Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        John, I’m really excited to speak to you today, not just because of your experience in this field, but also because it’s great to talk to someone who’s in the States right now and thinking of these things in a different context.

Before we get started, can you introduce yourself to everyone?

Dr. John Bickford:        Sure. Hello! I’m John Bickford, but everyone calls me Jay. I’m originally from New York State. I got all my degrees at the University of Iowa and now I’m an associate professor of social studies and history education at Eastern Illinois University, which is in the southeast part of the state of Illinois, about three hours south of Chicago.

SC:        You said that is quite a rural area.

JB:        It is, yeah. There’s maybe 20,000 folks in our town in the town of Charleston. I

SC:        You know, we were talking earlier on in a video with Kristina Llewellyn about how people’s experiences during COVID are all common, but they’re all going to be so different. Before we get started with the questions, what is it like in a rural community during something like this?

JB:        Biggest concern is shortages. For the most part, you only have one store for most items, you know. There’s a Walmart and then one other grocery store and that’s it. So if they’re out of something, you’ve got to go quite a distance to get it from somewhere else.

SC:        During this moment, we think we are all sharing this same experience, but your experience compared to mine highlights so many differences in our lives, and these are the types of things that have really made me think about the history as a discipline differently.

Has this moment — has the pandemic — made you think of history in different ways?

JB:        Oh, my gosh, yes. I think the biggest thing is recognition. Recognition of things that I may have been tangentially aware of in the past or I may have been very prominent in the past, but now it’s bedrock. It’s foremost. It’s so important to me.

For instance, the tensions between experts’ conclusions and ordinary individuals’ conclusions. It’s intolerable how we have regular folks on social media who think they can offer guidance to other citizens when they’re not trained in epidemiology or public health or other of these fields. We’re seeing a lot of what some people have referred to as the “democratization of expertise” where everybody’s opinion matters and my opinion is just as good as somebody else even if I’m untrained in that field. Those same elements, that same democratization of expertise emerges quite clearly when it comes to this pandemic months ago, weeks ago, days ago, today. That’s the first recognition, the tensions between experts’ conclusions and then ordinary citizens or elected officials’ suggestions.

My second recognition would be the disparities and inequalities among citizens in our country and of the world. It is startling, you know. And not that I wasn’t aware of this before, but it’s just become more paramount. The bedrock, so to speak, is exposed. Like when a river digs underneath the ground and pulls up some sediment that hadn’t been exposed in a while like with a flood. Not that I wasn’t aware of the idea of first-world problems like weak Wi-Fi, for instance. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of it, but it just becomes so much more obvious.

My wife is a teacher in town. And what blows me away is how our school district still provides lunches for all these kids. How many kids are coming to school to pick up lunches because they don’t have it at home. That is startling.

SC:        So there are some really interesting things that I want to acknowledge there.

Like when you said like weak Wi-Fi is a first-world problem and it certainly is, but it’s amazing how now, we are recognizing how the structures of needing something like Wi-Fi is so embedded in our expectations of daily life. Like how Wi-fi has become part of the bedrock. Because in Ontario, for example, we’ve all moved to online learning as of April the 6th, and the inequities within our own province, within our own cities, it’s going to be so much more apparent because we are assuming that Wi-Fi is this thing that everyone has, which they don’t. This expectation will exacerbate the inequities that we have here.

JB:        You know, it’s so concerning where something that would seem like a small nuisance a week ago or a month ago is now absolutely consequential. It’s startling.

SC:        Another thing I wanted to bring up when you had said about the democratization of expertise.

When I was talking with archivist Chris Sanagan, we were talking about all of the records that are gonna be created during this moment. All of the documents, all of the Facebook accounts, all of the emails, all the text messages, and the archivist will really need to figure out what the value of these records are. We were talking about this problem of so many records, but how it is also an opportunity to have a greater democratization of the types of records we archive.

But I think you bring up a really good point: Like, if we are saying we’re going to ‘democratize’ the type of records we’re going to have value to, some of those records will demonstrate these points of view that are contrary to what is actually happening around us.

JB:        National narrative or a specific political figure’s narrative, or a specific political party’s commonly held assumptions are their claims? Yeah.

The social history that is being created and documented in our contemporaneous exchanges of emails and social media posts are absolutely, absolutely astounding and wonderfully rich, you know. And they absolutely add nuance and detail that will not be seen in certain public official statements and claims and narratives. Yeah, I agree.

SC:        Yeah. I talked to a few historians that said, like, “Well, my idea of history hasn’t changed too much because I already was a social historian, so I had space for this.” But I think that you bring up a good point. Like we are also in a moment where we are creating a social history, and that I still think it should allow us to shift our acknowledgment about what gets created in these moments, which then, to me, leads to thinking about teaching history.

Do you think the way we teach history is going to change after this moment? Do you think it should?

JB:        Well, yes, I think it should. I’m hopeful that it will. That being said, there’s idealistic goals and also pragmatic measures and pragmatic elements that are beyond our control.

In the United States, at least in this area of the state I should say and from talking with other professors in the United States, there is a real struggle getting social studies teachers on-board with what would be considered best practice pedagogy: inquiry, discipline specific, critical thinking, communicating understandings through different forms of text-based writing and speaking.

You see a lot of teachers at least here, they engage in what I think James Loewen first referred to as the “tyranny of the text.” The idea of I have to get through the textbook. And we can all have our impressions of what happened, but this textbook, that’s what happened. We may think otherwise, but that’s what happened.

And a lot of teachers, especially in social studies, try to complete their timeline in history from Lincoln till September 11th, or something like that. It’s very common, and you don’t see a lot of teachers that are very invested in deep inquiry. And that’s one of the things I worry about. They’re so stressed for time. There’s so little time to begin with and it gets very difficult trying to get teachers on-board.

Most of the teachers I work with are elementary teachers who have the time and the flexibility where they don’t have a 40-minute class period. They can spread it out throughout the day and integrate reading and writing and thinking and language within social studies.

I see a lot of social studies teachers, those struggling hope that this moment would change how we approach history and ways to make social studies all the more meaningful, and I have some ideas for that.

SC:        Could you please share some strategies that you think might be helpful for teachers in navigating some of these ideas.

JB:        Sure. Well, I think the biggest thing involves two steps.

The first is engaging history students as if they were historians. If we could think for a minute about how second graders do in math: two plus {blank} equals nine. It’s a simple second-grade task, but that’s pre-algebraic thinking. You don’t tell the kids it’s pre-algebra, but that’s what two plus blank is. And as the kids are figuring it out, the second graders, they’re working like mathematicians. They’re using math disciplinary boundaries to answer a math question. Take the same second graders in reading and writing word, study English language arts class, they are reading and writing and thinking like an author or a poet or a copy editor. Take science. If they’re going out to discover different types of leaves, picking up leaves on the ground and then trying to trace them to the tree from which they fell and looking at the similarities and differences, I mean, they’re behaving like a botanist, okay? Just like a botanist.

Now you take a second grade social studies class. Frequently, they have to memorize the capital of a state, or they have to memorize this president and that president. And in the United States, it’s probably George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or some other innocuous figure, where its history is reduced to a timeline and a summary, you know. And now historians don’t work with summaries and timelines the way that we expect our second grade kids to just memorize.

Take those math, science, and English examples I gave. Each one of them involves critical thinking. Critical thinking intended for a second grader, but still they’re critically evaluating an ambiguous situation using evidence, and then they’re communicating their conclusions in a way that’s discipline specific and age appropriate. I think we need to do the same thing with social studies.

We need to pose consequential questions for students. And provide the resources the primary and secondary sources for them to explore on their own. To answer the question themselves and the idea of relying on evidence and expertise, but also questioning the veracity of the experts’ claims and the limitations of the evidence, you know. No primary sources of people in the past. It’s not perfect. They can give you clues, but it doesn’t tell you everything that happened. A secondary source is only as good as the primary sources upon which it’s based.

And the idea of we need to get our students to explore these primary and secondary sources just like historians. It’s not historical comprehension. That’s summaries and timelines. Historical thinking is scrutinizing the source, and the context, and the perspectives or biases, and the limitations. What were they not aware of?

And I think that’s what we have to do when it comes to our steps. Now, this is all integrated within at least in the United States within what is an extension of the Common Core called the C3 Framework. It’s got four different dimensions: Posing questions, using disciplinary boundaries and guidelines, scrutinizing the sources, and then communicating text-based understandings. I think that’s the key.

I think the first thing we need to do is move back to our disciplinary boundaries and rely on evidence and logic and expertise, but to also question where does the logic fall short? Or where does the evidence have limitations? Or where are the experts perhaps blinded by their own perspectives or their own gaps? Their own gaps.

SC:        Yes, interesting. I was thinking of Chris Sanagan’s video when you were talking. He’s an archivist and he said that we’re all in these curated bubbles of content, because of our social media accounts. And I think that, taking your idea and then thinking about this moment for how students look at like the ‘evidence’ that they have in their social media world, and then compare them with each other, it’s an interesting way of being able to highlight the different types of evidence. Even though a student in a class, especially in a rural area perhaps, would have a lot of similarities in their social media feeds, but it could be a way of like bringing those two things together, for example.

JB:        Yes. That is a key point. The second point, I wanted to make is about this. It is about the idea of moving beyond our bubbles, beyond the history bubble, even though I see myself in more social studies education than history. The idea of the role of civics, and economics, and cultural geography, and physical geography, and sociology, and psychology and how that can impact our understandings of history.

For instance, today in the state of Wisconsin, just one state north of us, they’re having primary elections. This is where they are voting on, if I understand it correctly, a state supreme court justice. They need to elect one more. And it’s not just for the primaries for the parties, but also for the state Supreme Court. The Democratic governor requested an extension a week ago for absentee voting to give them more than just today. Like, you know, it didn’t have to be just today. They could pick up their absentee votes sometime over last week or today, and then get them in the mail and then have two weeks to make their decisions.

The Republican-controlled state supreme court in this election, one of the things on the ballot is for another state supreme court justice. But the Republican-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court voted no to allowing an extension during this pandemic today. They refused to. And it’s the idea of, “Okay, who’s more likely to vote? Who has the time,” okay? When we’re talking who’s working in the service industry? Who has white collar jobs versus blue collar jobs? And the idea of limiting citizens’ decisions and their civil liberties. That’s a civic issue.  That’s a political science issue. History might look at who won the election, but in historical thinking, it takes in the case context, corroboration, credibility, all of these things, but a civics lens really changes the impact of what’s happening today.

Take economics. As I understand what’s happening in Canada, when it comes to ways that the government is trying to support its citizens, I’ve read from some pretty credible media sites like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes that a dollar amount that citizens in Canada can expect over these next, I can’t remember if it’s three or four months. In the United States, it’s about 60% of what Canadians are going to get in one month, the United States citizens are looking for one check. Just one check. 60% of one month in Canada. And it’s not a check that they get to keep. It’s an advancement on next year’s tax returns.

It is startling. If you were to look, there are 12 states that in the last two years have implemented very strict voting registration requirements; like throwing out all the voting records and making everybody get new IDs for new votes, to get their voter ID laws up-to-date with what they say are the driver’s IDs. And if you think about this, it’s basically renewing your license, that’s where it comes down to. You renew your driver’s license, then you register to vote at the same time. But think about when it comes to, who has the time to do this, who has the interest in writing another $100 check? For me , it might be an annoyance. But to somebody who has to choose between buying their grandmother’s medicine for the month, paying this month’s rent or spending $100 to be able to vote next election, the primaries, I mean, this is an economic decision.

And you can’t remove the civics from it, and you also can’t remove the implications on history, you know, and it’s so concerning. And when you see these states initiating these things, I mean there are certain things that are just so common. A lot of people in the United States will say things today, “My newsfeed on Twitter, on Facebook, it’s full of neighbors and family members saying things like, oh, we need to not politicize this moment. Or we need to not worry about these other things.” And there’s a reason these things are happening. We’ve disregarded the experts. We’ve dismissed the evidence, you know. And we’ve also tried to separate or create silos around this is what you can criticize an elected official for and this is what you cannot.

And I think one way to move forward within the discipline of history is branching out to other disciplines because history impacts poli sci and economics has a huge impact on historical events. And I think broadening it to more of the social studies, I think it’ll have a huge impact on the public in my thinking and in my mind anyway.

SC:        Well, Neil Orford, one of the teachers that I started talking here during this series, as well as Jan Haskings-Winner, another teacher that I interviewed, both of them said interdisciplinarity is going to be so important.

And again, one of the arguments I’d like to make in this series is that we need to have increasing circles of inclusion. And I think when we even think about interdisciplinarity, we can do that more because we are allowing different disciplines and greater types of knowledge to come into our conversation.

You know, I was saying to people before we went into social isolation here in Toronto, when there was a real heightened anxiety about toilet paper, I said: “You know why everyone is going to buy toilet paper? Because we can’t stop Trump and we can’t stop climate change.” Like, I think we’re living in a very anxious moment right now and that this allows us to see some of those anxieties because we’ve all had to stop in some ways.

And so I think about what you’re talking about in terms of bringing in evidence, but also combining it with things like oral histories like Kristina Llewellyn talked about as we need to pick up on some of these feelings of anxiety that so many people were feeling even before this happened.

JB:        Sure. To use a phrase that I’ve heard you say first, and I’m going to refer to it back to you about the new ‘we’. The new ‘we’, my first element would be an interdisciplinary mindset based on evidence and logic.

When you’re talking about how can we move forward with an interdisciplinary mindset? I love the idea of exploring the details for common problems and I wish we could do this for all citizens. I wish we could send all citizens to a critical thinking class where they identify what logical fallacies are and how can you avoid them in your own thinking and in your own life. Like, this isn’t a theoretical or a philosophical problem, this is a very real citizen’s problem, you know?

When we talk about how can we imagine a new ‘we’ or when we’re moving forward, I think there are lots of things that we can do, but one of the best things I think we can do is scrutinize the source, listen to the experts, and explore the evidence and just really make evidence-based decisions where it’s not a solution in search of a problem. Or it’s not one person’s claim that everybody else just adapts. Be critical consumers of the media that they produce.

SC:        Well, that’s my last question: How or if we can imagine a new ‘we’ differently. Because for me, that really came from teachers teaching national history articulating that there is like an us versus them in terms of, like, people that know this, like Canadians and then others because we have a very large immigrant population in Canada. But even people who aren’t immigrants, they’re just people of color, for example, there’s a bit an ‘us versus them’ mentality. And that can happen too, just like Sean Carlton talked about in his video in terms of Canadians and other people, indigenous people on this land like the nation-to-nation relationship.

So do you have any other thoughts about this notion of imagining and this notion of a ‘we’ during this moment?

JB:        Sure. Well, the first thing I would do is bring us back to one of my favorite women in history, Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt used to articulate that government is a shield for the masses, not a tool for the rich. And that’s the bedrock of my life’s philosophy, my teaching philosophy, the idea of we are stronger when we work together. And our connectivity certainly, absolutely — our connectedness and our close proximity absolutely exacerbates a pandemic. But it’s also part of the solution.

When we’ve got all these problems, we need all the brains we can get. And it’s not like there’s an American notion that if we just put these big walls up around our country and don’t let in any outsiders, then American exceptionalism will really flourish. But everybody knows that purebred dogs are the angriest. Variety is the spice of life. Our diversity is a strength. It’s our strength. And the idea of it’s not the people against the government, it’s how can we make the government work for the people and not just be a tool for the rich?

When it comes to the new ‘we,’ I think we can overcome a lot of these issues if we were to recognize that we’re stronger when we’re together and we work towards the typical civil liberties: the freedom of speech, freedom of worship, things like that, but also more social studies-oriented freedoms. Like freedom from want and freedom from fear. And everybody having clean water, or where you don’t have to decide between paying rent or paying for your prescription pills. Or like you mentioned earlier. What about publicly-funded Wi-Fi, you know?

In the United States, Eisenhower is credited for the national interstate system. And I mean, giving credit, you know it’s pretty impressive, but we need investments like that when it comes to 21st century avenues for creative success, and economic success, and engineering success and publicly-funded Wi-Fi is absolutely one part of that.

SC:        I think Eisenhower would have been a better president if he also did national Wi-Fi as an initiative!

JB:        Right. Ahead of the curve back in the 1950s!

SC:        Yeah. It will be interesting how this moment – and I keep saying ‘moment’  when it is more than that – but it’s a moment that teaches us things. This t isn’t going to be a moment in our history. It’s going to be this thing that evolves. And it will be really interesting how it continues to evolve. So thank you so much for this wonderful talk. I really, really appreciate it.

JB:        My pleasure.

SC:        Until we speak next time!