Rationale
Gentle Reader,
Many of my students were born in a different country but spent years or months living as refugees in neighboring countries "on the camp" prior to entering the United States. In their young lives they have known what it is to be the "other". During those years when civil war in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea disrupted my students' entire lives, it precluded any chance of a classroom setting for them. So they came to my class, wanting so much to get what they had heard about in Africa. America! Just the mention of that name is enough to send shivers of delight down one's spine. My husband told me that when people in Africa say they are going to Europe, nobody really gives a nod, but if you say America, wow, it's like going to heaven, except you're not dead.
America is not just a place - it's something much, much more than that. It started out as a place and then became a grand idea, a place where you could reinvent yourself. A place where you could live, and have your family, and be greater than what you could have ever hoped to be back home: a new kind of country where men would govern themselves as opposed to a monarchy. It didn't happen overnight or in a week but through being tested. And that testing came in the form of a war. That was the last time we would ever transition power violently. My immigrant students know it in their very souls because they are able to compare "here with there". It is my native born students who don't understand these things, because here, we transfer power peacefully. I believe everybody has a story, every family, a history and it's deeply layered, like an onion skin. With every layer you peel back, a new story comes to light. It's through stories that I want my students to see who and what the "other" is. I want them to understand that they too, depending on the time, have been the "other". But I need to do this in a way that grabs them and won't let go. However, I do not wish to use the experiences of the students in my own class because I don't want to inflame tensions, which may be bubbling just beneath the surface. Therefore, I need to have them study "others" outside of themselves so that they can make connections to the experiences in their own neighborhood and the larger human family.
Often we forget about the many and varied roles others have played in shaping this country which we call America or the United States. That being said, I want to examine some of these roles by looking through a "social justice" lens while studying American Indians under the United States government and Andrew Jackson. In so doing I endeavor to cause my students to look at what it means to be the "other" in spaces that are occupied by larger, more powerful groups and how some of those notions still linger in the American consciousness. Ideas are powerful, some so powerful that sometimes governments are afraid of them (1). Ideas about superiority/inferiority, class and gender played some very important roles in the settling of this country. Many of these ideas translated into iconic images, film, literature, textbooks and even common everyday language.
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