By Therese Boyd, ’79
The fight over content in K-12 textbooks in the United States often makes headlines when it comes to religious issues (e.g., the 2005 “Panda trial” in Dover, Pennsylvania). But textbooks that diminish, dismiss, or ignore other cultures in their telling of American history don’t garner nearly the same level of attention. Sarah Shear, assistant professor of social studies education at Penn State Altoona, works to raise awareness of the lack of full and accurate cultural representation in textbooks and change that status quo.
Shear’s efforts cover three fronts: the teacher, the textbook, and the state-mandated standards. In the case of the teacher, “we tend to find especially new teachers stick with what they learned, and repeat what they learned, and repeat the same cycle of teaching oppressive narratives,” she says. She does not fault those teachers, however, because she knows they weren’t taught the material in the first place. “Most education majors I’ve worked with the last few years have very little to no context of Indigenous peoples and their relationship with the United States. They tend to repeat a lot of what they learned, which might be misrepresentative of history and different groups within our society.”
What sort of approach does Shear use? “The work we do in class is about getting the education majors to start thinking about a larger picture of the world outside of what they have learned.” She wants students to think about “how they talk about and see people and the tendency to seek what is societally normed—what is considered ‘normal’ and what that may represent to their future students in an ever-changing world.” This line of thought encompasses not only race and Indigenous peoples, Shear notes, but gender and sexual orientation as well.
While challenging the outlook of education majors is a significant step toward changing the outcome in the classroom, examining the origin of the problem is also important. “Where are the voices of Indigenous peoples in the Thanksgiving story?” Shear asks in an article that appeared in the online publication The Conversation in November 2015. In that essay she describes the research she did as a second-year doctoral student, along with two first-year doctoral students at the University of Missouri, to study “state-mandated K-12 history standards” in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. They found that “87 percent of the standards placed Indigenous peoples in a pre-1900 context. In other words, these standards confined Indigenous peoples to a distant past. . . . But the standards rarely, if ever, present these events and the loss of life and land from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.”
As an extension of that research, she is presently “gearing up to lead an in-depth examination of AP U.S. history standards,” specifically “how those standards represent in content and context Indigenous peoples.” The original study brought attention from the Huffington Post, whose education editor interviewed Shear for an article published in November 2015 titled “Most Students Have No Clue What Accurate Native American History Looks Like.” In it, Shear bluntly acknowledges that the real story of Thanksgiving—not what schoolchildren learn—is “not a feel-good story.”
Her first publication, which featured her national study (S. B. Shear, R. T. Knowles, G. J. Soden, and A. J. Castro, “Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K–12 U.S. History Standards,” Theory and Research in Social Education 43, no. 1 [2015]: 68–101), was recently reprinted by the Zinn Education Project, and is just a start in her efforts to raise awareness about the importance of including all peoples in social studies. She continues to write about her research: “I just wrote a book chapter that deals with race in social studies education and how the textbooks leave out the discussion of Indigenous education policies.”
By omitting groups of people—and their significant life events—in the retelling of history, we leave an inaccurate narrative, as Shear is very aware. “For social studies it’s like beating the drum for decades. Research has been finding problems of inaccuracies for years, but nothing has seemingly come of it.” Her (and many others’) solution? “Bringing research into advocacy is the horizon of what social studies is going into next, to continue to get it out into the public sphere where teachers and policymakers can make sense of it.”
Putting actions to those words, Shear is taking part in a national movement to change what is now “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous People’s Day.” “I coauthored a resolution on behalf of the College and University Faculty Assembly delegation, for which I am a member, to the larger National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) House of Delegates calling on the organization to publicly support the change.” There was resistance, but “it passed narrowly after a contentious deliberation.”
Opposition to the resolution, Shear says, “varied from delegates stating elementary students would not understand the term ‘Indigenous’ to holding firm to the holiday as a tradition of America’s discovery.” Other delegates felt the resolution was too political. “It was disheartening to say the least,” she admits, but “many delegates spoke in favor as well and in the end we won this first major hurdle despite a significant number of delegates abstaining from the vote.” The NCSS Board of Directors will vote on the resolution in March, and “if it passes we will be the first, I believe, education organization to back the movement which is gaining momentum in a number of cities across the United States.”
Shear’s research takes her all over the country. She recently spent a week in Oklahoma “working with a colleague interviewing high school state history teachers about the resources they use and their decision-making about how to teach about Indigenous cultures.” Oklahoma has a significant place in history as the end of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi River in the late 1830s. “Ten percent of the students in the district where our research is located are identified as ‘Indigenous,’ so it is particularly important to learn how teachers consider the materials they use and the teaching lessons they write.”
At the same time that she and her fellow researchers are analyzing the data collected in Oklahoma, Shear is planning a trip to Montana and Washington to interview teachers in those two states. “It will be the same type of conversations: how do they make decisions about teaching considering how many Indigenous students are in those school districts.” This, Shear says, “is complementary to the research I do on standards and textbooks. But now I’m getting to see how the teachers actually use them, what those materials present and how the teachers think about them, if they use them, or what they use instead.”
This work brings her research “full circle,” she says, and “helps with how I go about teaching in the teacher prep program to help education majors think through that beginning teacher mentality of ‘how do I make decisions regarding culturally relevant material?’ This is not only for the potential Indigenous students in their class, but teaching relevant, accurate, and anti-bias lessons for all students.” Shear’s work leads to an ambitious final goal: “What I want for our students at Penn State who go into teaching is to correct the misinformation and the inaccurate narrative that have been cycling through K12 studies for too long.”
Shear sees her work as making valuable changes across textbooks and classrooms and even cultures. “People who are active in change at the local level can really use it. To have my work included in conversations is a tremendous honor, to not just exist in a journal where maybe a few people would read it but really have it do something, be part of a movement to make education better.”
