Making America Great (Again and Again): Certainty, Centrality, and Paranoiac Pedagogies of Social Studies Education in the United States

Abstract

The election of President Trump, and, by extension, a national endorsement of making America great again by any means necessary, even by means that are illegal and unconstitutional, is an outcome foreseen in the classrooms of two social studies teachers visited in this chapter. I observed the pedagogical practices of two student teachers—Bryan and Scott—during the second administration of President Obama a few years before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and found that these two teachers exemplify how centrality and certainty predetermine the curriculum and instruction of their pedagogies as social studies educators in the United States. When I first reflected on their classroom teaching through the critical idiom of paranoia with which this book is concerned, it felt as if the argument I was making—that social studies education in the United States is a paranoid practice articulating a logic of exceptionalism, mastery, and conquest through specific affects and desires—could be challenged on the grounds of an increasingly liberalized national ethos showing nascent though idealized signs of breaking through hateful forces of racism, sexism, transphobia, and Islamophobia, to name just a few hang-ups in the American national psyche. Now, however, such dreams are darkened and disturbed by our collective nightmare of the present that was aided by narratives, desires, and forces of paranoia. This chapter approaches the pedagogical lives created in social studies through a pedagogy that circulates through two registers of paranoia: certainty and centrality. What I hope to offer readers is a way of considering through and out of the paranoid pedagogies in social studies education. Drawing upon extensive field notes written during my observations of the teachers' classroom instruction, I consider how certainty and centrality provide the conditions for a paranoid pedagogy in their social studies classrooms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)