The Danger of a Single Story and How We Benefit From Many Lenses
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses
This week’s focus: Racial Literacy 101, or facts we should know about race, culture, and identity, but likely weren’t taught.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is over 1200 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month our theme is: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses.
When examining different resources that tell the human story, it’s important to interrogate the “why”? Why was this resource created? Who's holding the camera, or who created it? What’s the intended message or impact of this resource? What’s the heart of the story?
At Humanizing History™, a key value of ours is to embrace many, nuanced, humanizing lenses. We do this because we believe it fosters connection, community, and belonging — essential components for learning.
But this is not always the case when it comes to how others may package the human story — whether it’s a story of long ago, or a discussion of current events.
In a time of growing censorship, our goal is not to delete books, resources, or lenses, but to expand them — to make more, intentional space on the bookshelf, so our students and children have ample “windows and mirrors” to view their world and themselves, as we discussed in a recent newsletter.
Limited Lenses May Impact Our Worldview
Sometimes, history and stories of people across time and place are presented through a single lens, or limited points of view, that enter a “canon,” and may wind up being inherited for generations.
Whether or not we are aware of it, since we live in a racialized society — as discussed in a recent newsletter — it’s likely that race and other forms of identity have entered that canon, shaping our worldview.
To illustrate one example, we may take a look at how many of us view the continents, or how many of us were specifically taught to memorize that the world has 7 continents.
If we pause for a moment and take another look, we may notice that Europe and Asia share a landmass, called Eurasia. With this lens, the world has 6 continents. If we zoom into the Americas, we’ll notice that they are also connected, and now the world may be seen as 5 continents. If we return to the Eurasia and Africa, we may see that Africa is connected to Eurasia, and now we have Afro-Eurasia, and a world with 4 continents (as illustrated with this GIF, or moving image, of the world, which depicts the transition of continents from 7, to 6, to 5, and 4).
And while most of us will likely carry on with this lens, that the world has 7 continents, it may be a helpful exercise to recognize that we have literally been taught to see the world not for how the land is shaped or formed, but in a way that reflects geopolitical borders, and ideas associated with, or limited to, race and ethnicity.
“The Danger of a Single Story”
Limited lenses may feed into harmful stereotypes, echoing what Chimamanda Adichie called “The Danger of a Single Story,” in her widely viewed TED Talk.
In this talk, she shares many anecdotes, including the “single story” she held for immigrants because she had been “so immersed in the media coverage” of a specific racial, ethnic group that “they had become one thing in her mind, the abject immigrant.” She did not invent this idea, through repetition of limited framing, it was provided to her: “That is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
Single stories, and myopic lenses, may greatly impact how we — and our children — see each other, ourselves, the larger world, and how we relate (or do not relate) to each other.
How We See (and Do Not See) Ourselves in History Texts
To examine this idea further, we may take a look at a common topic of social studies classrooms in the United States: “The Age of Exploration.”
When discussing the “Age of Exploration,” a typical approach consists of learning about European men who travelled across large bodies of water, such as Christopher Columbus, who traversed the Atlantic Ocean, or Vasco da Gama, who reached India. These figures represent important chapters of history that arguably should be included in curricula, but if “exploration,” and ideas around who is perceived as an adventurous or capable “explorer,” is limited to a small region of the world, is that expansive enough to cover a topic like “Age of Exploration”? Does it reflect many lenses or limited lenses?
Rarely, does the “Age of Exploration”— especially in an elementary social studies curricular context or state standards — include navigation by people from other regions or “webs” of the world, such as Zheng He. As described by historian Cynthia Stokes Brown, “In the early 1400s, Zheng He led the largest ships in the world on seven voyages of exploration to the lands around the Indian Ocean, demonstrating Chinese excellence at shipbuilding and navigation”
To expand the lens further, “Exploration” rarely includes those who traversed the Pacific Ocean, “the largest and deepest of the world’s ocean basins,” such as Tupaia and Kupe, names kept through Maori oral history. For thousands of years, using innovative ship building techniques, like double-hulled canoes, with “great skill and courage,” Polynesians, as described in this BBC article, “perfected non-instrumental deep-sea navigation more than 3,000 years ago.” Over millennia, Polynesians used astronomy and other scientific understandings to “successfully migrate among and settle more than 1,000 scattered islands across the Polynesian Triangle between New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island.” This era and region of the world could be incorporated into a fascinating unit of study in nearly any elementary classroom.
How we name and frame ideas and people matter.
What happens when children are presented with the idea of “explorers,” and it’s relegated to a single story or lens, especially in regard to what we would consider race, ethnicity, culture, and other forms of identity? How does that impact how our children see themselves, how they relate to others?
Whether we are actively aware of it or not, we are already teaching with lenses of “culture” and “identity.” It’s more a matter of whether or not we unintentionally or intentionally teach through single unquestioned lenses or teach with intentionally expansive lenses.
Our Brains and the Power of Belonging
Identity matters in education. If we make an effort to expand how we tell the human story, we will likely be more apt to creating a learning environment that cultivates inclusion and belonging.
Belonging is not a superficial, “feel good” idea; belonging, or social connection, is largely a foundational requirement for mental health and academic success.
Neuroscientists have drawn powerful connections between our brains and belonging. Matthew Lieberman, for example, has noted that human beings are wired to connect: “Our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in much the same way they experience physical pain.”
When students experience social disconnection — such as from isolation, a lack of representation or not feeling like an integral, valued member of a community — it’s likely that their amygdala will have a “hijack” response, or send signals throughout our brains and nervous systems, commanding our glands to release stress hormones, which make it incredibly challenging for higher order tasks, such as those required to learn like executive functioning, to be carried out.
Single stories feed into stereotypes, potentially exacerbating social disconnection.
There are, however, ways to disrupt patterns that lead to exclusion, and what’s often labeled as implicit bias. Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt speaks to the importance of adding intentional “friction” to systems and thought patterns as one way to begin forming more inclusive practices.
To add “friction” to how we tell the human story, this month, we’ll continue to examine ways to expand our lenses — figuratively and literally — in age-appropriate, facts-based, intersectional ways.
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