Teaching Social Studies After 1-6-21

I am a social studies teacher in New Jersey who is still processing the shocking events of Wednesday, but also the events since the election and other events highlighting the national crisis over the last few years.

Before Wednesday, I had already been thinking and reflecting deeper than I have done before in my twenty year career. For several months, I have been reading and thinking deeply about how to fulfill my job to teach civic & social responsibility, Democracy, Human Rights, informed decision making, media literacy, critical thinking, and the ability to determine the validity and relevance of a source. That's not my opinion, its me paraphrasing Social Studies Standards from my State Department of Education.

While this process is ongoing, I am proud to be a part of the community of Social Studies Teachers in Ridgewood, in New Jersey, and the entire United States of America. My colleagues spent dozens of hours on Wednesday and Thursday to prepare appropriate & engaging lesson plans that gave ALL our students the ability to process, interpret, reflect, and think about what happened January 6th.

I should mention that since our district is currently fully remote, these colleagues also had to scramble to make sure the lessons would be equitable and accessible in a remote setting. While I would NEVER wish for these types of events to happen, yesterday I witnessed the true power of the Social Studies education as teachers came together to create a safe space for students to process these events, discern fact from fiction, and compare/contrast from events in American History.

To borrow from a colleague, we are in January, which is a month named for Janus: the two faced god who looks both forward and backward. As a Social Studies teacher, in order to look forward, we MUST look backward at national and global events in order to understand our own problems.

On this note, I have found myself looking to history as I have been processing January 6th as a student of history myself. "The Last Time Democracy Almost Died" was written by Historian Jill Lepore (Harvard University) and published in The New Yorker one year ago. (Before COVID or the 2020 election.) While there has been a scramble to compare January 6, 2021 to many era of US or Global history, I agree with Professor Lepore's analysis that our contemporary period most closely resembles that of the 1930s.

Unfortunately there are no "easy" lessons to be found in this decade as the casual student of history already knows. However, I was comforted to read about how teachers, administrators, and the physical schools themselves played a role in facilitating civic responsibility and promoting civil discourse in a decade where global Democracy was near death.

I will let you read Professor Lepore's essay and decide for yourself, but I wanted to share this reflection and resource for anyone who, like me, is still struggling to process the current state of the American Democracy.