River History Education Memo
Rivers offer a powerful entry point into state and US history. Whether through treaties that describe how Native people belonged to rivers, informing how and why they resisted colonialism, or runaway slave advertisements that detail how freedom seekers used rivers in their quest for freedom, teachers can engage students by bringing in more voices, new perspectives, and local connections to national and global processes. Currently, public school students only learn environmental history by accident—a problem this project addresses by creating resources and training for teachers to ensure equitable access to environmental history. This project will connect the expertise of environmental historians and the ready stories of conservation and environmental justice advocates with the needs and guidance of K–12 teachers. Though focused on creating engaging and relevant histories for middle and high school students across the nation, this project will serve the interests of all participants as we learn from each other. Focused lesson plans will be easy to incorporate into classrooms, giving close attention to their alignment with state standards, especially in US history. By bringing river history into social studies classrooms, students will be better engaged and their understanding of local, national, and global contexts, including climate change, will be improved.
Since the turn of the century, a dramatic change has taken place on America’s rivers. Instead of building new dams, existing dams are being torn down with fish swimming upstream for the first time in over a hundred years. The rationale for these massive restoration projects is rooted in the history of the people who have long lived there. The largest dam removal in American history is underway on the Klamath River. When explaining their rationale, the authors of a central study note, “much of the contents of this report are historical in nature.” While conservationists and government officials have begun to understand the history of communities and their waterways, few students in public middle or high schools are learning about the history of their local or national rivers. As the American Historical Association (AHA) completes the most comprehensive study of history education in public schools in several decades, one of their findings is that public school students rarely learn any environmental history. This initiative proposes to change that by bringing river history into K–12classrooms across the country.
American students have long taken required courses in United States history in order to become informed and thoughtful citizens. River history can support this tradition by offering engaging, diverse, and novel perspectives on core topics in American history. Teachers surveyed by the AHA noted certain topics where they particularly needed content and support from historians including the study of Native history, slavery, and anything after 1970. These are topics that rivers can deliver on: consider the birchbark canoes of the Wabanaki on Maine’s rivers, the plantations that lined the Mississippi River, or the burning waterways that led to the 1972 Clean Water Act. River history makes it possible for teachers to present their students with a range of primary sources and voices, not only written ones, while making connections across time and space to explore questions and tensions fundamental to American history.
Even as certain skills and trends in social studies education have shifted, the field remains rooted in understanding the basic concepts of chronology and change over time. Given the debate among scientists over whether humans have created a new geological era, the Anthropocene, students should be given the tools to understand this era and the shifting relationships between people and places. The field of environmental history has grown over the past five decades but it has barely made a mark on K–12classrooms. In part this reflects the nature of social studies education in which historiography often takes decades to reach a consensus and earn widespread knowledge among teachers. But it also reflects the development of the field itself, as environmental historians have moved away from narrower debates about wilderness and the American West to a global and national frame, revealing new insights into core topics in American history such as slavery, Native history, and environmental justice.
In addition to helping students learn American history, environmental history enables students to understand and historize environmental challenges, especially climate change. Many innovative programs across the country connect students with their local waterways through science and an emphasis on environmental justice. But these programs do not focus on history as a way for students to understand how we ended up with these particular challenges, and the progress that has been made in addressing them. If students learn about their state’s rivers from a historical perspective, considering how rivers served as sites of industrial production, have been priorities for ecological restoration, and how disadvantaged communities have benefited from and spoken for rivers over time, they will be better prepared to address present-day challenges. Their understanding of the history of slavery, movements for civil rights, and campaigns for environmental justice and ecological restoration can inform how they frame and approach problems as not simply a sudden crisis but as something connected to longer histories and larger movements. In an increasing number of locales civics courses and programs center climate change further highlighting the need for a historical perspective that also explores past success in addressing environmental challenges.
This project will provide teachers with lesson plans and professional development opportunities so that they can engage their students regardless of a teacher’s past education. The AHA’s teacher survey revealed that three-quarters of teachers rely regularly on online resources. Rather than waiting for textbook updates and adoption cycles, we can reach teachers directly and immediately. The most widely used resources make it easy for teachers to take pieces and plug them into the needs of their classroom for the day. Among social studies teachers, there is a clear appetite for professional development focused on content-rich historical topics—a demand that most district-led PDs are unable to serve. This river history program will offer free teacher training in addition to sessions at state and national social studies conferences. Whenever possible, we will work with partners to support place-based field trips that teachers can lead on their own in the future. Whether the waterways they study are in their state or in their neighborhood, the connections students make between state and national history through rivers will be vivid and meaningful, enlarging and deepening their own sense of the physical and historical landscapes they inhabit.
Three partners will have a stake in this project’s success: environmental historians, conservation groups, and social studies teachers. Together through the expertise of historians, the stories and education networks that conservationists already draw on, and the experience of teachers in the classroom, we will create lesson plans and supporting resources that will reach the greatest number of students. Though national in scope, the initial phase includes specific states. These states will enable a focused approach to creating standards-aligned teaching materials while reaching many of the nation’s students. Content will align with core standards in American history, but will also be linked to other relevant standards that teachers are required to teach, especially state history and geography. A single website will organize rivers and lesson plans by topic, and it will be possible for motivated teachers in other states to pick and choose lessons for their own classrooms since currently, no such materials exist anywhere. Environmental historians, including graduate students, will complete an initial round of research focused on the most compelling stories and the types of primary and secondary sources that students could study. Paid teacher teams will lead the development of the teaching resources. This core team will also lead reflections on its implementation so we can respond to feedback and improve these resources over time. Following the three years of the project, a report will be published reflecting on the program’s successes and challenges so that future K–12environmental history projects can be undertaken.
Mission statement:
To the extent that this project depends on flexibility, and might unfold at a bigger or smaller scale than sketched out here, we can manage these changes by returning to our mission statement.
All students deserve access to environmental history. We will start with the history of rivers, which connect people and place across time and space. Since K–12 students are already required to take courses in US history, we will support teachers with lesson plans, sources, activities, and professional development to use river history in their teaching of US history. Our approach will help students engage with and better understand local, national, and global histories.
For more information about this project and partnering as a teacher, funder, or organization email Scot at WSM2116@Columbia.edu