Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Colonizers recorded 85.7% of primary sources in widely used online lessons on imperialism
University of Kansas researchers found colonizers recorded 85.7% of the primary sources in 46 sets of open online materials used to teach imperialism. Teachers increasingly rely on such materials because many districts cannot afford or access print textbooks.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Every C3 Teachers resource used a balance-sheet approach, asking students to weigh the pros and cons of imperial actions, while no resource from DIG did.
- OER Project and PBS, the other two platforms in the study, used the balance-sheet approach relatively infrequently.
- Prompts included "should Hawai'i be sovereign" and "was American expansion abroad justified," and one asked for a cost-benefit analysis of the French occupation of Vietnam.
- The authors say such questions ask young students to debate people's right to exist freely, and that historians do not pose them because life without imperialism cannot be known.
- Anna Yonas and Stephen Jackson published the study in the journal Social Studies Research and Practice.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision A district picking a platform is also picking whether its imperialism units ask students to debate conquest, since the framing tracked the site almost entirely.
- exposure Brand recognition gives teachers little protection: C3 Teachers, a name Yonas said teachers may take as a sign of quality, used the contested framing in every resource.
- constraint The evidence covers the materials alone, so it can justify reviewing lessons before use; showing an effect on what students believe about imperialism would take a classroom study.
The 85.7 percent is a count of authorship. It is the share of primary sources in the materials that colonizers recorded, and the authors found few recorded by colonized peoples [5]. According to the study, the resources frequently privilege Eurocentric narratives and minimize colonial voices, normalizing imperial conquest and perpetuating what the authors call systemic silences [6].
The study is an analysis of documents. Yonas and Jackson worked through 46 sets of commonly used materials for middle and high school social studies [4]. They asked whose perspectives the lessons included and how common the balance-sheet framing was [13]. The published account does not give the number of primary sources behind the percentage, the split of the 46 sets across the four platforms, or any comparison with print textbooks [12].
Print textbooks are what these resources replace in many schools [2]. "Teachers are increasingly moving away from textbooks because they're really expensive, and many school districts can't access them," Yonas said [2]. She described a high school teacher planning three or four courses who goes to Google for ready-made material before an imperialism unit [15]. "You don't necessarily have the time to dig into those materials," she said [16].
Without a textbook control, the study cannot say whether the move online made imperialism units worse than the books they replaced. It does show that the open resources examined draw most of their primary sources from colonizers [5]. I think that is enough to justify checking a unit before it is taught, with one condition. The finding covers four open platforms, OER Project, PBS, DIG and C3 Teachers [8]. Yonas noted that some teachers go instead to paid websites, "which have their own pitfalls and problems" [18].
Jackson's objection to the balance-sheet format is to the questions themselves. "Most recent scholarship is extremely critical of this for a lot of reasons. It often brings in sort of inappropriate questions of sovereignty and human rights and pretends as if these are questions that are appropriate matters for high schoolers to be debating," Jackson said [17].
What to watch
- Whether C3 Teachers or the other platforms revise balance-sheet prompts such as "should Hawai'i be sovereign" after the study.
- A follow-up applying the same source-authorship count to print textbooks, which would show whether the move online changed what students see.
- The full paper's per-platform breakdown of the 85.7% figure and the number of primary sources it rests on.