Kindle version is also available on Amazon.

SC:         So everyone should go out and look for a copy, and read it and explore it and see the amazing work that Sarah and Andrea were able to put together in this collection.

And I was so excited to be a part of it. So, thank you both so much for speaking, as well as for doing this important work.

AH:        Thank you.

SS:         Thanks so much.

SC:         Bye, everyone.

AH:        Bye.

SS:         Bye.