Re-Conceptualizing Race in New York City's High School Social Studies Classrooms

Abstract

In New York State Public Schools, social studies education centers on employing interdisciplinary approaches to help students learn civic values and historical events. Increasingly, due in no small part to the influence of popular culture, social studies education research is making fewer distinctions about racial and ethnic identities. Following some trends in the larger academic community, more of the research in social studies education categorizes ethnically and religiously diverse European and African groups into the narrow categories of White or Black. This practice of flattening diverse European and African groups into current day race frameworks can be problematic when teaching high school social studies, particularly in highly diverse urban centers, because it perpetuates binary racial constructions that both are rooted in the historical fallacy of presentism and tend to contradict the students' ontological realities.