Shifting the Lens in History Education: Centering Racial and Ethnic Knowledge in the Classroom

A persuasive collection that considers how centering the knowledge and perspectives of historically marginalized groups enriches K-12 history teaching and learning

In Shifting the Lens in History Education, Maribel Santiago and Tadashi Dozono and a team of educational scholars call for history education that honors and respects the past and future agency of historically marginalized communities. This collection encourages history educators to extend their focus past conventional, inquiry-driven learning; to center the ways racially and ethnically marginalized communities preserve history; and to uphold Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Arab, and Asian American student knowledge in the classroom.

In these mind-expanding essays, contributors offer context and a theoretical framework for their proposed paradigm shift in social studies and history pedagogy. They invite educators to consider the full emotional complexity of humans throughout history to avoid teaching racialized emotions. And they demonstrate how nontraditional approaches to history such as storytelling, oral history, and testimonios, which are often linked to anticolonial practices, complicate dominant narratives and support both historical inquiry and healing.

Taken together, these essays show that approaches to history and ways of knowing practiced in historically marginalized communities are expansive, legitimate, community-oriented, and restorative. They call for educators committed to social justice to embrace racial and ethnic community knowledge in tandem with traditional, inquiry-driven history education to engage in more holistic, nuanced understandings of the past.