Local Teachers Deepen Their Understanding of the Mexican Revolution through Summer Course

In July 2016, the California State Board of Education adopted new social science guidelines that stressed the importance of incorporating diverse historical perspectives of different ethnic groups, including Hispanics and Native Americans, into K-12 education. To help teachers incorporate these topics into their curricula, Stanford Global Studies programs teamed up with the Graduate School of Education’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching to offer a new professional development course as part of the annual Summer Teaching Festival.

The course brought 10 middle- and high-school teachers together with historians from the Bay Area and El Colegio de México—one of Mexico’s leading universities—to share information and resources on the Mexican Revolution and nation building.

Through a series of lectures and group discussions, participants developed their content knowledge and explored different sources to build curricula that teach students to think critically about historical events.

“As a history teacher, teaching over thousands of years around the world, we only had one very small section of one very small chapter in our curriculum about the Mexican Revolution,” said William Crab, who teaches world history and ancient history at Sacramento Country Day School. “This course really gives me the opportunity to delve deeper, have a better understanding, and use different perspectives rather than that single perspective of a text book.”

As part of the course, the teachers delved into primary source materials in a visit to the Green Library collection. “I think for young people, anytime you can show them something, whether it be a picture, a poster, or a postcard, that they remember the image even more so than what you say,” said Charlotte Hinrichs who teaches U.S. History and Geography at John Muir Middle School in Los Angeles. “I loved being able to see these things and finding out where we can access them for free online.”

For the teachers like Crab, it was also a chance to collaborate with other professionals in the field, and come up with different ways to effectively deliver this information to students: “This gives us an opportunity to actually utilize it in the classroom.”

This course was supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI grant and Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies. For more information about professional development opportunities for educators, visit the SGS community engagement page.