Disciplinary Literacy in the Social Sciences: Moving Beyond the Familiarity of Eurocentrism

It's my intention to teach history, and I completely confess my own Eurocentrism, even as I attempt to correct my skewed view of the world. I can attribute much of my bias to time and place. I attended secondary school in the late 1970s and early 1980s in nearly all-white suburban schools. Of course we were introduced to Asian and African peoples and cultures, but almost as if there was something exotic about them. After all, they were not like us now, were they? If you were in the accelerated/AP track in high school you might take AP US History and AP European History, but everything else was lumped into a class called "History of the Non-Western World." There was an imposed "otherness" to these groups who were defined by what they were not: "non-western." However the great preponderance of study was on civilization that we were told was born between the Tigris and Euphrates and spread north and west. In a way, history was almost taught as "our story", and in late 1970s Park Ridge, the faces in class closely resembled the faces in the textbooks. This was history that we identified with and related to. Schools are finally recognizing this fatal flaw in the curriculum, and in some schools, European history isn't even taught as a separate course, but rather included within world history with no special emphasis.  

The first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting it. My home library is crammed full of books on British and French history, and biographies of dead white men, and I know that if I have any hope of broadening a student's horizon, I need to broaden my own, so two of the first courses I enrolled in at UIC covered aspects of African and Asian history. Most children and even adults have played the game "Person, Place or Thing", or some variation. I played "Person, Place or Thing" all the time in HIST 271 - Late Imperial Chinese History. "Hangzhou", "Qianlong", "Dianshizhai" - One of these is a very important emperor in the Qing dynasty, one is a port city in the Yangtze river delta, and the third was a Chinese language magazine. I struggled with words which were entirely unfamiliar and from my perspective lacked the cues that might have provided clues. If a student is reading about the Thirty Years' War, he or she will encounter "Gustavus Adolphus", "Breitenfield", and "Johann Tserclaes". Assuming that the student is a native English speaker, although he or she has never seen the word "Brietenfield", it's likely that they will recognize that it is a place.  It has the word "field" in it, and it sounds like it might be another suburb like "Brookfield". The student might also make the connection that Gustavus and Johann were people.  Some might know that "Johann" is the German version of "John", a fairly common name, or make a connection between "Adolphus" and "Adolf", which is not common, but notorious. Many other names in the Eurocentric world are going to be very familiar. The student will need to learn about Louis XIV, but has no need to learn that "Louis" is a name of a person, nor will it be a struggle to spell.  However, "Qianlong" (mid to late 18th century emperor), which is not pronounced the way it's spelled, will take practice or even rote memorization, and it won't help that some primary and secondary sources might spell it "Chien-lung." Perhaps a student who is a native speaker of Chinese might find those cues which distinguish person, place, and thing, but for most others it will be a mystery. Likewise, a student whose primary language is not English or some other European tongue might not make the same connections that I might take for granted. The question then is how should a teacher assist students who represent an ever-wider palette of languages and cultural traditions with words from east of the Urals or south of the Sahara?

In our assigned readings, I looked in vain for answers to this question. Reading in the Disciplines mentions that students reading Lincoln's "A House Divided" speech need to ask questions such as "what words and phrases used by Lincoln would have had a different meaning/connotation in 1858", which is true, but no mention of words in other languages. The Goldman article likewise doesn't specifically address foreign vocabularies. I had hoped for some luck on the internet and was shocked that I couldn't find anything helpful. I would have hoped that there would be some method more imaginative and effective than rote memorization. If we are teaching the history of an area or people where  the vast majority of students will encounter words which will be abstract, with no connection to prior knowledge, would it be more efficacious to focus first on the language and vocabulary before we even dive into the history? I would welcome any suggestions, as I have thus far found nothing too helpful thus far.