Race and ethnicity in the teaching of history: Challenges to history educators in the new dispensation

Abstract

A frequent complaint of those familiar with the teaching of history in high schools is that the subject is too often taught as content and not often as process. Teaching history mainly as content seems to be abetted by the popular notion that 'history' is a body of information recorded in the past and brought into the present. This approach makes history to be vulnerable of teaching it with influences of race and ethnicity, whether consciously or unconsciously. Such influences ignore the pro-cess by which history is to be interpreted. The influence of race and ethnicity in the teaching of history fails to recognize the process that takes place between the historian and that part of the past that remains, namely, the documents, relics, and other sources of information that the historian must interpret. Knowledge of interpretation of a certain period of history allows educators to generate classroom lessons in both inductive reasoning and critical thinking.