Laura Aitken-Burt asks our historian supporter Kelsie Brook Eckert about how the Remedial Herstory Project began, the barriers to curriculum development that need to be broken and how the ESIS report aligned with her work.
What is the story behind how you founded the Remedial Herstory Project?
The Remedial Herstory Project (RHP) started well over a decade ago as I began writing my first book.
I was a certified high school social studies teacher who wanted to teach about women in history, but I didn’t learn about women in my undergraduate or even graduate education. That realisation in adulthood of stumbling upon women I never learned about in school, led me to ask the more obvious question, “why?”
Essentially, the structural barriers that exist to getting women into the social studies curriculum became my first book: Teaching Women’s History: Breaking Barriers and Undoing Male Centrism in K-12 Social Studies.
“women are half of humanity; they should be half the content in the history curriculum”
Midway through the research and writing of the book I had found a few key answers to my questions: first, that if teachers didn’t learn women’s history when at school, how could they possibly teach it to students?
Then second, even as late as 2020, if you looked for resources to teach your curriculum and include women, few resources existed online. And those that did exist were hidden behind a pay wall. This to me was unacceptable in the 21st century.
In 2020, parallel to working on my book, my friends from many professional backgrounds joined me in launching a non-profit with a simple mission: make high quality free resources to getting women’s history into curriculum.
Unlike state and national initiatives, ours is not bound to regional topics. We started with no funding and even as funding ebbs and flows, our efforts continue due to the passion and commitment to telling the whole story to the next generation. The sexist curriculum ends with us.
How does the Remedial Herstory Project engage with educators and decision makers?
First, we are all educators and decision makers.
I came from the high school classroom, now I train high school teachers and I am one of the leaders for social studies education in my state. Our board is made up of non-profit leaders, but also educational leaders, tenured professors, and classroom teachers.
Our website is the main platform that we interface with educators, but we’re also pretty active on social media. (@remedialherstory) There we get a lot of feedback and direct commentary with the community that we serve. We also offer professional development opportunities to educators, including online asynchronous courses, and in person collaborative workshops.
We also travel to national and state conferences. Our ambassador program has members all around the country in the United Kingdom. We hand out free resources, interface with teachers, and learn more about their experiences. These in-person events are where the magic happens, when we get to talk with teachers who are excited and desperate for resources.
What did you explain in your TEDx talk ‘It has to be half’?
In the TEDx talk, we demonstrate how women’s history is absent, necessary and possible to integrate today thanks to the work of hundreds of thousands of scholars over the last several decades.
What do you want to develop next with the Remedial Herstory Project?
We continue to add enquiry based lesson plans embedded with primary source material to our website. We will soon be launching a European Textbook and our goal is to provide video resources so that educators can play short clips in their classroom.
What do you think are the most difficult barriers for curriculum change?
First, I think that a teacher’s own definition of what is deserving of historical study is often the biggest barrier. If teachers understood that women are half of humanity and deserve to be half the history in their curriculum, nothing would stop us.
Second, structural barriers, like curriculum, standards, administrators and community backlash continue to make it difficult for educators to teach about race, class, and gender issues in the classroom. Teachers might hate me for putting them in that order(!) but I do think that structure is second.
In 2021, my state passed a so-called “divisive concepts” bill. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) called me to ask if I would be a test case. Basically, keep teaching how you teach and let’s see if we can get you fired so we can sue the state. My answer was yes.
Educators have a moral responsibility to tell the whole story. It would take some real cognitive dissonance to suggest that race and class don’t influence it and that women aren’t in half of that history.
How does your book explain how to break these barriers?
There are many chapters and each one presents a barrier and offers a “breaker”. At first, I follow Tetreault’s Phase Theory – start by inserting token women into your curriculum, then start to look broadly at the female experience.
This encourages the educator to look at women’s lives beyond the elite or token women. It also gets them to look at material culture and themes that rarely make history: domestic life, unpaid labour, childrearing and women’s health. Finally, move toward critical analysis.
Chapter 3 of my book is available open access. There I introduce something we also shared in our TEDx Talk: the Eckert test. Stealing from the Bechdel test for films, we suggest that every lesson should have at least two women who come from different backgrounds and disagree on the topic at hand.
And then perhaps most importantly, I am a proponent of the enquiry model for instruction as a playbook for telling a more multi perspective history. In the enquiry model, students grapple with a compelling question and are provided with, or taught to find, sources from varying perspectives that help answer that question. Then they use analytical skills to evaluate the sources and come to an answer on the question.
Did the ESIS History report tell you anything about the UK curriculum context which surprised you compared to the US one?
I used a lot of UK based studies when writing my book so I’m pretty familiar with the UK system. I really like the report’s emphasis on the challenge of queens as really exceptional women. Including them alone isn’t really teaching about the full experiences of women – we need to encourage teachers to transition to Tetreault’s Phase Two.
I was appalled but not surprised that the report found that the exam boards, a key source of structural bias, in most cases included no women at all. The report said, “out of the 206 optional modules studied across the three exam boards, 67% of all A-level and GCSE specifications currently studied have not even one named woman to study.” Ahhh the anonymous woman, silently existing, but without a story, name or lived experience. We need not look further than the stories we tell generations of children to understand the challenges facing women and men today.
What inspired you to support the ESIS campaign?
The passion and dedication of the team first and foremost. My tag line is, “women are half of humanity; they should be half the content in the history curriculum”. The ESIS study concluded, “for most pupils in England, half of the story of our history remains untold.” There couldn’t be a stronger alignment of our goals.
