Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Bonnie, thank you so much for agreeing to speak for the “Pandemic Pedagogy” series. I know that coming off your sabbatical, you’re probably kind of overwhelmed with this type of work again. And so I just really appreciate you speaking with me today. Thank you.

Dr. Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz:        Oh, thank you.

SC:        Do you want to introduce yourself?

BS:        So I am Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz. I’m a history professor at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. A small town downstate in rural Illinois. I wear two hats in the history department. I’m sort of a ‘normal’ history professor and then I also run our social studies education program. So I work on helping students who want to be high school social studies teachers or history or civics or some combo of that.

SC:        And you were a high school history social studies teacher before. So it was like, if I remember correctly, you said that you did like you’re a teacher in high school, then you became historian and you are also the coordinator of the program?

BS:        Exactly. Yes. And it seems like I planned this all out, but I did not. So I taught high school for a number of years and then I got a Ph.D. in history, and then I realized there were actually jobs for people like me who had teaching experience, but who were also historians. And I think that’s actually been a cool thing and different than when I trained to be a teacher where you sort of did education and you did history and those two worlds [inaudible 0:02:18.8] didn’t talk. So I’m sort of the meeting ground for my students of those two schools that they’re in.

SC:        And I think that meeting ground is so exciting and it is hard often for people to come to that meeting ground, but also to like hear each other? Because what I find is like academic historians don’t necessarily know how to say things in ways that teachers can hear that they can bring into their classrooms. And teachers don’t really know how to tell academic historians enough, they’re like, that doesn’t help me. I need something else. And so I think it’s really powerful that you can bring — that your career brings both together, but I think that translation is such an integral part of history teaching conversations.

BS:        No, I think it’s really interesting, particularly because what we all do is teach and students do not undergo some dramatic metamorphosis from finishing high school to beginning college, right? That the best work that I’ve done on my own teaching is because I teach a class to my students about how to teach high school social studies and that has made me I think so much of a better college teacher. So it’s not different world. We just, like you said, I think exactly, we speak different languages sometimes even though it doesn’t really make sense that we do so.

SC:        Well, no. I mean, I think it does make a little sense because like you train in a different tradition. It’s the same kind of too with like elementary school and secondary school teachers. Like it’s interesting because — and anyone that’s seen any of the “Pandemic Pedagogy” conversations know that we haven’t even got into the questions yet, but it’s interesting because I was talking to some people on Twitter that do higher education. So like teach history at universities, and they were talking about, “Oh, how can we curate a better class for fall?”

And I spoke to a grade two teacher who have this like bitmoji choices board for Asian Heritage Month and she had said, “I’ve never thought of myself as a curator, but look at me, I’m doing some curation.” And it was just like, yeah, the more we can figure out how to talk with each other, the stronger and more diverse our practices will be I think.

BS:        Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

SC:        Yeah. Okay, first, how is the Internet for you?

BS:        It seems to be better.

SC:        Okay, good. We’ll just keep going then. It’s fine for me too, so.

BS:        You know, [inaudible 0:05:03.6] headlight, I look that way frequently, so.

SC:        No, no, you look great. You look great. We’re having a heatwave in Toronto right now, and so all day long I just watch my face getting shinier and shinier. But you look great.  You look very matte.

BS:        I think I jinxed us. Okay, now you’re back maybe.

SC:        I think [crosstalk 0:05:22.6]. Yup. Okay, we’ll just give it a second. All right.

Okay, so why don’t we get started with the first question because it might be a good way to, again, translate or bridge those worlds. So my first question is have you thought of history any different because of COVID? So this question is really about the present. Like, have you thought about history in the present? Anyway, so have you thought of history any different in the present? Any thoughts?

BS:        Yeah. I mean, I think I’ve been sort of moving back and forth, past and present as I think about history right now in part because I just can’t stop thinking about evidence. What is the evidence that we’re finding in this moment?

So I am a historian of American women’s history, particularly 19th-century American women’s history, and so I think a lot about missing evidence. What we missed about women’s experience in the past because we don’t have documentation. And so I think I’ve been sort of overwhelmed right now with seeing evidence of this moment everywhere. Everything is historical evidence and documents, but it has made me really reflect on how small our body of evidence is for the past. When I’m thinking my son having a Zoom call with his teacher, that’s a historical document of this moment.

No, there wasn’t Zoom in the 19th century, but there were these daily experiences for the sort of ‘great events’ that we talk about in textbooks that were missing the texture for. And I think that that has been really sobering to me, but I would also like to think that it has been humbling in that way and will make me more thoughtful as I seek out evidence in the past, I hope.

SC:        Well, I love what you said about texture because I think that is such a key element. Because I say that it has — this moment has helped me think about history differently, but in some ways, it’s provided evidence to things I already think about history. In that, we will not have evidence for the emotional experiences and emotional landscapes in all of these homes related to this. And so how will that affect how this history becomes written, but then we still are recording a lot?

So in other eras where that is not the case, we are both missing the emotional landscapes as well as the evidentiary record. And I think that you’re — because I did a video about, like why aren’t we teaching more women? Because the structure of history doesn’t allow it necessarily. When you’re focused on like a very grand tradition of history, that how can we make space to think of not only different evidence, but like to allow space for even creative nonfiction with a little bit of evidence that we have. Have these ideas come into play at all for you at all?

BS:        No, I think that’s really interesting and I think one of the sort of hallmarks for me as a historian. So I wrote a book about women who were sort of ordinary in the 19th century, but they were related to a really famous guy, John Brown. And there were moments when I was recreating their life and there’s lots of evidence because they knew a famous guy. They were part of his family so their staff could say it. But also that interior experience that you’re talking about a little bit, there’s not a lot of evidence for that. And you sort of hit this moment of ‘do I speculate?’ ‘When do I become comfortable saying I think someone felt something?’

So I think that there’s that going on with some of the emotional landscape here that it sort of gets against this place where we start to be like, no, I’m a social scientist, not a humanities person.

SC:        Just one second. Wait, wait, wait. You’re buffering.

BS:        — to wonder about this bit of nonfiction. Can we collect more of these materials and then those become windows into the emotional experience of Americans now. And obviously, I should stop talking about Americans. You know what I mean.

SC:        No, no, no, that’s okay. But also, most of that answer was cut off.

BS:        Okay.

SC:        Okay. Could you start again when you had said like, I’m a social scientist, not a humanities person? And then whatever from there.

BS:        Yes. I am going to turn off — I’m trying to turn off any device that I have even forgotten is still on that is sucking the Internet. Okay, and I missed — so you were talking about nonfiction and sort of some of the getting at people’s emotional experiences and the kinds of things that textbooks don’t normally get at, and that maybe we want to think about sort of new genres as a window into that. Is that right?

SC:        Yeah. I mean, I think the way your answer was going met my kind of speculation really well. So it just got cut off. Yeah.

BS:        Okay. So, I mean, I think that there is — I thought a lot about this question of sort of is history art or science? And where do we fall? Are we a social science? Are we humanities? I think the pandemic has made me double down on we are humanities because we cannot completely understand the past, and part of it is that we want to understand what people thought and experienced and felt. And that becomes difficult to grasp because we tell our students, right? Even if we have a diary from someone and the person is writing, I felt X. We can’t trust that source, right? We have to ask about bias and is this person performing for themselves, right?

But I think that there are ways to get at people’s emotional lives and responses to the loss that is going on, and that we historians doing that about past events. And so maybe we can look to that, particularly the thing that I think about its works about the American Civil War and sort of shifts in American thought as they grappled with death changing, right? People dying so far from home without the ability to have what a historian Drew Faust calls “the good death” that really involved sort of this deathbed moment with your family around you. We’re seeing the same thing happen now in hospitals where families are barred from witnessing that moment, providing comfort.

And I think it’s maybe our study of the past here that even can help us ask thoughtful questions about the present and think about how we sussed out that experience and write about it.

SC:        Mm. I mean, when you’re saying like I think about is history a social science or a humanity? That is really powerful. Aaron Stout, who’s another person I interviewed for the series said that history is a humanity. We really need to sit with the emotions and to be able to kind of feel through. But to me, a key element of that statement that you’re making too is for teachers to understand themselves within that kind of binary. Like, what do they think their purpose is in teaching history? Is it to understand the emotional landscape of a particular moment or is it just to assess criteria and assess evidence?

I mean, my perspective is that it should be about emotional landscapes and experience, but it doesn’t need to be — but I think what you’re also saying about like this moment in thinking about history as a humanity can help us think through a lot of the societal grief that we are going to be experiencing.

BS:        Yeah. And I think categorizing history as a humanity too is saying that we can’t know everything about the past, and this makes many historians kind of squirmy like, “No, of course, I am capturing objective truth about the past,” we know that is not true. And I think communicating that to students both at the college level as well as secondary and even down to elementary, that becomes very hard because students still arrive in my classroom thinking history is what happened in the past and we have to sort of unpack that. And I think this moment will be a great moment to help students think through. Okay, well, what’s the textbook paragraph going to say about this moment? Is that really — does that match your experience? How does this work? So I think the feelings are there, but also this classification of our entire discipline.

SC:        So I wrote a blog post in late May for the COVID Chronicles, which is a blog that has come up in Canada about the experiences of COVID and it’s about like my camera roll in my phone from the last two months.

BS:        Oh, cool.

SC:        And I was like, my camera roll is an archive of grief, and longing, and community, you can’t see that unless I narrate it for you, because the pictures of me, like a selfie of me in the woods smiling might seem like, oh, look at this late 30’s woman in an urban setting coping really well. And it makes me think about the evidence that has to be narrated like that was an important walk in order to X, Y, or Z. And I think because students are recording so much of their lives right now not just because of COVID, they too can think about those things through their own record collections.

BS:        Yeah. No, I think that is great. And really the — I don’t even want to talk about a silver lining, but a way for students to really understand the nature of history and evidence. And when we look at photographs from the past, now are we going to think differently about what we know? And also just encouraging people to document this moment and to write stuff down and to explain to us through a camera roll so that when someone looks at it 100 years from now, there are liner notes for it essentially.

SC:        A different type of record with liner notes, yeah.

BS:        Yeah. Exactly.

SC:        But it also is a good moment for young people also to think about like, why are essential workers who in Canada at least are predominantly racialized people? Why don’t we have as many records from them? Well, because they are busy. The people that are creating the most amount of record have an element of privilege to be able to do that recording, and like I think that this moment can help bring up that discussion in a classroom about the evidence that we have in the past and how this moment demonstrates to us how some evidence get saved and preserved and recorded, and some don’t.

BS:        Yeah. No, this makes me really think too about this moment of where, for many students, history feels very traditional. We should talk about politics, we should talk about wars. But then if we want them to sort of claim ownership of documenting this moment and thinking that their experience matters, that challenges them to then look in the past and say, “Okay, well, my experience matter groceries from, his experience matters, what about people in the past who would fit our niches?

So I think that it has the — I mean, I think we as teachers have the power to make this sort of reshape the way students think about history and who counts and how we find voices in the past because we have this living example of whose voices are being recorded and not right now, even in this great age of technology where most of us have smartphones and have the ability to make a record.

SC:        I think too that it also can help teachers recognize the diverse lives of their students that they might not have a chance to see in the same way. So for teachers to also think that the records that their students have created during this time are different than the records that they created during this time and to make space for those other lived experiences in how we think through this moment. So rather than just being like, don’t forget, these other records are there, but like, let’s look at your own records to be able to identify how they look different despite the moment being the same.

BS:        Yeah, absolutely. I think that moment is going to forever change sort of teachers’ assumptions that every student has the same experience and access to technology. You know, it’s very interesting to sort of see what this disruption in education is laying there I think.

SC:        Well, this seemed like a good moment to switch to the other question about the future. Do you think the ways that we teach history will change in the future from this? Not just about there might be more integration of technology, but like this thinking about evidence, this thinking about or understanding we’re seeing the different lives of students, do you think that will come into play at all in teaching history? So do you think history will change — teaching history will change after this moment?

BS:        I think it can. Part of the power I think of a series like yours is that it really pushes us to be reflective and to stop just sort of getting through the hard bits of teaching right now and sort of think about not just our own work and discipline, but what we’re doing in the classroom and to be more intentional about it, particularly how can I be a good teacher right now, whether that’s online or with students who are having such traumatic experiences? Many of them I think will become, can become a pressing question that then becomes a question that drives a lot of our teaching in the future even when we’re not in this moment.

I mean, I think the impact on the teaching of history and talking about evidence. I’ll have my students in the fall continue to collect evidence and document this experience and think outside the box in terms of what primary sources are, and do oral histories, and that kind of thing. And I have not been much of a local history person in my career, so that will shift for me. But I think the bigger charge is can we just do a better job of being inclusive in our story of the past because we’ve had this attention to inequity in this moment? Can we think better about what our students need? That care that you talk about? As well as obviously historical content, skills, all of that, but that has to be packaged maybe in a new box, I hope.

SC:        Yeah. Like normally, I would have a follow-up question to that, but my follow-up question actually makes the most sense with my last question about imagining a new ‘we’ because I argue that we should think of our history classroom with greater circles of inclusion and not just like allowing more people into our circle, but to really challenging our understanding of what that circle could be? What experiences are? And what I’m hearing from your answer is the importance of doing that both with our evidence, but also in our practices in our relationships with our students. So do you see greater potential after this moment for educators to imagine a new ‘we’?

BS:        I hope so. I think in the classroom, I’ve thought some about just the power of social studies in particular. Not just history, but also the teaching civics especially creating students who are news literate and thoughtful about the world, who value civic participation. I do open houses sometimes to recruit students to my teacher program and I made a PowerPoint last year that sort of started tongue in cheek, but that I put “Change the world. Teach social studies,” and it was sort of meant to just be kind of funny, right? That we get students —

SC:        Oh, it’s true.

BS:        Yeah. But then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, no, this is the way we’re going to do this because we can model the community that the world that we want to live in, particularly when I think about a high school classroom, right? We can change the world by changing the experience that our students have a kind of civil discourse, this kind of thing.

So I think there is that potential. I feel in my own country in the United States right now, this real tension, we had a virtual commencement that Barack Obama did the address a week or two ago, and he had this, which is a powerful message. But he talked several times about leaving behind the old way of doing things. We know they’re not working, he said.

And I was so struck by that because not everybody thinks the old ways aren’t working. And I think some of the fight over is the old way working? Is it not working? What is this new America? Do we want to imagine a new world? That that is a contest right now. And I wish I felt confident that it was going to come out on the side of we can imagine a new world. I don’t always feel that way, but I think in our classrooms, we teach towards hope and we teach towards the change we want to see and that that is what we have to do.

SC:        One of the other things he said in those speeches is like, you youth, it is your responsibility to activate and make these changes. And like I said earlier, like teachers should think about their purpose for teaching history. My purpose for teaching history is for transformation for students to feel a sense of transformation about what the world could be and then to activate that to action. And so, yes, social studies can certainly change the world, but I think that that is our role and responsibility in our social studies and history classes to give students the tool, the knowledge to be able to do that. And sometimes that work can be scary, but I think it is really essential and I think we’re seeing that more now than ever.

BS:        Yeah, it’s really interesting in the United States, a number of states have changed their curriculums in response to the National Council for the Social Studies put out a framework for social studies that everything ends in what they call “informed action” and that you’re supposed to be teaching students to ask smart questions, to engage in research, to answer them, to have civil conversations even of controversial events and then to end in this action.

And I really think that is just such a powerful model that Barack Obama is talking to the youth maybe because we’ve abandoned hope for the adults, right? That you’re going to become informed and then you’re going to act. Like that’s pretty cool, and to see teachers doing that with their students and to see the empowerment that it gives students to feel like they can be a changemaker, for lack of a better word, I think is really cool. And that was happening before this moment and I see teachers even in these hardest of times in the spring with remote learning trying to continue to do this work with our students.

SC:        And you know, something else about this — about you’re saying with the adults that there are some adults that don’t think things should be changed and then there are people that want things to be changed. What’s interesting is that the people that don’t want things to change are often using history as a foundation. Like, let’s do this again, for example. Or like the way the things that have been going have been fine.

And what I think is so important is that people that want to push for a better future often also draw on the past as a way to demonstrate resilience, and activism, and resistance. And in some ways drawing on the past is different than drawing on history because that history is already been crafted. And so we can use our classrooms as ways for students to think about that tension too and to think about the narratives that they want to see and, again, draw on the past to be able to do this imagining, to do this action.

BS:        Oh, I really like how you’re separating sort of the past from history. And we talked about history as art and science, and here we’re talking about it almost as a weapon, right?

BS:        That it becomes this tool to advocate for change or maybe to imagine and pretend past to stand against change. And one of the things that I had hoped before all of this that my students would take away from my classes is that when someone is presenting them ‘in the past we…’, I want them to stop and listen carefully and then think is this true? What is this narrative trying to do? That narratives of history or narratives of the past, we use them to do incredible work in the present, and we need to be careful. Like they are extremely effective and they are not always accurate. And that is, in some ways, it is a very weird time to be teaching history.

I started teaching history right around the turn of the century and it didn’t feel —

SC:        Don’t date yourself. Make sure you identify which century because you [crosstalk 0:29:22.2] to the 19th century. So don’t date yourself.

BS:        That is true. Yes. So around 2000, and it just did not feel so contested, when you talk about things in the past. And, I think that it is, too bad, but it also gives us this interesting challenge and this sort of clarion call do we have to do this right in the classroom? There is a sort of moral urgency to giving our students skills to figure out what is the truth out there, what do I believe in, how does the past impact our present, what does knowledge of the past call for us to do in the present, how should we interpret the news. And I think that that is the kind of powerful history and social studies that I hope to see, and maybe that’s part of this imagining a new ‘we’, right? That if the youth ‘we’ is coming up through that kind of social studies, maybe that is what brings on a new world.

SC:        Well, I think that’s a really powerful way to end. We’ve already talked for 30 minutes. This was so wonderful. Thank you so much, Bonnie.

BS:        Oh, no, thank you. This was fun.

SC:        Yeah, and I’m not done with this series or with all of you either. Like I think it would be really great to like touch base after and see if and how things are changing once like the urgency has kind of lessened a bit. And I think we’ll feel that in the summer and it will feel different in the fall. So anyway, let’s stay in touch.

BS:        Sounds good. Thank you.

SC:        Okay, bye.

BS:        Bye.