[Earlier this
month, I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently
discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special
post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]
On a striking
change in elementary school social studies, and what it might mean.
As part of his 4th
grade social studies work this year, my older son had an extended unit on
explorers and exploration. As with every aspect of the boys’ education to date,
I was profoundly impressed by how much more nuanced and comprehensive was the
unit than the equivalent from my elementary school days (which, at least
according to my rapidly fading memories, largely focused on Christopher
Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492). Yet when he brought home the
extensive materials at the unit’s end, I was especially struck by one
particular detail: the clear and straightforward emphasis on the Vikings as the
first European culture to reach the Americas, nearly half a century before Columbus
and his fellow Age of
Exploration peers. If I had to guess (and as always I welcome more
information from more knowledgeable folks in comments!), I would bet that even
a few years back, such a unit might have at most presented the possibility or
theories of a Viking arrival—but in these materials the Viking voyages were
treated as historical facts, no different from the Silk Road journey of Marco
Polo or the circumnavigation
of Vasco de Gama.
This educational
shift could have a number of meaningful effects, and I’ll focus on a couple in particular
here. For one thing, including the Vikings can help emphasize for students the
messy, dynamic, multi-faceted nature of the exploration
and contact period and its histories. From what I’ve experienced and seen,
too often the period has been presented to young students as a series of individual
and isolated moments: Columbus “discovers” the New World, then some time later
the Pilgrims arrive, etc. Besides the easily overlooked complexities within
each of those particular histories, that narrative entirely elides how many
different communities arrived throughout the Americas over a period of more
than 600 years, how many different indigenous cultures they encountered there,
how many European American communities and settlements were temporary or failed
(and yet what each contributed to the evolving
world of the post-contact Americas), and many other historical messinesses.
Obviously elementary school social studies units are going to have their
simplified or reductive sides, but those things aren’t necessarily the same as inaccurate,
and to my mind presenting the exploration and contact period as messy and
multi-part is far more accurate to that time and world.
Including the
Vikings doesn’t just shift the historical narratives or images being presented,
though—it also and just as importantly can shift the implicit but influential
definitions of American identity that units like these can create. We’re in
Massachusetts, so of course the unit still featured a good bit on the Pilgrims
and Puritans and those origin points for post-contact America; but it very
overtly did so as one of a collection of such origin points, a group that also
included the Vikings, the Spanish, the Dutch, other English colonies such as
Roanoke and Jamestown, and broader historical and cross-cultural factors such
as the Silk Road and global trade. Moreover, the unit featured a great deal of
attention to Native American cultures, a complement to an earlier 4th
grade unit in which groups of students were given particular native tribes
about which to create elaborate multi-part dioramas and projects. Taken
together, these emphases can’t help but portray an America that has been as
multi-cultural (and –lingual) from its earliest moments of existence as it is
in the 21st century—and can’t help but lead, I believe, to follow-up
questions about what each of those cultures and communities has added to the
mix of who and what we are. This week I’m considering one particular such
culture, but the addition of them to the roster of elementary explorers
reflects and extends these broader trends as well.
Next
VikingStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?
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