Traditional history curricula and its embedded assumption that history is a set story reinforces a white normative school and classroom culture that alienates students and teachers of color while simultaneously insulating white students and teachers from understanding the ways in which class and race function in the world today. Alternately, a school wide history curricula that prioritizes student inquiry into inclusive counternarratives shifts the center of that curricula from a set story simply reflecting the norms and beliefs of the dominant culture. In so doing, a reimagined history curricula has the potential to both create an environment that is intellectually and emotionally safe for students and teachers of all backgrounds as well as to help teachers and students to acknowledge their own cultural identities, assumptions and socio political positionality. The workshop presenters come to their collegial work from three different racial backgrounds, teach in the same department of the same Albuquerque school and yet, have decidedly different lived classroom experiences. The three workshop facilitators will reflect on, discuss and model their process of interacting across racial difference in a professional setting as they have worked to shift the fundamental structure of the history curriculum of their school. Workshop participants will articulate the skills and content that would take center stage in their ideal history department curricula as well as how their own socio political positionality influences their curricular values and priorities. Participants will engage in the process of reimagining traditional history courses with their fellow workshop participants and leave feeling more equipped and empowered to initiate similar conversations within their own departments. Anyone is welcomed to attend but the workshop is primarily geared towards inservice teachers and administrators who have the ability and desire to shift traditional history curriculum at the schools where they work.
