Learning our histories: History and identity at a Jewish community high school

When students at the Naftali Herz Imber Jewish Academy (pseudonym) enter their history classrooms, they are not just studying times long gone. They are also learning stories about who they are and who they're supposed to be. As a private Jewish high school in the United States, the Naftali Herz Imber Jewish Academy has an explicit agenda to foster both intellect and identity. Its classrooms are, by design, places to learn academic subjects as well as explore what it means to be a Jew in the United States today. Its teachers are hired to cultivate critical thinking as well as affiliation with an American-Jewish collective. Its history courses are intended to teach the discipline of history as well as a sense of pride in a shared past.;How do students and teachers in such a school study history? How do they balance their commitments to critical historical analysis and to cherished narratives of a collective past? How do they make sense of Western notions of history as a quest for truth and Jewish beliefs about the historicity of sacred texts? In sum, in a school that teaches both academics and affiliation, what are the meanings and purposes of the study of history? These are the central question of this dissertation.;The research project is a single-site case study examining history education at a Jewish community high school. In particular, it focuses on the teaching of U.S. and Israeli history at the school. Both national histories were taught as "our" history (Levstik, 2000), a past to which students and teachers are supposed to feel personally connected. Yet the classes were also very different, and so they provided two opportunities in a single school for understanding how students and teachers made sense of their history studies. The research combined ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and a "think aloud" study in which students and teachers voiced their thoughts as they read historical documents about U.S. and Israeli history.;In the dissertation, I discuss the complex relationship between identity and historical thinking in the two high school history classrooms in this study. I show that a U.S. history class that explicitly focused on the academic goals of history education did not always teach students the deep historical thinking that would prepare them to understand the academic discipline. In fact, the class often taught a mythic narrative about U.S. history. By contrast, an Israeli history class that had a clear agenda to cultivate identity was often able to help students understand that history involves analysis and interpretation. Yet by encouraging students to examine and question history, the class in some ways weakened the very collective bonds that it hoped to foster.