Riverdale History Teachers Create a Unique Curriculum
Our course curriculums play a large role in how we perceive the subjects we study. What they include, and leave out, is paramount to what we know and how we understand the material presented. At Riverdale, each academic department has near autonomy to design their respective curricula. As Dr. Laura Honsberger, Chair of the History Department, explained, “The school traditionally hires experts in the field so that we are able–and have the privilege and honor–to put together a curriculum.” Neither the Board of Trustees nor the administration plays a role in smaller changes. When there is a major shift proposed, however, a curriculum committee provides feedback as to how such a shift would impact student schedules, college requirements, and how the changes are perceived through the lens of The Department of Equity Inclusion and Belonging as well as the Learning Resource Team.
Dr. Laura Honsberger said that the history department has a set of core historical skills that they believe students should know and are “very mindful and aware of what is happening at other independent schools, mindful of what New York regent standards are, and those things certainly go into how we think about a curriculum.” Beyond that, she and history teachers Dr. Marc Antone and Mr. Omar Qureshi described a “democratic process” among teachers who bring different expertise, perspectives, and approaches to the task at hand. The teachers engage in friendly and constructive disagreements and passionate debates to create a curriculum inclusive of diverse content and materials that are multi-faceted, enabling teachers to teach based on scholarly conclusions. The goal is to create a learning environment for students to engage in respectful discourse and foster student growth and critical thinking, not to indoctrinate. As Mr. Qureshi said, “We have to make sure that we are teaching history from a scholarly perspective, not from our politics.”
Year to year, small revisions to the curriculum are made based on student feedback, teacher reflection, changes in the world, new evidence, and new perspectives on old evidence. According to Mr. Qureshi, “In the last thirty years there has been a move to diversify the curriculum by including a range of voices.” Dr. Honsberger echoed that observation adding that one of the major shifts across the 8th, 9th, and 10th grade curriculums is “a real effort within the department to diversify the sources that we are looking at to broaden and expand the voices that are represented and presented.” As Dr. Antone explained, “Teaching a more complex view of society doesn’t mean two sides, it means multiple sides.” Broader changes to the curriculum require more deliberation and therefore take longer to introduce. For example, last year the 10th-grade curriculum changed with the goal of getting further into the 20th Century. The department felt strongly that students need a more thorough understanding of core concepts and historical shifts that occurred post-1945 that are going to shape the world that we graduate into and experience as adults.
Dr. Honsberger, Dr. Antone, and Mr. Qureshi agreed that with the right curriculum, history is an invaluable way to teach critical skills like reading comprehension, identifying arguments, building arguments, using evidence responsibly and effectively, thinking about large trends, and seeing connections. For Dr. Antone, history is also important as a “developable tool for how to explain problems in society” and to describe, explain, and analyze systems and cultures. For Mr. Qureshi, it is important to know and understand what formed us, where we came from, and the results of human actions–not so that history does not repeat itself, but so that we are aware. He also cautioned not to become a prisoner of history in a way that hinders how we think about our future. Dr. Honsberger said that “history is a place where you have the opportunity to understand perspectives that are different from your own, even if those challenge you in some ways, and help you to see the world in a different way.” She also said that that the key to understanding history is to recognize that “the world we live in is created through a series of choices from millions of people over all these years and that those choices matter and that those choices create the world we live in,” and a “good history education can help students understand their own agency within broader systems and trends and historical moments.”
As exemplified by the history department, the curriculums at Riverdale are clearly well thought out, designed, and refined by the extraordinary teachers who use them.