Announcing the Post-Colonial Education Project Curriculum
The project aims to provide free K-12 curriculum and lessons to educate American students about American colonialism among indigenous peoples and overseas territories.
I am pleased to announce the launching of the Post-Colonial Education Project! As both a high school and college level history instructor, I struggled with the fact that I could not find a good survey level U.S. History text book that dealt well with issues of American colonialism, indigeneity, and race. It is well known that Native Americans disappear almost completely from U.S. history textbooks after the 1890s (if not after even 1830!), and yet, the knowledge of this fact has done little to change this in our courses. As a teacher educator, I have also struggled with the fact that most U.S. History surveys don’t deal well with Native American history even before 1830, and don’t paint the United States as a colonial nation. While our students study the Persian, Roman, Chinese, Spanish, and British empires to some extent in World History, there is little to no acknowledgement that the United States is itself an empire, and that even the founding fathers intended the country to be an empire.
While the curriculum package is consciously K-12 (with a few resources for K-6 teachers, and the rest for high school), the mini-lecture materials and many of the assignments can be easily adapted for undergraduate classroom use.
I am releasing the first unit today, with additional units in the works to be released in the future. The first unit focuses on America’s Overseas Territories: Past and Present. The unit itself looks to both the history and the current political and cultural realities for the territories. The unit is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the political and legal realities surrounding the coloniality of the territories, and Part II focuses upon the physical and cultural geography of the territories. Additionally, I have included materials for use in Advanced Placement U.S. History and Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics classrooms, including a list of Landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases on the territories and resources for learning more about them with your classes. As a former AP teacher, when I first began creating this curriculum, I envisioned it as a series of lessons that I could teach after the AP exam was administered, but before the end of the school year. It will work for that purpose, or it can easily be administered as a stand alone, topical unit for your history, government, or American/Ethnic Studies course.
The next unit of the curriculum will focus upon “indigenous America,” and specifically upon federal - Native American/Alaskan/Hawaiian relations, history, rights, and tribal governance.