Nana and Kali are joined by Drs. Marisa Chappell and Linda Richards to discuss teaching history as part of social justice education. Marisa and Linda share techniques from their classrooms, the possibilities that emerge from having students work with primary sources, and insights about the importance of history in our broader cultural narratives.
Nana and Kali are joined by Drs. Marisa Chappell and Linda Richards to discuss teaching history as part of social justice education. Marisa and Linda share techniques from their classrooms, the possibilities that emerge from having students work with primary sources, and insights about the importance of history in our broader cultural narratives.
Nana Osei-Kofi 00:08
Welcome to Transforming the College Classroom. This is a podcast for anyone who is interested in taking up teaching and learning in higher education from a social justice informed perspective in ways that are centered on a deep commitment to teaching all students. My name is Nana Osei-Kofi. I'm Director of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination program at Oregon State University. And I'm also Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Kali Furman 00:32
I'm Kali Furman, I'm a postdoctoral scholar with the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program.
Bradley Boovy 00:39
And I'm Bradley Boovy, associate professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State. And co-facilitator with Nana of the DPD Summer Academy, where we work with faculty who are developing and teaching DPD courses.
We're recording this at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, located within the traditional homelands of the Mary's River or Amphinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated tribes of the Siletz Indians.
Kali Furman 01:16
Hello, everyone. Nana and I are here today with our guests, Dr. Marisa Chappell and Dr. Linda Richards to talk about their chapter. Welcome! We're so excited to have you!
Marisa Chappell 01:26
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Linda Richards 01:27
Yeah. Thanks.
Kali Furman 01:28
We'd love to start out just to have you all introduce yourselves to our listeners and just say a little bit about who you are.
Marisa Chappell 01:34
Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Marisa Chappell I'm an associate professor of history at OSU, and my scholarship and teaching are involved with 20th and 21st-century US history, social policy, social movements, political economy of race, gender, that kind of thing.
Kali Furman 01:53
Excellent. Thank you.
Linda Richards 01:54
Yeah. And I'm a teacher in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. I teach history of science classes and I also teach a couple of interesting classes that are talked about in the chapter. But my field of research is around radiation exposure and human rights. And I've been working on a couple of different angles to that, and I'm super excited to talk about our chapter.
Nana Osei-Kofi 02:19
Fantastic. Please do. [group laughter] Just go right in, yeah. Tell our listeners a little bit about your chapter.
Linda Richards 02:28
Well, first, I was so excited to write this chapter because Marisa asked me to write it with her, and I got to co-write a chapter as an instructor with a tenured professor. And I always want to encourage the professors who are tenured to do the same thing, because it gave me such a beautiful opportunity. And the other thing that writing this chapter did was it helped me work out a thing that now I have the name for. It's called an autoethnography. Do you all know to say that word? I don't even know how to say that word. I've only read it, but anyway...
Nana Osei-Kofi 02:57
It sounded good.
Linda Richards 02:57
[laughter] Yeah. Where you kind of work yourself into your analysis. And that's kind of what I do in that chapter. And it was really healing for me to be able to write about the loss of a student that I had to white supremacy and how that connected with the work that I do to educate people about nuclear weapons and war. And so it also had a nice resonance with how archives can be used to see things from different perspectives, in new ways, and kind of breaks down the whole idea that history is a narrative. And it gives students a point of access to look at the actual documents from that period that they're looking at and seeing things from several different points of view, and you can see how the different narratives would be put together. And at the end, you know history is an argument. And to me, that's really powerful.
Nana Osei-Kofi 03:54
That's fantastic. Yeah. Can you say a little bit about where you just left off, this idea of history as an argument? It seems like that's a really important point.
Marisa Chappell 04:02
Yeah. A lot of students come into college, having taken high school history classes where they're primarily using a textbook that is a narrative. And it's a list of facts and things that happened, and they have to memorize things and answer those on a test, right? And they come in having seen documentaries on The History Channel, for example, which also are narratives, which aren't self-evident and they don't declare that they are a narrative. So, you know, Linda probably does the same thing in my class. It's argument, argument, argument, interpretation, interpretation, interpretation.
And really, it's a fine balance with students because, if you say, "Look, history is about interpretation," some students think, "Well, then any interpretation is valid, right?" [group affirmative sounds and laughter] And so, it's really important to teach students about what makes a valid interpretation and how do we in the historical profession do that with peer review and those sorts of things. So, yeah, it's a heavy lift, I think, with undergrads.
Linda Richards 05:13
Yeah. But it's exciting too because you can see the light come on as they're doing the work and as they're seeing things from different perspectives. We do a lot of activities in my class. And actually, one of the changes since the pandemic, for me and my teaching, is now I'm doing less leading of the activities as teaching the students how to lead the activities, so that they can work with divisive questions and controversy. So I have this spectrum line activity, and it hadn't occurred to me until COVID, "Oh, they could learn how to do this because they pick it up." And I've got the directions in the module so that they can keep them.
Kali Furman 05:58
Great.
Marisa Chappell 05:59
That's funny. I was going to say the same thing and answer to the question, "How do things change," in that it might partly be the pandemic and it might partly be just getting older. [laughter]
Linda Richards 06:10
Yeah. Actually, it might be.
Marisa Chappell 06:13
But I tend to, over time, become less directive and controlling, [laughter] and more of a facilitator and a guide.
Linda Richards 06:23
Yeah. I mean, really accepting my role as a facilitator is what's happened, I think, in the last year. And the students really are interested in leadership and thinking about things from different perspectives so they can solve problems. And we use, in my class now, an outline from Dr. King, his four steps that he outlined in his letter in a Birmingham jail. He outlines four basic steps that you can map onto history. And as we go through the class, the students keep, I keep reiterating those steps, and they keep talking about how we're doing these steps.
And the first step's gather the facts. So we talk right then, like, "What are facts? Who decides what facts are and then how do you figure out which facts to include?" Then the second step is negotiation. So that's perfect for history, negotiate between the sources, right? Third step is purify, which I adapt to, "Look for your own bias and the bias of your sources." And the fourth step is make a contribution, which, for Dr. King, was direct action. So I've taken scholarship and made it into direct action.
And the students keep working with those four elements as we go through the material, particularly the Modoc War example, which is in the chapter that I wrote. So it's been really fun to just be in this place of excitement with the students as they think about history as a way to make a contribution to justice. And I wouldn't know that if it weren't for the DPD trainings that you all gave me. I had a background in activism and justice and work for justice, but I didn't have a way to actually make it a part of how I taught, until I got to spend time in the DPD trainings to really focus on reaching every student.
Nana Osei-Kofi 08:13
That's exciting to hear.
Kali Furman 08:15
I'm curious because you all say more about how you use primary sources in this process, right? Of helping students to work through these four steps, in your case, Linda, or how you use those primary documents to help students assess, like you were talking about Marisa, that anything can't be true. But what does it mean to really work with those materials and understand them?
Marisa Chappell 08:38
Yeah. I use primary sources in my classes in a lot of different ways. So sometimes, it will be collectively, we'll do a very close reading of a particular source and ask the kind of questions that Linda has pointed out. Sometimes I will have small groups. I described in the chapter, I think, a Great Depression exercise I do where small groups have different sources, different voices, and then we have a town hall meeting. And sometimes I put together archives, fake archives, but I will take a bunch of sources and put them together for students. And that's a way – so there's the close reading of one or a few, and then there's the sorting process and trying to have them speak to each other. And what can you conclude?
I have these primary source digs, they're group projects. So I will send students off and say... For example, there's one, that's African Americans in World War II. And I will say, "You need to look in Black newspapers in the first half of the 1940s and just see what's there." I try to encourage them, "Don't put in a keyword and find something, right? Actually look through, go look," because it gives them so much of a better idea of what's going on. And then they have to all choose an article or a photo or whatever it is and come together, and think about how do we make sense of these collectively and what kind of interpretation or argument can we offer. So those are some of the ways that I use them.
Kali Furman 10:15
That's great.
Linda Richards 10:15
Those are all great activities. I'd like to see more of your activities and maybe pilfer some. I was really excited about this question because one of the things that's changed since I wrote the chapter is now I have students introduce themselves with some sort of primary source.
Group 10:35
Ooh.
Nana Osei-Kofi 10:35
Ooh, say more! [group laughter]
Linda Richards 10:35
And it actually has worked out really well. And I also, since the pandemic, found out... I mean, people that read our chapter will realize I talk a lot about wars against Native Americans. And turns out during the pandemic, my brother started studying our family history. And unbeknownst to me, I'm a descendant of settlers who had a land claim very early in late 1840s in Oregon. And so now I have a role in this story. And so I introduce myself with the land claim map and I talk about my responsibility to create justice in my lifetime and make as much as a contribution to amends as I can. And it's just a whole different way of approaching the material post-pandemic.
And then we spend the rest of the term, basically, trying to see things from a different view than you would've had. So they start with something that was really personal to them. And usually, that ends up being something that motivates their research. And then they spend time brainstorming, "Who are the other stakeholders who would have a different way of telling this story?" So it's been really interesting.
Kali Furman 11:59
I'm really curious. I mean, obviously, you teach a range of classes, right? But for your typical student that's enrolled in one of your courses, are they familiar with primary sources and really getting to dig through and work with them? Or is that something that's new to a lot of them when they come in for the first time, actually... Not just you've seen a picture of a source in a textbook, right, but actually having those materials? And you were talking about needing to read through the entirety of them and not do a keyword search in the newspaper archive, right? So I'm just curious: what are students' reactions to getting to work with primary sources? And is it the first time they've done it?
Marisa Chappell 12:31
I get the sense that it's the first time for a lot of students.
Linda Richards 12:35
My students are mostly non-history students, and for most of them, it is the first time. Yeah. I mean, it's one reason why I added the activity of, "Find a primary source that you connect with," because then they start to really get it. And interestingly enough, a few years ago, the department said that one of the things they wanted to really instill in students is what's a primary source and what's a secondary source. And in my classes, students usually know that within a week of taking the class, because we spend so much time really working on that. And yeah, it makes history so exciting for them.
And I used to be able to take them up to the archives to do primary sources. But now even how I curate them, similar to how Marisa explained, I sometimes curate groups of primary sources that are from me, and then they see my bias in the sources I've given to them. So I'm like, "Yeah, look at these. I'm definitely someone who takes a position against nuclear weapons, right?” And you can look at the sources I've curated for you and see that.
Marisa Chappell 13:47
This is the-
Linda Richards 13:47
In the primary sources.
Marisa Chappell 13:52
... next-level analysis, right, is that even the sources that are left, the sources we have access to, and asking students, "What voices are not present," it can be a really fruitful discussion.
Kali Furman 14:04
Yeah, absolutely.
Linda Richards 14:05
Yeah. The archival silences, right?
Nana Osei-Kofi 14:07
Yes, yes, yes.
Linda Richards 14:08
Yeah. And we spend a lot of time with, "It matters when the story stops and starts." And actually, I say that in the chapter, but the students work with it a lot. They get it, by maybe three fourths into the term, that someone else may have a whole different narrative than them just because they've picked a different starting point for when the conflict is, particularly in my Why War class, right? And whose voices are included in the telling and...
Nana Osei-Kofi 14:36
So when you talked about students introducing themselves to the primary source, so if someone wanted to do that, how might they go about that? Because I'm thinking about it in relation to this idea that students might not have an idea of what a primary source is, and since we're talking about introductions is probably something you want to happen early on in the class. So can you say a little bit more about that? And also curious to hear what students choose when they present themselves.
Linda Richards 15:00
So I do start explaining what my primary sources are. So here's the map from 18... I can't remember what year the map is from. But My brother, he's got an actual map, then he sent me the picture of it. So I put the picture up, and then I've got a few other pictures of my real... I'm like, "These are primary sources that are meaningful to me because these explain why I want us to unpack some of this history in as unbiased a way as we can and know that inscribed in how we understand our relationships is a lot of bias, right?
So the students see me pointing out, "These are what the primary sources are that connect to me," from the beginning. But I'm pretty clear in the assignment, when they first start, it needs to be something they cared about. And it doesn't necessarily have to be in the beginning a primary source. So sometimes it will be a book that was very important to them, but it becomes a primary source because it's what describes them as if it's in a moment of time. Do you know what I'm saying? So they understand this idea of a primary source is around the time under study. But in this case, I'm under study, so a primary source is something that's important to me.
And the variety of things are really amazing. I've actually had a student who cared about gun rights, take a picture of himself with his gun and put his gun up. And it actually seems like a really difficult thing to work through, but the students really worked through it in a really positive way. That was the first term that I taught the peace class, and it was actually on online class as well.
Nana Osei-Kofi 16:43
Wow.
Linda Richards 16:44
And it was just totally unexpected on my part. I never considered it. And you can understand how that would be really threatening to the other students. Absolutely, right?
Kali Furman 16:54
Yeah.
Linda Richards 16:54
But the other students, we all talked about it with him about how that made them feel. So it was a learning opportunity in the end, as risky as it was. But it made me think a lot about, in the chapter, you and I say at the end, "We're going to make some mistakes." But luckily, he didn't mean any harm. He was just saying, "Gun rights are so important to my heart. This is the gun that my father gave me, and it's super important to me."
Marisa Chappell 17:25
Well, and that's a great entry into guns in US history and what they mean over the time.
Kali Furman 17:31
Yeah.
Linda Richards 17:32
As hard as it seemed at the time, the other students all really worked through it. And it was actually really interesting to see the ways that the students supported each other to talk about it. So yeah. But usually students put up something like their parent's medal. Sometimes they've served in the military. Sometimes they'll put up a letter that their grandparent left them. It's really moving, actually. A wedding ring that they were given from a relative, something that's really important to them, and so it introduces who they are to the class in a really personal way.
Marisa Chappell 18:19
What I love about this, Linda, and why I'm going to steal it [group laughter] is you're encouraging your students to seed themselves in history, right, which has all sorts of positive results, I think.
Linda Richards 18:35
Thanks. That's reassuring, because sometimes I'm not quite sure. But yeah, I had a student who was presenting on autoethnography, actually, at the undergraduate research conference. And I realized this is what we're doing, is this autoethnography. So that's actually a neat way to think about it too. And I actually thought I might recreate the assignments to be more geared towards that.
Kali Furman 19:02
Cool.
Nana Osei-Kofi 19:04
Yeah. So you mentioned undergraduates, and there was something you mentioned a little earlier that I want to come back to that you talked about that is a heavy lift in terms of understanding history and history as an argument. Where my mind went with that was just: what about society at large? I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about. Are the issues that we face as a society in relation to understanding of history a similar, different, easier, harder...
Marisa Chappell 19:37
I mean, I think we're seeing this with the attacks on so-called critical race theory. Many of the attacks are not about critical race theory and don't understand it, but that is an argument about history. I mean, when the 1619 Project came out, there's an argument. And it's where you start. It's exactly what Linda was saying. And then the 1776 commission of the Trump Administration, right? The argument was about what is the narrative of US history. So I feel like, in a way, it's perhaps easier than it was, say, 20 years ago...
Kali Furman 20:10
Interesting.
Marisa Chappell 20:11
... for our students. In terms of society at large, maybe part of the conflict is that people aren't self-aware in terms of that it isn't right. It's like, "Which one of these is the right story?” as opposed to more productive questions.
Nana Osei-Kofi 20:31
Yeah.
Kali Furman 20:31
Thinking about it isn't a binary, right? It's like there is a right and a wrong history. There is a linear sort of narrative that says specific things, and one is correct and one is incorrect, versus a much more nuanced, complicated sort of view of what history is and does.
Marisa Chappell 20:47
Yeah. And we can learn so much from how fraught that debate is, if you think about the 1619 versus the 1776. Why is it that some people are so passionately opposed to thinking about one particular narrative history as opposed to another, right? That just tells you what historical narratives do, the work they do.
Linda Richards 21:11
Yeah. And I always tell my students, actually, this parable now. Actually, also started after the pandemic. It's the parable of the monks and the elephant. You might be familiar with it. There's an elephant and there's some blind monks, and they're each feeling the elephant and they each feel a different part of the elephant. So some think it feels like a fan and they describe the elephant as a fan, and some are touching the leg, the trunk, and they say it's a tree. And they're all monks, right? So that means that they have been very prayerful, right? And they've tried to be true as people. But they almost come to blows because they all know, individually, that they are right and they are telling the truth. It's not unless you back away that you realize that you have a piece of the truth but there's many other truths to see the whole. And to be able to see the whole, you have to be able to accept that you don't know all the truths. And so there's a bit of untruths and truths in all things, is what Gandhi says, right?
And so we work a lot with untruth and truth, and we also know that people can put together narratives to manipulate them as well. And that's where bias and knowing your intellectual virtues... So I think of history as actually... When Dr. King says, "Purify," to me, it's saying, "Doing history is actually sacred work, and you need to make sure you're being as fair as possible and you're aware of what your biases are, because people do look to history as though it's truth."
Nana Osei-Kofi 22:59
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So in doing that work, a lot of what you've shared, I mean, these amazingly skillful ways to engage primary documents and to engage students in these conversations, what about... For those of us who are not historians, what advice can you give us in doing this work?
Linda Richards 23:22
A few things come to mind. And the first is this advice from elders. I was actually told by elders that what's most important to repair our environment and our world today is to create relationships that are healthy. And to have a healthy relationship, I think you need to approach things with a problem-solving attitude more than, "I'm right and you are wrong," but doing that in a way that doesn't indulge abuse either. So the two hands of nonviolence is how I think about this. One hand is always reaching out to everyone's humanity and the other hand is saying, "I will not participate in injustice. I will do everything with every part of my being to work for justice." So doing those two things at the same time are what I think good teaching is.
Marisa Chappell 24:26
Yeah. I think, for teachers who are not explicitly teaching history, right, I think history is nonetheless useful. So it can be helpful, say there is a particular … well, I'll just give an example. So during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump's speech in Arizona about immigration. So even not in a history class, right? It would be possible to have students think about the rhetorical devices, the particular arguments, and maybe look at examples of prior things that sort of added up to that, or what Linda was saying, the multiplicity of voices.
So I use this film called State of Arizona, sticking with the immigration issue, which... What I love about it is it has a lot of different characters and takes them seriously, right? So the film definitely has an argument that you can talk about, but it also is allowing you to see and hear from people with different experiences and perspectives. And so I think, for any sort of class, bringing in a variety of voices around a certain issue can be very, very useful.
Nana Osei-Kofi 25:49
Yeah. No, that sounds super helpful. Going a little further, what I'm thinking about is engaging history in response to current events, because it seems like that... I mean, well, it just keeps on happening. I don't even know what to say, right? I mean, you mentioned it around the pandemic, I'm thinking Ukraine, Russia, now we have Buffalo, with the hate crime and the murders there, where that happens that morning that you're going to teach and you know that... Or at least for me, I feel like I have a responsibility to engage it because it's happened. I can't just pretend that, that hasn't taken place. And it seems like, in doing that, using history can play a really important role but there's not a lot of time. And I guess just coming back to, again, maybe not being historians, so advice? Recommendations? I mean, I know it's a hard question but it's a real question too because it happens and it keeps happening. So how might we best engage that in a responsible way? I think that's an important piece of it.
Linda Richards 27:04
So sometimes I actually start with a moment of silence or a few minutes. I just say, "It's really hard for me this morning." I use myself. I just say, "I'm really suffering, hearing about this. And I don't really know how to start class, so maybe y'all join with me for a minute of silence so I ground myself." And then we'll have that time. And then, usually, a student will want to talk a little bit or another one. And sometimes the students will have a conversation.
So, basically, pausing is what I do, even if I have to do it every day I come to school now. But the pause helps me be present with them. And I think being present with them is actually the most important thing right now. Know that you probably will make mistakes. Often, later I think, "Oh, why'd I say this thing or that thing?" But overall, I think the students need us to show that we care about them and we care about their future and we want to give them the best of ourselves for problem solving for their future. I mean, that's the one thing we know about the future. The rest is very uncertain, but we know that we'll need problem solvers.
Marisa Chappell 28:24
Yeah. I think that, similarly, kind of a student-led process, right? First of all, because you don't sort of know where students are and how comfortable they are, right?
Nana Osei-Kofi 28:37
Right, right.
Marisa Chappell 28:38
But I think it offers a good opportunity to have students think about questions. What kinds of questions do we have around this? So if you think about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, right? So what would help us better understand this? And for me, I'm not a Europeanist. I don't know that history well at all. I actually brought my friend Sarah Henderson, who's a political scientist, in to talk to my students. [laughter] That's a cop-out maybe, but-
Linda Richards 29:07
No, that's a smart idea.
Marisa Chappell 29:09
I mean, and I think it kind of reinforces that idea that none of us knows everything. None of us can see the whole elephant. And so it can help students, I think, process and think historically and analytically about things like: how do we define a nation? What are the justifications for invading another nation? Those sorts of big questions, I think.
Kali Furman 29:41
I love that. Yeah. Well, you both have shared so many rich ideas and context for how you do your work and how you work with history and primary sources and students. I'm just wondering, is there anything that we haven't asked or talked about yet that you want to share with our listeners around some of these issues?
Marisa Chappell 30:00
One thing I'm thinking about a lot is colleagues in high schools and colleagues in even universities in states that are passing educational gag orders, and the position they're in, and trying to do this kind of work under that chilling effect. I don't know what to say about that other than I think about it a lot and we need to support those folks as best we can.
Kali Furman 30:39
Yeah. Absolutely.
Linda Richards 30:40
And that's what was exciting about the book coming out, because right away, I thought, "Here's something that we did that maybe will help some teachers out there find different ways of approaching some of the difficulties of teaching, right? At this time." And so the book really does have a lot to offer. And just know that we're all thinking about how we here at Oregon State... We have the academic freedom to teach, but we know that others aren't able to do that even on a college level, in other places, and that there has been consequences for people teaching honest history.
But I think the more that we can explain to the American public that history really is important to learn from different perspectives, being open is an intellectual virtue that everyone can have, the more that we can use this as an opportunity to reach out to educate each other. I'd really love to see more of our work supporting teachers who are probably in rural areas and any way that we can support teachers, from the university to those teachers. Maybe we can have a DPD clinic for teachers that are K-12 next, something like that. And we could all work on ways that we can work with history without negative effects, right? Because... Yeah.
Nana Osei-Kofi 32:32
Yeah, yeah. You are making me think of this question of: why do you think it is that the issue of history is so difficult for us as a society? Is that a universal situation or is that context-specific in terms of thinking of the United States? Just, yeah, curious.
Marisa Chappell 33:01
I mean, history is the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a people, right? I don't know enough about other places in the world in these debates, but I suspect it's universal.
Linda Richards 33:20
Yeah. One of the quotes that we work with in class is, "All wars are fought twice, once in the battlefield and once in memory." And we do know that, in the United States... I know that, when I grew up, we were definitely not taught the truth of the Western expansion. And as my students come to me, most of them have not learned just... It's still as true as when I wrote this piece.
Nana Osei-Kofi 33:52
Yeah. Well, history is the narrative that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Although you said it much more eloquently than that. [laughter]
Linda Richards 34:02
Yeah. And between the genocides of native peoples, the other harms wrapped up in all of that and the oppression and enslavement of African Americans, that history, I was not taught. I was not taught it, but it's there now. And maybe the only way to make it go away is to deny it. I think the power to deny it is really not to be underestimated. But from working with my students, I see them change. I see them realize they don't actually know everything and that it is okay to question and that it doesn't make them less to know history in a more sober way, right? I just think it's hard for people to accept. They really want to believe that we're a country where everyone's equal, and that's just how it is.
Nana Osei-Kofi 35:09
Yeah. Yeah.
Linda Richards 35:13
And so just having empathy for that and knowing that some students come to our classes... I've had students tell me, it was the first time they'd actually met an African American, was in the classroom. And some students had never met international students either. So we do have a lot of access to education along the I-5 corridor that just isn't in other places.
Marisa Chappell 35:39
I think that raises another really interesting point, which is that depending on a student's social location, right? So teaching about white supremacy in US history lands differently depending on the students social location. And so navigating that in the classroom is, I think, a very tricky enterprise.
Linda Richards 36:06
Yeah. And I've had students be open about how alienating it can be for them to learn what they've learned at the university and go home to visit, how hard Thanksgiving is. We talk about this right before Thanksgiving, because we talk also about, how can we be more accurate about this holiday, right? What kind of holiday celebrates the loss of people's homelands to others? And how do we coexist, right? So we do talk about ways to keep the relationship, right? But know that you have a different understanding now than you had when you came.
Nana Osei-Kofi 36:56
Yeah.
Linda Richards 36:57
Maybe just more education, like … I can't think of his first name right now. But just the ideas of family education as well. I try to encourage my students, "Take what you're learning right now and share it with your friends and family."
Nana Osei-Kofi 37:17
Yeah. Part of what I'm hearing, that I want to emphasize, is it sounds like you come into the classroom and into that space with a humility that allows students to recognize that they also don't know everything, right? And that they don't have to be experts at everything and that they can take that armor off, if you will.
Linda Richards 37:41
And that's mostly because I've found that I don't learn things if I think I'm already an expert in them.
Kali Furman 37:45
Yeah.
Linda Richards 37:46
If I really want to learn, I'm learning things I don't know.
Nana Osei-Kofi 37:51
Yeah.
Linda Richards 37:53
And it's the opposite of higher education, right, to look like you really don't know?
Marisa Chappell 37:58
Well, I tell students the more I learn about history-
Linda Richards 38:01
The less...
Marisa Chappell 38:02
... the less I realize I know, right?
Linda Richards 38:05
Yeah. That's exactly how I feel about it too.
Nana Osei-Kofi 38:05
Yeah. And I mean, I've learned a lot here already that I'm going to go use in some research after this. So we're always learning. I mean, that's the beauty of this to me. Yeah.
Linda Richards 38:15
But that's also our sheer luck of our positioning, right?
Nana Osei-Kofi 38:18
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kali Furman 38:20
You all are really stirring for me… I grew up in a very rural, conservative, isolated community. And for me, history was my entry point into seeing the world in a different way. My older sister, her and her friends were reading Howard Zinn when I was a teenager. And they're like, "You got to read this book, Kali." And I was like, "What is this?"
Linda Richards 38:37
Yeah, it's a whole different reality.
Kali Furman 38:38
And then they gave me Lies My Teacher Told Me, right? And that really opened an entire world for me. And I majored in history as an undergrad because of some of those things, which then led me to feminism and social justice and the work that I do now. And so I'm sitting with my own experiences, we're talking about these things. It's very much resonant of my experience, like a white, rural, working-class woman millennial, right, and how all of those things have played out in my own lived experience. So thank you.
Linda Richards 39:05
Well, thank you for the chance to talk about our work. I just love talking with you always for any reason, so...
Nana Osei-Kofi 39:13
No, thank you for being here. This was wonderful. This is really wonderful. Thank you for everything you shared. It's so useful and so meaningful.
Kali Furman 39:20
Yes, absolutely.
Marisa Chappell 39:21
Thank you.
Nana Osei-Kofi 39:23
Join us for our next episode when Bradley and I will be speaking about our chapter in the book.
Bradley Boovy 39:28
We'd like to thank Orange Media Network and their podcast director Jen Dirstine.
Kali Furman 39:33
This podcast is sponsored by the Difference, Power and Discrimination Program. More information on the DPD program, our book, and the transcripts for this podcast are available at dpd.oregonstate.edu.
Nana Osei-Kofi 39:46
Listen to us on any of your preferred podcast platforms. Continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching. Join the conversation.