Hypothesizing a Better World
I structured my inquiry unit with an intentional eye towards encouraging students to hypothesize. The essential question is “How Did the “Failure” of Reconstruction Create the United States as it is Today?”, but it could have just as easily been “How Might The United States Have Been Different Had Reconstruction Succeeded?” The emphasis in my inquiry unit plan on hypothesizing is present for two reasons.
The first is probably the most obvious; hypothesizing is at the heart of inquiry, and students need to know how to apply imaginative skills to real world problems if they are going to develop applicable critical thinking skills. A key part of identifying a good essential question is ensuring that the question “requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers.” The point about considering alternatives is operative, here, and throughout the inquiry unit. If historical events are treated as mere inevitabilities, the study of history becomes a kind of rote exercise in memorization, inimical to real learning.
The second reason for emphasizing hypothesis as a learning tool relates to that point. Hypothesizing about counternarratives is an excellent way to bring history to a level of real, tangible impact on real people. After all, if (as outlined above), history is nothing but a sequence of inevitabilities, it’s easy to just look at the past as a sort of dead, changeless pattern. Something separate and abstracted from students’ daily lives. But by fostering a sense of inquiry about subjects like material interests, economic forces, social conditions, and ongoing effects, students can recognize that history is something that is dynamic and mutable. This lays the groundwork for connecting Reconstruction to contemporary issues of race, equity, and discrimination in the United States.
That dynamism is something I tried to capture by presenting many conflicting visions of Reconstruction for students to work with. Thaddeus Stevens’ vision of radical land reform against Abraham Lincoln’s conciliatory plan, or Booker T. Washington’s message of black uplift and racial truce against W. E. B. DuBois’ more ideologically thrusting vision of revolutionary change. By engaging with these countervailing forces, I aimed to get students to work towards synthesizing opposing views and seeing how the real outcomes reflected the contesting priorities of different schools of thought. This more genuine engagement with the past is why many of my activities in the inquiry unit are writing focused; I firmly believe, per Drake and Nelson, that “writing is thinking; it causes your students to classify, infer, discern relevant from irrelevant information, and identify whole and partial relationships.”
My inclusion of multimedia in the inquiry unit was not simply out of an effort to “break up” lessons by letting students engage with content through video or images (although that certainly is a valid metric). It was also to help reinforce how different forms of media can be analyzed in different ways and provide avenues for inquiry from different directions. Video tends to provoke more emotional response than text, and offers a lot of opportunity for media literacy and inquiry discussion. How do musical cues in a scene from Lincoln freight dialogue with certain emotional resonances? Why does a Crash Course U.S. History video choose to prioritize some voices and not others? What are the probable motivations of the documentarians behind the film 13th? Critical consideration of sources is fundamental both to a well-rounded education and to Wisconsin state social studies standards, and using multimedia is a good way to give students a toolkit applicable to information however it is presented to them.
Finally, the summative assessment for the unit plan draws from several sources. It is a role-development exercise which challenges students to create a character living through Reconstruction by drawing on sources they have discussed in class and those they discover through guided, individual research. The research component is an attempt to fuse narrative-building and creative thinking skills with a more hardnosed challenge for students to keep their work grounded in evidence — an important point for me as an instructor will be help students develop their abilities to strike a balance which ensures their creative writing obeys the imperative to “show me the evidence.” The narrative exercise, more broadly, is informed by a conviction that storytelling can be a useful mechanism for social justice education, all the more so when students are given some freedom not just to interpret stories but to take responsibility for crafting them.
Finally, I have intentionally approached and structured this inquiry unit in a spirit of experimentation and openness. Some of the techniques I’ve outlined here will be useful; they will spark curiosity and foster inquiry among students and lead (I hope) to genuine understanding of the Reconstruction period — its successes, its failures. Others will doubtless fall flat — discussions that trail off too quickly into small talk or silence, video responses that produce only a few discouragingly brief “reflections”. That is to be expected; that is part of the work of teaching. But if what I have outlined here goes some way to teaching students about a truly monumental turning point in American history, a moment when everything our nation is was up for grabs, then that is a good thing. And if it teaches them in a way that encourages them to think about not just what happened but about what might be, then it will have been a success beyond my most optimistic expectations.
