The violence that erupted in Gaza in 2023 changed the political climate of teaching the Middle East in schools across the U.S. It was as much the conflict itself as the growing polarization that began to rise in social media, political debates and news headlines.
That December, the UC Office of the President announced one-time resources to address and combat antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bias, bigotry and discrimination at the university. UC Davis received $700,000, of which $565,000 was open to proposals.
“We wanted to do something that was responsive to the needs of teachers who were getting calls from parents who were concerned about curriculum in these topics,” said Stacy Fahrenthold, a professor of history and Middle East/South Asia Studies in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
In partnership with the UC Davis California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) and co-PIs Beth Slutsky, Baki Tezcan and Ali Anooshahr, Fahrenthold led a grant proposal for the Middle East in Historical Context project, which included bringing experts to campus and building a new curriculum for teachers in California schools. This past summer they released new materials that teachers everywhere can use to confidently teach the history of both the Middle East and of Arab Americans.
“Teachers either want to teach or are being asked to address conflict in the modern Middle East, but they're simultaneously facing a lot of public discourse around what's happening,” said Fahrenthold. “It's really important to offer them classroom materials and tools that are rooted in the very best ways that we handle this curriculum at the University of California.”
Addressing bias and bigotry with primary sources
CHSSP, headquartered in the Department of History in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, is part of a statewide network of California Subject Matter Projects (CSMP) administered by the UC Office of the President. They bring the latest scholarship by leading historians to classrooms in forms that students in all grades can understand.
The Middle East in Historical Context received $80,000 in funding covering two academic quarters. They invited four leading scholars in the field to speak at UC Davis and to consult with faculty, graduate students and California teachers to develop new materials for teaching Middle East and Arab American history.
The visiting scholars included Brian A. Catlos from the University of Colorado Boulder, Orit Bashkin from the University of Chicago, Charlotte Karem Albrecht from the University of Michigan and Ussama Makdisi from UC Berkeley. They all helped identify primary sources they thought had been particularly useful in their own classrooms and in their own research.
The CHSSP collaborators then compared those sources to their own curriculum at UC Davis as well as state frameworks. Faculty in the Department of History and the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, departments that sponsored the series, contributed additional expertise.
In August, CHSSP released four Middle East inquiry sets that are ready for teachers to use in high school classrooms. These materials are grounded in primary sources, including an oral history of a Syrian-Lebanese merchant who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s. At that time, Arab Americans were legally codified as “white” but experienced a lot of discrimination.
In the 1962 recording, currently held by the Smithsonian Institution, he tells the story of once seeking a room at a boarding house in the Midwest and being refused, accused of carrying bedbugs and headlice.
“One of the ways that we capture complexity and nuance and sometimes contention and conflict and viewpoints in the classroom is by literally digging up some of those archival sources, giving digestible chunks of them to seed a classroom conversation,” said Fahrenthold. “This is the way we teach history on every college campus.”
Encouraging inquiry, critical thinking, and independent thought
The materials respond directly to the challenge of bias because the histories of people who lived and left their words behind come from multiple perspectives that each have their own unique insights. In the classroom, students learn to navigate and think through ideas and experiences that can be as different from the students’ own as they are from each other.
“The political idea that's being advanced about teachers is that they're indoctrinating people into believing things,” said Fahrenthold. “Teachers, of course, bristle at this, and I bristle at this as an educator. What I do as an educator is give students materials and opportunities to think about those materials more deeply to form their own opinions.”
The materials are called “inquiry sets” in reference to California’s History-Social Science Content Standards adopted in 1998. The California History Social Science Framework today adopts inquiry-focused learning defined by four dimensions:
- Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries
- Applying Disciplinary Tools and Concepts
- Evaluating Sources and Using Evidence
- Communicating Conclusions and Taking Informed Action
The overall goal of this framework is for students to become engaged citizens by building critical thinking, problem solving and participatory skills.
CHSSP worked closely with leading teachers in California classrooms to make sure the inquiry sets would fit into their instruction. The resources that resulted became entry points for teachers who are often so pressed for time.
"It is especially important right now for teachers to have access to these kinds of resources,” said Beth Slutsky, a historian and CHSSP deputy director who was co-PI on the Middle East in Historical Context Project. “Sometimes that means like really boiling stuff down, but in my perspective it's more important that this subject gets taught with a few significant primary sources rather than not at all.”
Helping teachers navigate tough conversations
In addition to the work of faculty and staff PIs, the project included contributions from history Ph.D. candidates Ali Danis Neyzi, Charles Sills and Nina Gonzalez. Gonzalez, a CHSSP Marchand Public Engagement Initiative intern, who developed curriculum for Head Start programs across the Bay Area before attending graduate school. She made the materials as accessible as possible for students from the 7th grade through high school.
Gonzalez pointed out that these resources can be especially valuable for first-year history teachers or teachers credentialed in other subjects who might not be confident in the new materials. Adding the intensity of a polarized topic can make these teachers especially feel like they risk upsetting parents by even addressing it.
Avoiding the topic, even a polarizing one, is a missed opportunity, said Gonzalez. It can leave students with unanswered questions or even reinforce the idea that the Middle East is so complex that it’s impossible to understand when that isn’t true at all.
“Students can figure out the narrative themselves and come to their own conclusions based off of primary sources that are told in the original people's own words,” said Gonzalez.
Teaching about Palestine, the Middle East and about Arab Americans as part of a broader ethnic studies curriculum is a way to confront bias and bigotry directly, said Fahrenthold.
“In times that are as fraught as ours, there are really only two paths,” said Fahrenthold. “One is to just not talk about what's going on and the other is to find ways to have meaningful conversations, even if that work is hard.”
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