Teachers׳ curricular choices when teaching histories of oppressed people: Capturing the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

This paper investigates what choices teachers made and what rationales they offered related to the inclusion and exclusion of primary source photographs for a hypothetical unit about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in order to better understand teachers׳ curricular decision-making as it relates to representing the histories of oppressed people. Elementary and secondary social studies/history teachers from three different in-service and pre-service cohorts (n=62) selected and discarded images from a bank of 25 famous and lesser-known photographs. Their decisions and explanations were coded for emergent themes. Findings reveal that these teachers tended to be guided by criteria both technical (how they might teach using a particular photograph) and philosophical (why they might teach about a particular photograph), with narrow definitions of what they deemed relevant and appropriate for their students. Their choices constructed a sanitized narrative of the Civil Rights Movement that largely avoided a discussion of racism.