Identity politics around the teaching of history: topic update

I ran into a great deal of difficulty when I was attempting to refine my topic. I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do for my topic, and I followed the track I will describe below in an attempt to narrow my topic.

First, I was interested in how (and if) the case of Emmett Till was taught in history classrooms in the past and how the teaching has evolved at all over the last 30 years. As I tried various search terms and navigated various databases (ERIC, ProQuest, Ebsco), I kept finding lesson plans created in the last 10 or so years to help teachers attempting to teach the case.

Because this was not working, I tried a number of other things to find a topic I could focus on. First, I attempted to look into the history of the Oakland Community School (The Black Panther School) to see if I could locate any of the resources they used to teach history in their schools as a potential jumping off point or a topic in and off itself. I ran into challenges here because I was only able to find information about the Oakland Community School and its philosophy in general, not specific information about the history curriculum.

Next, I set out to look at California history standard over the last 40 years to see if there have been any major changes that I could focus on to write about. While I did discover a big education reform movement that took hold in California in the 1980s, I was able to find far more information about the impact this reform had on teacher credentialing and schools generally, but not a lot of information about the changes in the history curriculum (though I know from my research that there were significant changes).

Finally, I began to look through questions of textbooks and children’s books that inaccurately represented historical phenomenon. While I found a lot of writing on this subject over the last 15 years, I was unable to find any from before that.

In summary, I feel a bit lost. I am planning to go the Education Library on Friday to meet with an education librarian so that I can hopefully find some guidance on my topic.