MAKING HISTORY WORK AS NOURISHMENT FOR CHANGEMAKERS

Speech delivered by Fernande Raine, Founder of History Co:Lab on October 4, 2021 at 1st World Congress of History Teachers in Moscow

Good morning.  It is an honor to be with you in this cradle of history. Thank you to the Russian Academy, and to EuroClio for convening this historic event.

Since I am not from an official government delegation or large and established institution, allow me to briefly introduce myself.  I am a German-American historian who came to truly love history and the process of writing history right here in Russia. It is in your archives and libraries here in Moscow, writing my dissertation about the policies of Stalin in Iran in World War II, that I discovered the thrill of finding answers to questions to which no one had known the answer.  I did the wonderfully exhausting but gratifying job of finding documents that governments did not want me to see and turned what I saw into a truthful account illuminating the past.  

But after finishing my PhD, I did not become a historian, or a history teacher. I became a history seeker, I worked in the field of Social Entrepreneurship, looking for people who are writing history today with their ideas and passion for making the world a better place. That journey led me to found an organization that is now called the History Co:Lab.  We are a civic organization working to activate young people, teachers and museums to collaborate so that make history learning can be inspiring and engaging.

2.  THE PROBLEM: 

I started this organization because we realized that young people were not being heard in the system of education in most countries in the world.  Through interviews and surveys in the US and Europe, we asked young people how they felt about history education. We heard the same thing again and again. Yes, there were some people who talked about their teachers as the most inspiring people in their lives.  But for the most part, we heard things like:  “We are taught history like it’s something just in the past’ “History in school doesn’t include people like me” “History’s all dates and facts, and no context” “We are never allowed to ask questions that go off the script of what the teacher has to teach”. “It’s really boring ”. That one hurts.  This is not what we want to hear, but it is the state of affairs. 

Now what do we make of this?  It isn’t that young people aren’t smart, or don’t care.  Or that teachers are not incredibly well meaning.  It just means that for most young people, the delivery mechanism, the system that we have built to provide history is not yet serving the needs of our youth.  Indeed, it is driving them away from history, away from learning, and away from responsibility.  This is a creating a global crisis of what one might call humanistic and civic malnutrition!  And we are creating this historic and civic malnutrition at a time when our world needs it most. 

We are living in a world often described as “VUCAH”:  The world is volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and hyperconnected. This VUCAH world creates a paradox of power.  

On the one hand, it is easy for young people to feel scared.  Scared of diseases. Scared of unemployment, of poverty, of failure. Scared of climate change and of persistent conflicts.  Exacerbating these fears is that fact that, compared to young people of previous generations, they are

-       Exposed to far, far more information 

-       Much more vulnerable to misinformation

-       Less likely to feel connected to the community in which they live

On the other, this generation is not just scared--they are exceptionally powerful: They

-       Have grown up with more connection and diversity

-       Have access to more opportunities to share their voice

-       Have more organizing power thanks to technology.

With these tools in hand, this generation is hungry. They are hungry for a sense of belonging and relevance, hungry for a vision, hungry for knowledge, community. They are hungry to understand how systems work. They are hungry to be seen as contributors to society, to be seen as people with the potential to create value right now—not someday. They are hungry to make a difference and to live in a world that is in harmony.  These are the young people of today.  

3. THE SOLUTION: 

And it is these young people, holding both fear and power that set an agenda for us, this congress of history teachers.  An agenda to focus not only on what we teach, but on WHY and HOW.  Others have already alluded to the WHY—the WHY is to help them succeed and thrive in a VUCAH world.  If young people continue to feel like history is just a national narrative that they must ingest because some grownup thinks it’s important, we will put ourselves out of business. The canned food of textbooks and frontal style history lectures will not do the trick of nourishing young people as citizens. Our job as educators and parents and government is to give young people a compass with history to find their place in the great human story. To find their community. To find their agency so that they may create authentic change.  To help the learn through humanity so they can make history. 

For that to work, we must provide them with the kind of learning that is juicy.  Inspiring.  Inclusive.  And how do we do that?  For the answer, you can turn to young people themselves.  In reaction to the challenges of history education, a group of young people in America has formed the National Youth Council of Real History education. And in their manifesto, they are calling for things that all teachers know are important:

-       They want access to primary documents, and learn how to find and evaluate evidence on complex problems

-       They want to explore the many diverse narratives that make up our nations, and connect their own personal stories with those of others

-       They want to be included in decision-making on how to make history education relevant and engaging

-       They want to be taught as if they were being prepared as the next generation of leaders, 

-       The kind of learning that builds the competencies that they need to thrive in the 21st century.  be able to dig into the history of problems they care about today, to understand the root causes of issues more broadly.

-       They want history education to be as high quality and fulfilling as their other classes

Interestingly, what young people are asking for is precisely what Learning Science tells us education should be.  There are countless studies that prove that

-       Inquiry based learning, asking questions WORKS 

-       Giving students agency, letting them learn through hands-on projects WORKS

-       Making learning place-based, and giving young people the chance to connect their narrative to the narrative of their community WORKS

-       Making it fun and incorporating play WORKS

4. THE SOLUTION IN PRACTICE

So, what does it look like when history education “works” for young people, and we give them opportunities to learn this way?  We get a generation of young people inspired to be the best citizens and members of their community they can possibly be.  Here are some concrete examples from our recent work:

1.     Incubated by our History Co:Lab, a group of young people.e created a podcast called UnTextbooked.  In it, young people from all different backgrounds from round the US interviewed some of our most famous historians.  Each young person picked a topic they were passionate about, found a book by a leading historian explaining the story behind that issue, and then interviewed the author about their insights.  In its first year, UnTextbooked won an award from Spotify as one of the best next gen podcasts in the world. 

2.     Part of our Co:Lab is a network of teachers and museums working to generate inspiring learning.  They have created dozens of projects that allow young people to engage in their communities as historians and bring the history they create to their community.  They are creating art works for museum marketing campaigns;  tours through exhibits, exhibits and public discussions for a on historical topics.    None of this is rocket science:  it’s just letting young people engage with the amazing assets that our communities have:   people, museums, archives, libraries to discover history as a place that provides comfort and safety, and the inspiration they need to be changemakers. 

3.     CALL TO ACTION

In order for this shift to youth-focused, place-based, learning science backed history to work, we must leave our fears behind, and free our peers of the fears that are holding them and us all back.  We must abandon our

Fear of the truth, our fear that the truth will keep young people from loving their country and having national pride.  We must allow young people to engage with real history, for it helps young people understand their country, their world and each other. We must face the facts and dig into the painful stories that have been ignored and need to be told.

Fear of complexity, and our sense that young people need things to be kept simple. Yes, we must be careful about the age at which we introduce certain ideas, but we must teach young people that history is complicated, and that stories of victory are always someone else’s story of loss.  

Fear of technology:  Learning engineering, and digital platforms that allow us to provide individualized knowledge development in adaptive learning modules is amazing. They have been proven to deliver core content fully to any learner by pacing it to their individual needs and pace.  Imagine—the quality of a personalized tutor for content for every child.  Across the world, governments are investing in bringing the power of learning engineering to their classrooms for math and science.  We need big and bold infrastructure funds to advance learning engineering in the space of history, because this buys teachers time to do the kind of teaching that works in their classrooms. 

Fear of innovation in our methods. Many teachers still love lectures and focus on story-telling, but it just plain doesn’t work.  We must make investments in training teachers at scale in new methods of learning, providing them with space, time and encouragement to use the tools that will produce the outcomes we need.

Fear of cutting parts of our curriculum and realizing that is it more important that students learn methods and competencies than that they absorb a certain number of facts.  The goal is to turn them into life-long learners, who leave school eager to continue learning about history in the museums and libraries that surround them. 

Fear of trusting our communities to know what will work best for them.  This transformation cannot be centralized.  

Fear of young people.  IF we would just listen, we would hear than they want to love their country, that they love one another, that they want to build a future that is better than the present that we have created for them.  Let us not hold them back by teaching them that the world is what it is and will always be that way.  We must not hold them back in the petty power politics of the present.  We must give them wings to unfold their full humanity and lift us all up to a place that we have not yet seen. 

Let us use this time together to make connections that give us hope and courage to leave these fears behind. 

Then, and only then, will we make history a force that can change the world for the better.