Conscience

For my last currere blog post of the year, William Ayers' Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation gives me my starting point to take the synthetic turn—"turn to fragments of experience and larger political and cultural context" (Moore, 2017, p. 13). (see diagram 👉)

Another in a series of posts in my currere exploration

of my notions of social studies curriculum

Ayers (2016) is advocating that we teach in pursuit of social justice and states, "The work, of course, is never done. Democracy is dynamic, a community always in the making" (Ayers, 2016, p. xiii). As an aspiring social studies teacher, I feel the weight of this statement more heavily because I also have to teach about the instances where we have failed to vindicated social justice over and over again. But I am heartened by the opening words in his book: "Imagine a world that could be, or a would that should be, but isn't apparent or available to us just yet" (Ayers, 2016, p. 1). These words are what gets me up in the morning and exactly what I want my students to do. Before we can make this new world, we must first imagine the possibilities and then work towards it with a plan.

For me, becoming a teacher is driven by a desire to make the world a better place, specifically the city where I live—Washington, DC. And the more I have contemplated being a social studies teacher, the more convinced I become that social studies is the perfect place to do this. If social studies is used to instill a healthy skepticism and critically thinking skills that allow students to learn to make decisions for themselves and evaluate and weigh the credibility of their sources of information, that is the first step to a better world. We won't get there with sheep and a person who can think for themselves is unlikely to be content with the world as it is. This is the subversiveness of social studies.

But this subversiveness also is perilous and scary. Social studies teaching has always drawn political attention, but it feels like it is under the greatest threat to be be subverted for political ends that it has been in my lifetime. It is also under threat from threat from within as schools work so hard to avoid controversy that they create it by making topics off limits (Ross, 2022, p. 208). The recent local lawsuit against Jackson-Reed High School is a perfect example where the school basically banned discussion of any sort of the ongoing Isreali/Palestinian conflict (ACLU of DC, 2024).

As Ross (2022) notes, the student who social studies teaches to think for themselves is a citizen "dangerous to the status quo" (p. 209). And that teacher is also a dangerous citizen. But being a dangerous citizen is perilous because it is a threat to the status quo and so it "requires bravery and acceptance of risk" (Ross, 2022, p. 2010). I can accept the risk, and I hope I can bravely move forward as I juggle my first year of teaching. I believe the atmosphere of the school I am at will play a big role in that.

We live in interesting times. I'm excited to move forward, but also apprehensive.

References

Ayers, W. (2016). Teaching with conscience in an imperfect world: An invitation. Teachers College Press.

Moore, L. (2017). Starting the conversation: Using the currere process to make the teaching internship experience more positive and encourage collaborative reflection in internship site schools. Currere Exchange Journal, 1(1), 11–17.

Ross, E. W. (2022). Afterword.  In N. H. Merchant, S. B. Shear & W. Au (Eds.), Insurgent social studies: Scholar-educators disrupting erasure and marginality (pp.  207−211). Myers Education Press.

ACLU of the District of Columbia (ACLU of DC). (2024, April 24). Press release: Student club sues Jackson-Reed High School for unconstitutional censorship of pro-Palestinian Speech. https://www.acludc.org/en/press-releases/student-club-sues-jackson-reed-high-school-unconstitutional-censorship-pro