School Improvemnt for Children Taught Arts 7 Huanities in School

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a humanities education project that took place in a center schoolhouse in the rural U.South. South. Through a partnership between a state academy and local school organization, Grand-12 teachers engaged in ii years of professional person development on the integration of humanities education into the regular curriculum through project-based learning (PBL). During this project, teachers were required to personally and professionally engage with racial tensions rooted in the history of the local community as they learned to implement their PBL activities. This context is key to the design and implementation of the project as presented in this paper. We detail three learning strategies that emerged and how these were taken upwards past teachers: the personalization of history, historical perspective taking, and modeling a critical position. Nosotros discuss the implications of these strategies for integrating PBL and humanities education in a mode that attends to socio-cultural-historical contexts. Implications for the practice of learning blueprint in similar contexts are as well discussed.

Introduction

The racial and economic iniquities of the by continue to touch on rural areas of the U.S. S. This is especially noticeable in K-12 teaching, where those inequities oft manifest as lower operation on standardized tests and fewer graduates inbound four-year colleges than the national average (Lavalley, 2018). The rhetoric around educational reform in rural areas, however, often focuses more on escaping poverty than addressing the longstanding roots of that poverty (Schafft, 2016). Whether intentional or otherwise, this focus affects students in profound means. Some students develop disfavorable narratives nearly the place in which they alive that, over time, lead them to go out rather than stay and improve the bug within the community (Schafft, 2016). Others remain in those areas later graduating high school, ofttimes struggling to empathise why they are viewed as having failed for staying in the identify they call home (Jones, 2006; Schafft, 2016).

Humanities education is one way to introduce educational reform in rural and disadvantaged areas that can help address the longstanding roots of poverty. In this paper, the term humanities education represents educational reform efforts that get beyond a single class (east.g., linguistic communication arts; history) or prepare of content-area standards. Such efforts emphasize human bureau and creativity through stories of collective action (Anderson, 2002). This typically involves students engaging in sustained inquiry by taking differing perspectives around issues that are present in the customs (Walker, 2009). Information technology is a humanizing style of thought that attempts to understand people as "free and responsible agents who bring about a world" (Anderson, 2002, p. 136). Such perspectives are rooted in the piece of work of John Dewey (1916) and Paulo Freire (1970), who promoted the idea that schools should teach virtually democratic society and appoint children in debate about fundamental notions such as equality and justice. Studies have shown that humanities-based approaches to K-12 teaching tin help disadvantaged youth better their performance on content-expanse standards while also understanding themselves through their relationship with the people in their community (e.g., Hadley, Shush, & Wright, 2019; San Pedro, 2016).

While humanities didactics has tremendous potential to ameliorate teaching in rural areas, it is often overlooked as a viable option for reform. As noted past Schafft (2016), a more mutual view is that school improvement will result from generating competition between schools. Such neoliberal views ofttimes lead to reform policies that focus on mastering standards rather than better understanding oneself in relation with the development and growth of the community (Schafft, 2016). For example, contempo national policy in the United states suggests that improving achievement in Stalk education will atomic number 82 to economical prosperity (Love, Pearson, & Schweingruber, 2014). While this policy is undoubtedly important, information technology largely focuses on improving bailiwick-matter outcomes rather than the integration of identify and customs in Grand-12 instruction. Equally a effect, current educational reform tends to overlook a critical opportunity to equip students with the skills needed to negotiate the challenges that rural communities face today (Schafft, 2016; Jones, 2006).

The purpose of this paper is to nowadays the results of a humanities education project that took place in a middle school in the rural Usa South. Through a partnership between a state university and local school system, Yard-12 teachers engaged in two years of professional development on the integration of humanities education into the regular curriculum through projection-based learning (PBL). That piece of work required them to personally and professionally engage with the racial tensions rooted in the history of the local community as they learned to implement their PBL activities. At the end of the ii years, we collected data from students and teachers to assess learning outcomes and inform the overall design of our approach to humanities education. The research questions guiding our written report were:

• How did our approach back up teachers in meeting land standards?
• What aspects of humanities education were taken up by the teachers?

Project Design: Project-Based Learning with a Humanities Focus

Teachers engaged in two years of professional person development on project-based learning that was composite with a humanities focus. Projection-based learning (PBL) is an instructional approach that supports student date in real-world, or "nontrivial," projects and problems (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). As shown in Tabular array one, students typically lead an investigation centered on a driving or challenging question, synthesizing their findings into a shareable artifact (Barron et al., 1998; Larmer, Ross, & Mergendoller, 2017). Educatee learning is situated in an authentic context, allowing for both subject-focused exploration and interdisciplinary learning. Students produce an artifact that reflects their learning and application of skills, and that antiquity is made public for others to view. Both teachers and students reverberate on the process and their learning throughout the PBL action.

Tabular array ane

Intersections of PBL and Humanities Education

PBL Element*	Clarification*	Humanities Component
Challenging Problem or Question	An "open-ended, inspiring, and understandable" driving question frames the projection.	Teachers identified questions around bug of poverty and segregation after viewing the NARA photographs (eastward.g., How do you and others bear on your customs? How do our by experiences bear on our present? How are people afflicted by and from stereotyping?)
Sustained Inquiry	Student-generated questions are researched throughout the project past gathering / interpreting data, building evidence, and creating and evaluating solutions.	Focus on identifying and finding prove of multiple perspectives, likewise equally engaging with and making sense of these perspectives. Through this process, students construct, and share, their own perspectives.
Actuality	The project relates to "students' concerns, interests, or identities" and/or involves "real-world tasks, tools, and quality standards."	Student work was situated in the local historical context; NARA photos were used to explore social problems and take perspectives relevant to the electric current culture of their customs.
Educatee voice and selection	Students have "significant responsibility" in the project, including making decisions nearly the questions, resource, tasks, and products used/ created.	Students chose what photographs to focus on, what production to create, and how to nowadays their findings.
Public multi- modal products	Educatee work is available to people exterior of their classroom. Students publicly explicate their work, including their research procedure and decision-making.	Student work was presented publicly in the schools (e.one thousand., art hung in hallways) as well as a community result hosted at a local art/cultural center.
Reflection	Throughout the project, students and teachers reflect on what content was/is existence learned as well as the inquiry process itself.	Reflection occurred largely through in-form course discussions.

*Note: Descriptions and direct quotes are taken from the Buck Institute for Education (2019) Project Blueprint Rubric

The benefits of PBL are supported through research. Tamim and Grant (2013) and others (e.k., Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007) have reported that students of teachers experienced in PBL improved in their motivation, appointment, learning, and acquisition of academic and non-academic skills. Although the exact nature of student piece of work products is dependent on the content that is addressed, most PBL products are multimodal. In other words, student piece of work includes more than than one manner of advice, such as text, images, color, and use of space. Multimodality as a pedagogical arroyo centers students' significant making practices by providing them opportunities to appoint in both artifact creation and the cess of multimodal resources (Kress, 2010). Students construct and interpret multimodal resources every bit a way of making sense of the world effectually them, as well as to engage in social critique (DeJaynes and Curmi-Hall, 2019).

While both PBL and humanities education take their own rich literature base, the intersection of these is less oftentimes articulated as a form of applied instructional blueprint. As shown in Table 1, the humanities focus in this study came from the style that teachers created opportunities for students to take differing perspectives and explore bug that were present in the community. Those opportunities came largely from a series of photographs taken within the community in 1941 that are publicly available through the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) (see Figure 1).

Figure ane

Sampling of 1941 National Archives Records Administration (NARA, ca. 1922-1947) Photographs and Original Captions.

Description of photographs in Figure ane. Top left: Inside a dairy, ii African American men seated at stools milk cows. The men, and the cows, are facing away from the camera. The men are dressed in jean overalls, shirts rolled up to the elbows, and matching caps. Top right: An elderly African American women in a print wearing apparel sits in a single-room motel. She faces to the left, off-camera. The room has several rocking chairs stored backside her, and a metal-frame bed is visible in the bottom right corner.  Bottom left: Several people are visible on a sidewalk in front of a grocery store. Women in the photo are wearing dresses and heels and continuing close to the store. Large awnings display signs. Legible signs state: "Tea 15¢" "Ham 30¢" "Potatoes 10¢" More signs are visible, but non legible. An older man and a youth lean confronting a garbage can in the forefront of the prototype, both facing towards the store. Bottom correct: A small, single-room house with a porch is shown from the front. A chimney on the left side of the business firm is made of brick; the rest of the house is forest. In that location is a ladder on the roof. The house is run-down. On the porch sits an African American man with a guitar in black pants and a white shirt. Next to him is a toddler. He is facing up and to the right, where some other homo is sitting in a chair with a woman in a printed wearing apparel leaning confronting the doorway behind him.

Each instructor produced at least one project-based activity that integrated the photos to back up educatee-driven inquiry that aligned with land standards, resulted in a multimodal product that reflected student learning, and encouraged students to take differing perspectives around the social issues that have been and, in many cases, keep to be nowadays in their customs. Our thinking was that the photos would offer students a rich, authentic context for PBL activities that provided a fashion for students to explore social problems and take perspectives that are relevant to the culture of the customs (Danker, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Engaging with multiple perspectives helps students begin to encounter how the past connects to their experiences in the present, which helps cultivate a stronger connection to and understanding of their community (Lovorn, 2012; Smith & Sobel, 2014; Walker, 2009).

Methods

Context

This projection took place in a rural community in the US South whose schools serve approximately three,500 students (44% white, 41% black, and xi% Hispanic). Like many rural communities in the S, its history is ane of racial inequality and those who accept challenged information technology, spanning from the practice of slavery through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Although the overt racial and economic segregation of the by has faded with each successive generation, the structural remnants persist: approximately 30% of the customs's under-18 population currently live at or below the federal poverty level.

In this context, there is an opportunity to explore and construct narratives that reflect the customs every bit the vast bulk of residents accept experienced it. Residents over 60 have clear memories of racial oppression and the struggle for civil rights, and some tin still trace their lineage dorsum to family members who were at one point enslaved. These older generations have their own stories to tell of the hardships, victories, and changes that accept transformed the place of their babyhood into the 1 in which their grandchildren and groovy-grandchildren are now growing upwards.

This context, then, positions this study as one that explores how learning pattern might be taken upwardly to accost issues of social justice. The teachers in this study were not only learning to implement PBL in their classrooms. They were also challenged with integrating photos of the customs'due south past into their pedagogy. Those photos offered a glimpse of the racial and economical inequality that existed in 1941; they were included every bit part of a series of reports on rural life funded by the Works Progress Assistants. The study on the community that serves as the context for this report highlighted the way that racial segregation intersected with the customs'due south shifting economical structures (see Wynne, 1943). For the research team, this context demanded sensitivity, both to the history behind the photos and the needs of the teachers who would innovate them to their students.

Participants

Six middle schoolhouse teachers participated in this study. 1 identifies as a white male, 4 as white females, and one as a Black American female person. Their number of years teaching spanned from 3 to 24, with a median of 11 years in the classroom. For all but i, this teaching feel has occurred entirely in their electric current county. Teachers in the report received a stipend for their participation in the professional development.

Teacher Professional person Development

The ii-year PD program focused on designing, developing, and implementing learning activities that met state standards and integrated the NARA photos and local community. The PD drew largely on the materials produced by the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) that supports project-based learning in K-12 settings (Larmer, Ross, & Mergendoller, 2017). Specifically, teachers used the BIE lesson template tools to plan for the development and implementation of PBL. The template structured instructor lesson planning in a way that addressed the PBL elements noted in Table i (e.1000., driving question; sustained research; student pick and vox).

The PD entailed an annual day-long summer workshop, followed up by regular meetings and in-classroom back up throughout the twelvemonth. As shown in Table 2, Yr 1 focused on developing and implementing a PBL action, whereas Year 2 focused on improving the activities from Year 1 while also increasing the number of participating teachers and subject areas represented.

Table 2

Professional Evolution (PD) Activities and Focus by Project Year

PD Activity	Year 1	Year two
Summer Workshop	Explore NARA photos Identify photos relevant to specific content areas Develop PBL effectually photos Create an implementation plan	Recruit additional teachers Vertical and horizontal alignment of themes beyond grades and subject field areas Peer feedback Design a 2nd PBL lesson or expand on initial lesson
Regular Meetings	ii-3 meetings per year at course level Individualized planning and implementation support	2-3 meetings per year at grade level Individualized planning and implementation back up
In-Classroom Support	Support during implementation Provide clarification of overall project to students Access to/creation of materials to support pupil inquiry	Support during implementation Pre-class discussions and mail service-form feedback Connecting overall projection goals and private classroom goals/lessons Admission to/creation of materials

As shown in Table 3, the teachers' PBL activities took place across disciplines such equally social studies, English Linguistic communication Arts (ELA), mathematics, and science. Across those six teachers, nearly 100 students participated in a PBL activity. For the bulk of those students, this was among their first PBL experiences that incorporated the community. In total, 36 student projects were included for assay.

Tabular array 3

Overview of PBL Activities Created by Centre School Teachers

Class	Lesson Title	Description	Gr.	Content Standards
Mathematics	Paint the Past	Students calculated area situated within past and current photographs of local historical sites.	half dozen	Mathematics: Geometry
Current Events and Disquisitional Thinking	[City Name]'due south Past	Students analyzed photographs to develop historical perspectives. Cull between writing a story most a photograph or a presentation on the evolution of a technology in the photo.	6	Social Studies: Information Processing
Current Events and Disquisitional Thinking	This is u.s.a.: [Canton Name]	Students adult presentations where they wrote how each person in a photograph contributed to their customs as a hero: a NARA photograph, a local hero, and a selfie.	6	ELA: Reading for Information
Life Scientific discipline	Ecosystems and How they Work	Field work including local hike and soil sampling around human being utilize of environment	7	Life Science
ELA	Historical Narratives	Exploration of bias and point-of-view through the cosmos of historical narratives	7	Social Studies: Literacy in History
Art	Community and Quilting	Students created quilt tiles to stand for personal histories	8	Visual Art: Creating and Connecting

Research Pattern

The current study is part of a larger Pattern-Based Implementation Enquiry (DBIR) project that sought to integrate humanities education into the G-12 curriculum. DBIR (Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011) emphasizes an iterative process of developing, testing, improving, and retesting a enquiry-driven educational intervention through deep collaboration with local contexts (see also Cobb et al., 2003). Every bit noted by Penuel et al. (2011), DBIR emphasizes co-pattern, significant researchers and local stakeholders (e.g., administrators, teachers, students) work collaboratively to shape and attain the driving goals of the project. Involving stakeholders (due east.thou., teachers, curricular coaches) in iterative co-design places a focus on sustaining change within the school system over time; information technology leads to the formation of research-based learning principles and practices that advance theory while having relevance in an applied context (Penuel et al., 2011).

DBIR is an umbrella method that allows for various approaches to data drove and analysis. With each iteration, the enquiry team improves the intervention while focusing more deeply on the constructs and mechanisms that support learning. With that in mind, the current study builds on our prior enquiry that describes our theoretical approach to humanities teaching (Lawton et al., 2020) and the impact of our arroyo on teachers and students (Walters et al., 2020). The goals for the current study were to establish the efficacy of our approach. We first wanted to understand the means in which our arroyo to humanities education supported teachers in meeting land standards (RQ1). 2d, we wanted to identify the elements that became nearly salient for the teachers (RQ2).

Data Collection and Analysis

Data were collected from both students and teachers with approval from our Institutional Review Board's (IRB) guidelines for confidentiality. Pupil data came from scoring their PBL projects completed at the terminate of each activity. Every bit shown in Table 3, each of the six teachers met different standards, ranging from math to ELA and art. Thus, we adult and used different rubrics to analyze student work, one for each PBL activity. These were developed collaboratively with the teachers to ensure validity. For instance, ane instructor's PBL unit addressed the standards for calculating surface expanse in math. The corresponding rubric evaluated pupil calculations on a serial of surface surface area questions that related to the NARA photographs, assigning a point for each right adding. Another addressed the social studies standards associated with literacy in history. The corresponding rubric included criteria such as Narrative Voice, Use of Historical Evidence and Historical Orientation (Curvation, 2013), scored on a iii-point calibration that ranged from Demonstrated Proficiency (three) to Approaching Proficiency (two) and finally Not Proficient (ane).

Instructor data came from 2 semi-structured focus grouping interviews conducted via videoconference at the decision of the two-year professional evolution effort. We chose videoconferencing because contiguous interviews were not possible due to COVID-xix restrictions. Interview questions explored the teacher's experiences with the project and PD, such as what the teachers learned and the perceived benefits for students.

Each interview was transcribed and analyzed for thematic patterns effectually the research questions. Analysis consisted of consensus edifice equally detailed by Braun & Clarke (2006). Each researcher commencement conducted an independent reading, coding sections of the transcript with shorthand descriptors for underlying ideas, assumptions, and concepts (e.g., critical thinking, teacher challenge, community connexion). The team then met to discuss those descriptors, group them under larger thematic headings. These themes were and then reviewed as each fellow member revisited the transcripts to mark sections using the larger theme headings. They met i more than fourth dimension to found a consensus about the final themes and examples of each theme.

Positionality Argument

Positionality refers to an understanding of 1's identity and the style this identity impacts ways of knowing. This concept is disquisitional in research where the researcher is as much a part of the data collection and analysis as the methods and tools (Bourke, 2014). Our positionality statement acknowledges that we are white scholars who live in communities that are different from that of our participants. We have not personally experienced the types of racial oppression many of our participants take. Being enlightened of this, nosotros intentionally adopted a reflexive blueprint and enquiry practice entailed ongoing reflection virtually our perspectives in relation to that of the research participants and their impact on the research study. This became especially of import when navigating the tensions that arose around long-standing racial and economical injustices in the community, too as when determining how to support both teachers and students in exploring those tensions. This reflexivity besides supported our DBIR arroyo in that information technology positioned the teachers every bit co-designers; we created regular opportunities for the teachers to give input that helped shape the management and focus of the projection as information technology evolved. Thus, our piece of work centered and valued the different means of knowing and knowledge each partner brought. Our goal was to continuously develop our understanding of the design through our interactions with each other, the teachers, and the students.

Findings

Research Question i: How did our approach support teachers in meeting land standards?

Ane immediate goal for our project was to make sure that our approach supported teachers in meeting the state standards. As shown in Table iv, the hateful scores on student work ranged from 75.00 to 97.50 (out of 100), suggesting that the standards were met or exceeded. Data from instructor interviews revealed that the teachers felt their students were engaged in the PBL activities and met the intended standards. 1 instructor stated that her students who "practice not normally" speak upwardly in class were excited to discuss the photographs. The teacher described how students recognized locations in the photos (e.g., "I know that place!" or "I've been there!") and felt that this familiarity supported the students' engagement with the activities. Another instructor stated the approach to humanities educational activity supported the way she likes to teach, using primary historical sources in an ELA course. This interdisciplinary piece of work supported students meeting Literacy in History writing standards.

Table 4

Student Antiquity Scores (out of 100) past PBL Activeness

Course	Lesson Title	Gr.	Content Standards	Rubric Items	N	K	SD
Mathematics	Pigment the Past	6	Mathematics: Geometry	Represent iii-D Figure; Calculate Surface Surface area; Employ Calculations	6	95.00	5.48
Current Events and Disquisitional Thinking	Eatonton's By	6	Social Studies: Information Processing	Arrangement; Elaboration; Historical Orientation; Writing Conventions	x	97.50	12.08
Current Events and Critical Thinking	This is the states: Putnam	half-dozen	ELA: Reading for Information	Use of textual evidence; integration of multimodal information	thirteen	75.96	21.02
Life Scientific disciplinea	Ecosystems and How they Work	7	Life Science	North/A	N/A	Due north/A	N/A
ELA	Historical Narratives	7	Social Studies: Literacy in History	Narrative writing organization, voice, ideas, and conventions; Utilize of historical evidence; Understanding of historical orientation	seven	88.89	iv.81
Arta	Community and Quilting	8	Visual Fine art: Creating and Connecting	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

^aData were not bachelor in these classes due to constraints associated with COVID-19

Research Question two: What aspects of humanities educational activity were taken upwardly by the teachers?

Three themes emerged from the focus group interviews related to the way teachers and students took up aspects of humanities education: the personalization of history, historical perspective taking, and modeling a disquisitional position. The personalization of history refers to the style that students recognized their own experiences equally meaningful and role of something larger than themselves (eastward.thousand., the events of the by). Four of the teachers discussed how students struggled initially with seeing their personal, day-to-twenty-four hour period experiences as meaningful. The art teacher stated students had to "give themselves permission to use their experiences…for their artwork." Other teachers described similar experiences, explaining how eventually "it clicked" equally their students created artwork, narratives, multimodal presentations, and other artifacts effectually their personal experiences.

A primal aspect of this "clicking" was the act of connecting the students' experiences with the broader community. In the This is Us activity, students identified specific details of their own lives (e.1000., what they do for fun; what they similar about where they alive) earlier imagining what the lives of past youth in their community may accept looked like. They then created multiple artifacts linking selected NARA photographs, YouTube music videos, present-day images, and locations in the community. Through this creative process, the students began thinking about themselves as if they were living in the by. This helped them create contrast between how things used to exist in the community as compared to how they currently are.

The comparison between past and present reflects the style that historical perspective taking took place in this written report. Historical perspective taking is a procedure of "explor[ing] and reconstruct[ing] the internal states of a person of the past" (Nilsen, 2016, p. 375). Equally Nilsen and others (Endacott, 2014; Rüsen, 2005) have noted, historical perspective taking focuses on the stories of individual people and their experiences rather than overarching and impersonal historical narratives. In this report, all the teachers described how they created opportunities for historical perspective taking. 5 described how they helped students sympathize how specific experiences of people from the past related to larger historical themes in the present. As one explained, "Like the civil rights motion…information technology really comes downwardly to those little moments, that 1 day at the lunch counter… information technology's the small moments that make our lives." Another described how she helped students focus on how their day-to-day lives were similar to the lives of the people in the photographs. Her students' projects contained writing that explored how moments of celebration and joy are a natural role of life, both in the by and in the present.

Some other way that teachers connected the past with the present was to engage students in amalgam historical fiction. In the Historical Narratives action, students created characters that were similar to themselves—the aforementioned historic period and living in the same place—but also non similar them in the issues they faced, such as segregation. The students achieved this past blending their personal experiences with the issues of the past. The teacher explained, "This helped students construct conceivable characters by connecting to their characters' emotions and desires in unfair circumstances" -- emotions such every bit defoliation, distress, and anger over "racial discrimination and the desire to fight for their interracial friendships." This suggests how historical perspective-taking allowed students to empathize a national historical event, segregation, through the everyday experiences and emotions of someone their own age, in their own town.

The final theme that emerged centered around the critical position 2 of the teachers modeled for their students. A critical position refers to the fashion that teachers drew upon student assumptions, mindsets, and experiences to support difficult conversations about race, economics, and change in the classroom (Freire, 1970; Jones, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1995). In one 6^th grade classroom, students saw black and white photos and assumed, considering they were of the past, that they depicted slavery. The teacher described how this assumption reflected the students' understanding of their community, based largely on the dominant narrative of the past that focused on racial inequality and oppression. Her response was a critical one, pushing back on the dominant narrative in an endeavor to construct a new, more positive one. Specifically, she used activities such as "finding themselves in the pictures," and identifying examples where "kids [were] just kids," in order to make connections between the by and the present. She also emphasized an epitome depicting a blackness landowner, suggesting that not all of the dominant narrative was authentic. This eventually helped the students learn that the context of the photos was not slavery only actually the experiences, positive and negative, of both black and white sharecroppers.

Give-and-take

In this newspaper, we applied a humanities focus to the cadre elements of PBL. This is not necessarily a new idea; Youth Participatory Activity Research (YPAR) similarly blends PBL elements (e.g., sustained inquiry, educatee voice and pick, multimodal products) with a focus on perspective taking within a local context (Shush et al., 2018). What is unique to this paper, however, is the way PBL and humanities education were implemented in a customs in which long standing issues of racial and economic inequality persist today. The inclusion of the NARA photographs challenged both the teachers and the states, the designers, to observe ways to drive and sustain enquiry while allowing students to take their ain voice and choice, have multiple perspectives on sensitive issues of the past, and make connections with the community in the present.

The results of our study suggest that our approach was successful in several ways. To begin, the humanities-focused PBL activities developed in this project met the immediate goal of achieving state content standards. Project hateful scores consistently fell between "Approaching Proficiency" and "Demonstrated Proficiency," which suggests that the teachers were able to successfully integrate their PBL activities into the classrooms. This effect is worthy of annotation. Teachers often avoid PBL activities out of concern that they crave besides much fourth dimension to run into the required standards (Tamim & Grant, 2013). This report adds to a growing body of literature that suggests the opposite—that teachers can appoint students in PBL while mastering content-specific standards (e.g., Blumenfeld et al., 2000; Boardman et al., 2021; Condliffe, 2017; Krajcik, McNeil, & Reiser, 2008).

At the same fourth dimension, our results suggest that our approach to humanities-focused PBL was non merely a content-delivery organization. The teachers' PBL activities created opportunities for going beyond the standards through 3 singled-out learning strategies: the personalization of history, historical perspective taking, and modeling a critical position. These strategies provide insight into the ways that the teachers in this study balanced the elements of PBL with the goal of implementing humanities education. With regard to the personalization of history, some teachers had students draw connections between the activities portrayed in the photos and their personal and/or family's by. Others built a personal connection by engaging students in exploring how the photos related to regional and national events in history (e.g., sharecropping; changes in economic structures). Regardless of the arroyo used, the importance of creating personal connections with history was axiomatic. It created an opportunity for our teachers to move beyond the analytic aspects of historical thinking towards the formation of one's ain identity that can occur when making personal connections with curricular materials (Barton & Levstik, 2004). Without a personal connection to the events of the past, many students fail to see their identities represented in the history classroom -- especially those marginalized by gender, race, and/or economics (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Collins, 1991).

The focus on making a personal connection with history lent itself to driving and supporting students' sustained research which, in this study, took the form of historical perspective taking. The photographs showed places familiar to the students, simply from a time when dissimilar rules and norms regulated political, economical, and social life. Multiple teachers noted how this familiarity helped the students gain perspective near the events and people depicted in photographs. By taking on the perspectives of individuals from the photographs, students began to meet themselves as if they were the people in the photos—people who took action and contributed to the creation of the present-day community. Information technology made the emotions and relationships portrayed in the images more than relatable for the students, which and so became an entry point into more circuitous conversations nearly the racial and economic challenges that the community has faced over fourth dimension. The ability to relate to and empathize with the people of the by is a goal of humanities pedagogy (Anderson, 2002; Walker, 2009), further suggesting that our goal for humanities pedagogy was realized in some way.

Personalizing history besides supported opportunities for some teachers to engage in taking a critical position, exploring how the past coincided with or contradicted the students' experiences in the present. Several teachers noted that they intentionally shared stories that pushed against the dominant narrative. For instance, one emphasized the uniqueness of a 1940s African-American landowner in society to challenge the students' overall assumption that all non-white residents were enslaved or poor. In this way, the teacher took a disquisitional position that challenged the single dominant narrative of the community. Insight into the style that the teachers engaged in taking a disquisitional position is important. Previous studies suggest direct engagement with critical problems and exposure to a diversity of perspectives can support students in developing disquisitional positions (Barton & McCully, 2012; Parkhouse, 2018). However, this remains a circuitous and difficult task for teachers requiring a deep agreement of both social justice issues and their students' histories, cultures, and previous knowledge (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Parkhouse, 2018; Cummings, 2019). Finding ways to include rather than avoid conversations effectually sensitive issues such as racial and economic inequality can improve education for students whose lives are directly impacted by those issues (Cummings, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 1995).

Implications

Ane implication from our report is that it is important when engaging in humanities educational activity to begin with activities that support learners in making personal connections with the people and events of the past. This practice, which emerged equally function of the teachers' implementation, offers insight into the design of humanities-focused PBL in disadvantaged areas such as the 1 in this study. Asking students to imagine life in the past, through the events and people depicted in the photographs, sustained inquiry that created a infinite for students to talk and think about themselves. In plow, it supported teachers in modeling ways of challenging common and often disfavorable narratives nearly the community. In this fashion, the teachers in this written report were able to realize the vision for humanities teaching equally a form of educational reform. They were able to focus less on the deficits of their community and aid students empathize with others and empower themselves by understanding how their lives in the present chronicle to the past (Levstik & Barton, 2011; Wineburg, 2001).

The current report also carries implications for the practice of instructional design. Equally designers engaging in a project that intersected with social justice problems, we recognized that nosotros needed an approach that was sensitive to the power differentials that were likely to emerge throughout our work. We ultimately took a reflexive stance, which was essential in supporting our teachers every bit co-designers equally office of our DBIR effort. It acknowledged the fact that our teachers came to us with their own means of knowing, based on their ain experiences in the community. Our own experience in this regard is consistent with other DBIR scholars who have emphasized the importance of a common, trusting relationship with participants in any educational blueprint endeavor (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Penuel et al., 2011)

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to share our experience with incorporating humanities education into the K12 curriculum. While the information supports the efficacy of our approach, our work offers insight into the intersection of learning design and contexts in which racial and economical inequities persist. In many ways, our reflexive process helped model the humanities approach we hoped to achieve; it centered on our human relationship with our participants and the community, and how that relationship developed and grew over time. It is our hope that this paper serves as an example for others as they negotiate the complexities inherent in this type of work.

Acknowledgment

This study was supported through a Humanities Access Grant (ZH-258495-eighteen) from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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