Academics Unbounded

28 Spring 2021

Spotlight on the History Department

By Gina Greene, PhD

The exciting changes taking place across the Thacher curriculum are not confined to GATES. And students are not the only ones challenging themselves. Thacher faculty members are continuing to explore new ideas and approaches to tap into student interests, capitalize on current events, include overlooked perspectives, and take fuller advantage of all that our location and campus have to offer. Here’s what’s happening in the History Department alone.

Over the last couple of years, the department faculty has taken a critical look at the existing curriculum with an eye to, as Dr. Spinney likes to say, “opening things up.” The result has been changes designed to enrich the student experience, bring in more historical voices and critical perspectives, and stimulate student interest in the connections between the “real world” and what they learn in their history books. Following are a few examples.

POLYPHONY IN THE NARRATIVES OF AMERICA While American history has not changed, per se, perspectives on it have become richer, more varied, and more nuanced as new scholarly work has been done in American Studies and related fields. One of our primary goals this year was to amplify and examine the perspectives of viewpoints that had traditionally received only minimal coverage in the traditional textbook-based recounting of American history and, in doing so, to build a more polyphonic understanding of this rich, complicated past. Thus, we rounded out the familiar narratives of American History with primary sources examining the experiences of indigenous peoples, African Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, women, and the working classes. We did this both through introducing personal diaries, speeches, and other types of firsthand accounts that capture the perspectives of a more varied selection of individuals—both famous and little known—and by engaging with a more diverse set of scholarly works including historiographical writings by W.E.B. Dubois, Ronald Takaki, Eric Foner, Paul Ortiz, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In addition to argumentative research essays, students periodically had options to produce short films, podcasts, graphic novels, and multimedia story maps, to offer the potential for a dynamic reader experience and greater student engagement both with their own work and each other’s.

NINTH GRADERS GAIN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Ninth-grade history, taught by Drs. DelVecchio, Spinney, and Greene, also made moves away from traditional textbooks to draw on more recent dynamic scholarship from authors such as Charles Mann and Jeffrey Sachs. Students were invited to explore, research, and present to their peers about the important contributions of an ancient civilization of their choosing. Through a series of essays, posters, and presentations, the class went on to explore and make sense of the ways that today’s interconnected and diverse global landscape has been shaped over centuries by the cultivation and extraction of commodities (such as cacao, sugar, cotton, gold, silver), industrialization, economic trade, patterns of oppression, and powerful resistance movements.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS In his Honors Contemporary Ethics course, Jason Carney combined student-led research about contemporary challenges faced in America in connection to education, policing and the judicial system, and access to healthcare resources with opportunities for community education and activism. Working with student feedback and interest in engaging with many powerful recent events that have shaped American life, ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to protests against police violence, Mr. Carney and his students decided to investigate various areas where vast disparities in access to resources had become glaringly clear: policing, the criminal justice system, healthcare access, and education. As one student wrote in their end-of-project reflection, “Oftentimes, the school curriculum is a little distant from real world problems and something I took away from this project is that there's a way to make our learning matter and make a tangible difference. The stats we read on the difference in education depending on race, class, wealth... were stunning and confirmed what we thought as well as prompted more questions about our nation's education system.”

EXPLORING INDIGENOUS HISTORIES Dr. Spinney has been doing much work in the area of indigenous studies and partnering with faculty in other areas, including the sustainability program and the science department, to build our knowledge of indigenous cultures, such as the Chumash, whose histories are deeply interwoven with that of the Ojai Valley. He has also been working to develop digital showcases for student work in GATES and around campus as well as creating The Thacher Review, a studentcurated and peer-reviewed online website showcasing student work in Honors US History.

GERM OF AN IDEA Dr. Greene has taken the pandemic as a cue to develop a course on the history of global health, a focus of her doctoral research, from the era of colonial medicine to the present.

WINDOW ON THE MIDDLE EAST The department’s newest member, Jake Conway, brings a wealth of experience having taught American students in Beijing as well as in independent schools on the East Coast. This fall, he offered Middle Eastern history and economics.

The Thacher School 29