I’m not old enough to have taught or been a student during the height of the Cold War. I imagine, however, that teaching in our contemporary milieu of political polarization and anxiety about our country’s future and place in the world is quite similar to the paranoia and fear people experienced during the Cold War era. I believe that our students need us to acknowledge that their futures feel unstable and unclear. One way to do that is by teaching them to embrace a certain level of uncertainty and ambiguity in their learning.
I’ve been thinking about this recently as my eighth-grade Global Thinking students have embarked on a unit on the Middle East. My students greet this material with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. They have an intense desire to understand the world around them and they sense, correctly, that there is more to the story than what is shared in the U.S. media. For them, there is excitement in studying such complex and urgent material, but they also sense our country’s atmosphere of angst and are themselves uneasy. They are scared, but they’re not sure of what; they are curious, but they’re apprehensive about what they don’t know. In this way, they are similar to many Americans who find themselves fearful and angry.
As a history teacher and scholar, I believe that one of the reasons for this profound national anxiety is a lack of information, knowledge and understanding about the world, especially the Middle East. I see evidence of widespread Islamophobia—including the conflation of Islam with the Middle East—as well as evidence that our students and fellow citizens believe gross inaccuracies about the region. And yet as I think about my unit on the Middle East, I also know how challenging it is to understand such a complicated region, where the narratives are intricate, even contradictory at times. Using The Middle East in Transition, a curriculum from The Choices Program at Brown University, as well as supplemental materials from contemporary news sources, I try to provide the broadest possible historical context for current developments. Although the unit proceeds logically and feels like a conventional history unit with timelines, slideshows and discussions, our learning quickly gets complicated. We read articles that directly contradict one another. Our struggles with bias, perspective and narrative are more daunting than usual.
This knottiness scares some teachers away from teaching material like this, but I prefer to take that complexity and make it the starting point for students’ learning. In this blog post, my colleague similarly argued for “accepting, and even welcoming, this ‘messiness’” as an essential part of our course. The message we send to students when we ignore challenging content is much scarier than tackling this content thoughtfully and carefully: Cordoning off areas of the world or lines of inquiry only reinforces students’ perceptions of what matters. Misperception will only fester and calcify if we don’t at least attempt to disrupt it, even if we do it imperfectly. If we only studied what fit neatly into a cohesive narrative, there wouldn’t be much to study in history class!
When I present the unit to students, I am explicit about how hard it will be. I am similarly transparent about my own struggles to develop understanding, and I model for students that the embrace of uncertainty and patience with ambiguity are at the root of authentic scholarship. The unit is framed as an opportunity for them to practice developing comfort with uncertainty. I believe that the lesson of learning with a teacher whose own knowledge is emerging and evolving can inspire students to keep inquiring and learning themselves. As we learn more, we typically have more questions. We teachers may need to lean in and model that fact ourselves. So teach what you’re still learning, be open about your questions and acknowledge uncertainty. Show your students how an unyielding quest for knowledge and understanding is the surest path toward a more tolerant, open-minded world.
Gold is a seventh- and eighth-grade history teacher at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island. You can reach him on Twitter @jonathansgold.
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