UC Berkeley

Despite increased literature on the disciplining of black and brown youth in schools, there has been little attention to implications for content area instruction. This study examines the disciplining of knowledge in world history classrooms, and the impacts of this on students who often get labeled as troublemakers. Although many world history classrooms make claims of a shared humanity, such spaces often reproduce value systems that deem some as historically significant, while negating and excluding others. I employ qualitative methods to examine how such disciplinary practices impact students. I conducted individual student interviews and think-aloud tasks with twelve tenth grade students, to document how students understand themselves in relation to world history. To identify students and gain context of their learning, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two out of three sections of tenth grade world history classrooms in their small urban Title 1 school, with predominantly African American and Latino students, over the course of six months. I read the world history classroom and how students think in light of queer theory, critical theory and cultural studies, and subaltern studies.

This study shifts the focus on so-called troublemaker students from a behavioral focus that aims to integrate them into the status quo, to consider their ways of thinking in broader socio-political contexts. This work builds on the ways these students productively trouble the logics of traditional world history pedagogy, and complicates historical thinking by engaging challenges within the discipline of history itself. I turn to history as a disciplinary space to consider how scholars from marginalized populations have challenged the work of history, including the archive, document production and preservation, narrative production, and the relations of knowledge production within the history discipline. This study ultimately aims to alter how teachers think about and teach world history, in light of these marginalized students.