Discursive differences in teaching the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision and the preservation of narratives of American progress

Teaching race, racism and African American history

A substantial amount of research has examined the role of race and racism in the social studies (Woyshner and Bohan, 2012) and problematized depictions of minoritized groups in the social studies curriculum, including textbooks (Calderón, 2008, 2014; Brown and Brown, 2010, 2011, 2015) and state standards (Eargle, 2016; Journell, 2009; Vasquez-Heilig et al., 2012; Shear et al., 2015; Anderson and Metzger, 2011). These authors’ findings indicate that despite the removal of overt racist imagery of the past (Crocco, 2004), textbooks, curriculum and social studies pedagogy continue to rely on stereotypical and un-agentic representations of African Americans (Eargle, 2016; Lintner, 2004), who are often portrayed as victims of discrimination, or in capacities limited to a few historical events, rather than as the major drivers of social change (Journell, 2009). According to VanSledright (in Hawkman and Castro, 2017: 28), Black history is often confined to ‘freedom quest’ tropes and limited to the events involving Enslavement and the civil rights movement (King and Brown, 2015; Busey and Walker, 2017; Bolgatz, 2005).

A lack of agency attributed to communities involved in social struggle holds true in most research documenting how the civil rights movement is taught (King, 2014). In their analyses of textbook narratives of the civil rights movement, Woodson (2016, 2017) and Aldridge (2002, 2006) find that accounts included few African Americans, generally portrayed as messianic figures (for example, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr), with little reference to the movements supporting these individuals (see also Wineburg and Monte-Sano, 2008). Selecting a few African Americans as ‘exceptional, outliers, and atypical’, King (2014: 11) argues, denies sociocultural agency to entire communities and propagates otherness. In addition, (Hall 2005: 1234) finds that depictions of Martin Luther King Jr remain ‘frozen in 1963’, where his speeches ‘retain their majesty yet lose their political bite’. Reducing social movements to individual heroism precludes more complex understandings of systemic racism and collective action. Demonstrative of this, Wills (2019) studies the teaching of the civil rights movement, finding that students’ explanations of racism were often pinned on individuals’ actions, thereby preventing more structural understandings of racism. In addition, as noted by Salinas et al. (2016), the civil rights movement frequently occludes other histories leading up to the Brown decision involving other collectivities of colour. This finding is confirmed by Santiago (2016), who examines the teaching of the Mendez v. Westminster court case preceding Brown, which ruled school segregation unconstitutional, finding that teachers reduced Mendez’s complexities in order to draw cross-racial parallels between Latinx and Black movements. Finally, Hall (2005) describes the dominant narrative of the ‘short civil rights movement’, starting with the Brown decision in 1954 and culminating with the Voting Rights Act in 1965, symbolizing a ‘triumphal moment in a larger American progress narrative’ at the expense of a true accounting of the movement’s successes and challenges. These dominant understandings have been co-opted by the conservative movement and tokenized as part of a new ‘colour-blind’ ideology that concedes the existence of racism, but relegates it to a time ‘in the distant past’ mainly in the South, and understood as ‘individual bigotry’ (Hall, 2005: 1237).

Teaching Brown

In examining the teaching of Brown, Hess (2005) argues that there is a stark contrast between the historical explanations proffered by academics and the history frequently taught in schools. For academics such as Hall (2005), the Brown decision is wrought with ambivalence, rampant with contradictory effect. Scholars including Derek Bell (1980) have argued that Brown was more about post-Second World War interest convergence and the need of the United States to appear as a liberal democracy in the face of Soviet competition.

Other studies have challenged the actual effects of Brown, asserting that many school districts did not desegregate until the mid-1970s, and that integration did not necessarily undo the psychological damage of racial discrimination (Gay, 2000). In fact, integration often meant that African Americans had to travel across cities to attend White schools taught by largely White teachers (Gay, 2003) who continued to harbour racist attitudes (Halvorsen, 2012), and the decision also led to the firing of Black teachers and the consolidation of Black community-based institutions (Watras, 2012). Today, US schools are more segregated than ever (Orfield et al., 2019). Moreover, Noguera and Wing (2006) find that even in so-called integrated spaces, racial inequality persists (see also Lewis and Diamond, 2015). Despite this complicated background, in most school contexts, the Brown v. Board decision is taught as a full-throated success.

Theoretical frame: Master narratives and hegemonic Whiteness

This study was guided by two theoretical concepts: master narratives and hegemonic Whiteness. The idea of master narrative applies Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony to the field of history, and explores how teaching history is used as a means for operationalizing normative ideas about power. Apple (2004) argues that schools are instruments through which dominant ideologies are imparted, and that they often do the bidding of systems of power, albeit sometimes unwittingly. With respect to history as a discipline, Trouillot (1995: 28) argues that ‘power is constitutive of the story … that power itself works together with history’. History is seen here not as a series of a priori facts, but as an ideology embodied – a positional take with specific aims. Raymond Williams elaborates on:

the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected or excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture. (Quoted in Apple, 2004: 5)

Here, a so-called ‘traditional’ past is systematically constructed in the service of maintaining existing power relations. These narratives are frequently termed ‘master narratives’, which Hammack (2011: 313) defines as a ‘collective storyline’ viewed as compulsory for group members – ‘a story which is so central to the group’s existence and “essence” that it commands identification and integration into the personal narrative’. Within the context of the United States, Woodson (2016: 185) ties master narratives to the reinforcement of White supremacy, defining master narratives as ‘social and historical mythologies that portray reality in ways that reinforce White power and position’.

Notions of exceptionalism, progress and redemption are central to master narratives about the origins of the United States (McAdams, 2006, 2013; VanSledright, 2008) and are inextricably linked to Whiteness. Calderón (2008, 2014) notes that the ‘main story’ most often taught in history classrooms is one that reinforces White settler nationalism, which, in effect, erases, obscures and sanitizes histories that threaten to complicate or delegitimize the American colonial project. Hughey (2012) describes this as hegemonic Whiteness, wherein Whiteness functions as the unexamined norm and Whiteness is presumed as normal (see also Dyer, 1997). Chandler and Branscome (2015) and others have examined the pervasiveness of Whiteness in social studies education (Ladson-Billings, 2003; Hawkman, 2018, 2020; Smith and Crowley, 2014; Crowley and Smith, 2015; Hawkman and Shear, 2020). Given the findings of this research, critical scholars see the purpose of history as a means for speaking back to master narratives through counternarratives (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995), a central tenet of critical race theory, which seeks to ‘replace comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences’ (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012: 24).

Hammack (2008: 222) describes the possibility of multiple, and at times competing, master narratives that coincide with individuals’ personal identities and cultural affiliations, and through social interaction and practice. In this study, I view the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision through the lens of master narrative, seeking to observe how teachers’ versions diverged from, and converged with, typical ‘master’ treatments as described above, and to locate counternarratives. To do so, I deploy critical discourse analysis, specifically focusing on how language shapes meaning.

Theory

In this paper, I utilize critical discourse analysis as my methodology to provide a way for both viewing and analysing data. According to Kress and Hodge (1979), language is a means by which ideology operates, establishing institutional practices that appear commonsensical, natural and hard to identify, and yet conferring power through the recruitment of individuals into certain subject positions, connected to differential status, and often legitimizing existing power relations. This type of positioning also occurs through learning history; discourses are located in the historical narratives taught to students that inform their understandings of themselves, their social groupings, their place within nations, and their world views. As Gee (1999: 18) explains, it is impossible to separate individual actors from the discourses they represent and enact, and of which they are ‘carriers’ – ‘through our words and deeds, we carry on conversations with each other through history and in doing so, form human history’. For the purposes of this paper, I use ‘narrative’ as a stand-in for ‘discourses’. It is in this way that White hegemonic master narratives are enacted discursively; through the language that teachers deploy, and through their decisions about who to name and how to position historical actors, history is made and remade for students.

Method

To demonstrate ways in which language both shapes and is shaped by social relations (Halliday, 1994), this paper utilizes methods of critical discourse analysis to show both the micro-mechanizations of language usage in classroom-provided historical narratives and the larger discourses that these practices invoke. I coded transcripts of each teacher’s lessons on the Brown v. Board decision at a clausal level, specifically examining the types of nouns and verbs that comprised each clause. In order to address the question, Who are actors?, I tracked who or what were featured as sentence subjects, noticing whether they were individuals, collectivities or nominalizations (actions turned into nouns). Key to the use of nominalizations are questions regarding suppressions and deletions (Van Leeuwen, 2008). Machin and Mayr (2012: 85) explain that when ‘the agent is missing’, responsibility is obscured. By omitting individual actors, nominalized verb groupings – such as racism, segregation and colonization – appear to be naturally occurring, ‘inevitable’, and ‘something that must be responded to and adapted’, rather than questioned (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 85). I also examined patterns of nomination, looking at who was named, and whether the naming was individualized or generalized (for example, institutions). To address the question, Who is acted upon?, I tracked who or what was positioned as a direct object.

As with social actors, the ways that actions are described and attributed to various types of people differ and have material consequences. Thus, to understand how agency attribution differed across groups, I looked at what types of verbs characterized actions, making note of active versus passive verb constructions. On a macro-level, I employed Fairclough’s (1989) tool of presupposition in order to probe ‘what kinds of meanings are assumed as given in a text?’ (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 153).

Because I wanted to compare the embedded power relations across all three classroom contexts, I limited my clausal analysis to teachers’ lessons involving the Brown v. Board decision, despite having field notes that spanned their units. I supplemented these data with qualitative interviews in order to understand whether and how teachers’ lessons confirmed or undercut their stated goals and beliefs about their role as history teachers. In the findings below, I include a mix of examples of teachers’ discourse and more general insights gleaned from interview data to present a fuller picture.

Participants

This study featured three eleventh grade US history teachers, Christopher, Samuel and Talia (all pseudonyms), all of whom identified as White. I recruited them through snowball sampling based on acquaintances’ recommendations. I sought to capture a range of classroom contexts, and I was able to achieve some degree of representation in terms of class type, school demographics and school type. To that end, Christopher taught Advanced Placement (AP) US history and Samuel taught regular US history at large, suburban, predominantly White high schools, while Talia taught regular US history at a smaller urban charter school populated predominantly by students of colour. All of the teachers had seven years of teaching experience, were of similar ages, and had gone through one-year credential programmes. Christopher and Samuel both had undergraduate degrees in history, and Talia majored in American studies.

Importantly, each teacher expressed feelings of autonomy with regard to their curriculum, asserting that their choices about what to teach were not shaped by their school administrations, parental fears or a predetermined curriculum. Christopher relied on an AP US history textbook for homework, but his classroom teaching did not engage the textbook. Samuel relied heavily on his school’s textbook for both homework and classroom activities. Talia did not use a textbook at all. Christopher worried about covering all of the AP curriculum, but no other fears were expressed by participants. This sense of freedom reflected Thornton’s (1991) finding that teachers are curricular and pedagogical gatekeepers. Finally, all three teachers reported reading widely outside the requisite classroom materials to learn about their subject. Christopher described reading a biography of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, which informed his 1950s unit. Samuel referenced texts and films that informed his historical understandings, although the bulk of his knowledge about the civil rights movement appeared to come from his school’s adopted textbook and another non-adopted textbook. Finally, Talia described learning about the civil rights movement in a college course that included clips from the documentary Eyes on the Prize (DeVinney et al., 2010). She was so inspired by the documentary that she watched the entire 14-hour series on her own. Additionally, each teacher described experiences living and working in communities that diverged from their own suburban upbringings: Christopher had spent time on a Native American reservation, Samuel had lived in Japan for two years, and Talia had studied abroad in Mexico, was Jewish, and had been involved in activism for most of her life.

Limitations and researcher positionality

Despite this semblance of parity, it is important to note the limitations of this study and the fact that these findings are not generalizable. Had I observed a different group of teachers, my findings would have been different. Moreover, although student demographics were part of my selection criteria and I sought a cross-section of classrooms, I focused on teachers’ linguistic practices and their perceptions of their classrooms, schools and communities, rather than on the students. Beyond demographic data collected from school district websites and teachers’ anecdotal descriptions, I did not collect additional information about students. Finally, my own positionality as a White woman and former history teacher provided me with an insider–outsider status that inevitably shaped this research. It is possible that my insider status as a fellow White person made teachers feel more comfortable in opening up about their dilemmas related to addressing race in their classrooms. However, my outsider status as a researcher and former teacher might have invoked feelings of insecurity, inviting a need to perform in certain ways and/or ‘say the right thing’, in part because of the lack of ease White people frequently feel when talking about race.

Data set

In this study, I utilized comparative qualitative case study methods (Baxter and Jack, 2008) to collect data that included preliminary interviews, classroom observations, curricula and debriefs. I observed each teacher’s units on the civil rights movement, which varied in time spent and placement in their respective courses. Talia and Samuel both taught three-week units specifically about the civil rights movement and dived into a variety of different historical events, including the murder of Emmett Till, the march from Selma to Montgomery and the Black Power Movement, along with more contemporary issues such as the police murders of young Black men. In contrast, Christopher’s civil rights movement lessons were embedded within a broader unit on the 1950s, which moved quickly and spanned an array of topics, including the booming economy, the women’s movement, communism and cultural trends such as the expansion of materialism, and the development of supermarkets, fast food and motels.

Although the three teachers’ coverage of the movement varied, each taught lessons on the Brown v. Board decision, which I used as a comparative sample. After observing lessons, I conducted informal follow-up debriefings and final wrap-up interviews, and I collected curriculum samples. Prior to observing their teaching, I conducted formal interviews with each participant lasting between 60 and 120 minutes, wherein I sought to understand how they approached teaching historical moments involving race, their views of history and their goals as teachers (see Box 1). I audio-recorded and transcribed each event, and I wrote analytic memos during each phase of research. It is important to note that teaching and learning are highly complex activities (Gebhard, 2019), and the lessons I observed are not generalizable to each teacher’s overall teaching practice. Instead, I used their narratives of Brown as emblematic of some of the different linguistic practices utilized, and not as a complete assessment of anyone’s entire linguistic repertoire.

Brown as a narrative of hegemonic Whiteness – Christopher

Christopher’s presentation of history most closely typified a master narrative of the United States. He viewed history as a collection of facts operationalized to support certain arguments. He emphasized the importance of data and evidence to support arguments, asserting in our initial interview: ‘You can argue basically anything, although weak arguments don’t have good data backing them up.’ In both his interviews and teaching, Christopher frequently presented counter-perspectives to historical injustices, creating a permission structure that excused and/or downplayed the harm caused by the initial policy. For example, in his discussion of how he teaches manifest destiny and westward expansion during our initial interview, he explained:

I think now there’s a trend to say, well this is a horrible thing because Native Americans passed away, animals were killed, they lost their land, they cut down the trees, they were violated. But they could also argue on the other side, well we live a really nice lifestyle here. And that wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t do these things.

With this explanation, Christopher neutralized genocidal violence by using passive voice verbs such as ‘were killed’, and descriptors such as ‘passed away’, ‘lost’ and ‘cut down’ trees, with no clear agent responsible for said degradation. Then, when discussing how he teaches post-Civil War Reconstruction, Christopher cited Robert E. Lee as a ‘shining example’ of a former Confederate soldier who ‘made good’ by becoming a ‘chancellor of a school, and a lot of African Americans joined that school, and he spent the last five years of his life educating people, not in the sense of racism necessarily, but on the idea of bringing the country together’. In this narrative, Christopher left out other facts about Lee, such as his belief that African Americans were not intelligent enough to vote and his unwillingness to punish students involved in ‘attempted lynchings and kidnappings of Black women who lived nearby’ (Toscano, 2017). In these and other examples described below, Christopher betrayed a sense of resignation at the crueller parts of United States’ history, asserting that sacrificing ‘part of your ideals’ is necessary in order to ‘negate what you believe is opposite of your ideals’. This belief lined up with his hesitancy to judge historical actors who acted brutally, stating in his final interview, ‘my stance on judging the past is to judge yourself first through the filter of where they’re coming from…’.

Clashing narratives and Brown as a vacillating success – Samuel

Samuel’s narrative of Brown was the most difficult to categorize, mainly because the ideas he presented were often in direct conflict, perhaps reflecting his own vacillations regarding the purpose of teaching history. Samuel saw himself as social justice-oriented, was in an interracial marriage, and expressed a desire to include marginalized voices and stories in his curriculum. At the same time, he asserted that it was not his responsibility to impart moral judgements on historical events, claiming in our final interview, ‘I don’t have a dog in this fight’, and arguing that ‘as far as extrapolating lessons to apply to our present-day society, I feel that that’s dangerous territory for me to, like, wade into … I would rather have them draw their own conclusions’. When discussing his own cultural background in our initial interview, he reported:

I don’t have deep-seated cultural pain that traces back to slavery or, like, centuries of systemic oppression of being afraid to go out at night or that the police are going to shoot me. Something like that doesn’t exist in my social mental makeup, but it does in many of my students, and so I learned that you have to be sensitive to that and aware of it when you present things.

In this interview, Samuel also identified his desire to use historical examples that might have ‘shock value’ to engage students, making them ‘care about it because it’s so bad’. He struggled with how to maintain cultural sensitivity without doing a ‘disservice to people who fought those fights to pretend that it was less traumatic than it was’. In terms of questions about what to teach, Samuel articulated a conflict between his desire to teach about ‘American life’ – ‘the food, art, music, family life’ – versus the ‘political economy’ – ‘what did the president do and what did he say in this speech’ – and other information that enhances students’ fluency in the dominant culture: ‘You feel like you’re sacrificing stuff, like, I mean, stuff that the community will also be, like, what do you mean, you never learned about JFK?’ These competing views voiced in Samuel’s initial interview were also reflected in Samuel’s narrative of Brown.

Brown as counternarrative and celebration – Talia

Talia viewed teaching as inherently political and as a means to dismantle White supremacy. For her, learning history should be a corrective to dominant Eurocentric narratives. In her ruminations on the overarching message about America conveyed to her students during her initial interview, she stated:

I try and set up that deep contradiction because I feel like that is what we’re wrestling with because, like, what a contradiction: that you are offered a promise on top of, or at the expense of, the eradication of a people and the enslavement of a people.

This premise animated Talia’s teaching – she did not shy away from discussing distressing historical topics, described anti-Black racism as ‘terrorism’ and reported showing emotion as a practice of solidarity. In her preliminary interview, she explained that as a White teacher of mostly students of colour, she felt her students needed to know ‘she was there for them’, and she emphasized the importance of discussing White supremacy:

I think just a lot about being totally comfortable with the fact that we are looking in the face of White supremacy and really how ugly it is when it gets challenged and rocked, because the backlash to the civil rights movement is like so horrific and violent that you have to be willing to really look at that and be emotional.

She described her lesson on Emmett Till’s murder as ‘the hardest day of the year … there are tears, mine and my students’. In a follow-up interview after the lesson she elucidated:

You’re looking at things that are, like, so grotesque and inhumane and you just can’t turn into just teacher, you have to be, like, human and teacher, whenever it comes to race, I’m never the expert in the room.

For Talia, teaching history invoked a sense of awe at the bravery of the historical actors she taught about, and a sense of urgency rooted in the acknowledgement that many of the same structures continue to oppress her students today.