| The purpose of this study was to examine the contexts involved in the process of teaching and learning history among adolescent Mexican Americans, and the constructs that the participants attach to those contextual realities. The participants in this study were history teachers, Mexican-American students at the seventh and eighth grade level, and the families of those students. The setting of the study was a middle school in a midwest town.;In order to elicit and analyze the meanings that participants attached to the contexts involved in the process of teaching and learning history among Mexican-American students, I approached this study with a qualitative approach. Within this approach, I regarded the case study design as the best suited for the research. Therefore, this study was a comparative analysis of two case studies: the American history classroom and the Early World history classroom.;This study shows that multiple contexts influenced the process of teaching and learning history between and among two white teachers and adolescent Mexican Americans at Atkinson Middle School. Those overlapping contexts (the context of the education of minority language students, the context of history education, the context of social studies education, and the school's monoculture) created a unique totality responsible for shaping the experience of learning history by Mexican-American students. Each of the contextual realities that existed in history classrooms (e.g., not calling on Mexican-American students, lack of voluntary participation by those students, little use of team work, teacher-centered approaches, lack of awareness of cultural values of Mexican-American students, disregard for the students' native language, a curriculum that was meaningless for the Mexican-American students, teachers' reputation, teachers' lack of enthusiasm for the subject, teacher styles, unchallenging assignments, and the exclusion of Mexican history and the contributions of Mexicans to American history) represented aspects of the overlapping contexts that worked in unison to shape the generally negative experience that Mexican-American students had in the history courses taught at Atkinson Middle School. These experiences were detrimental for the appreciation by Mexican-American students of history's potential meaning(s) and significance. |
