{"id":129,"date":"2012-06-18T14:51:21","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T18:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/?p=129"},"modified":"2012-07-01T21:18:50","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T01:18:50","slug":"olich_part_i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/2012\/06\/18\/olich_part_i\/","title":{"rendered":"Jacqueline Olich: Why Teach Childhood? Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"http:\/\/library.duke.edu\/digitalcollections\/esr_esrph01010\/\"<\/a>

"Street Scene" (1930) Frank Whitson Fetter Papers, Duke University<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/em>Everyone has a childhood.\u00a0 Therefore, the history of childhood is accessible to students of history and intrinsically compelling.\u00a0 It creates spaces for students to question implicit assumptions about both history and childhood.\u00a0More history courses, I argue, should include a reading or project relating its contents to the burgeoning field of childhood studies. While the history of childhood is a young field (pun intended), it is a dynamic and growing one.\u00a0 Inspired by discussions with Karl Qualls, Julie deGraffenried and other participants in the recent Russian Children\u2019s History Workshop about the field of childhood studies, here I will share what I have done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Part I) and suggest some ideas and resources (Part II).<\/p>\n

Part I: Case Study: RUES 699 Kids, Communists and Capitalists: Twentieth-century Childhood in Comparative Perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n

It would be hard to imagine a subject more difficult to teach\u2014or more rewarding\u2014than the history of childhood.\u00a0 Truly interdisciplinary, the history of childhood must necessarily draw upon anthropology, art history, biology, demography, developmental psychology, law, literature, philosophy, and sociology, among other disciplines.\u00a0 Unlike courses that can be organized in a purely chronological fashion, the history of childhood\u2019s multidisciplinary character means that courses must combine chronology with topical approaches–including such topics children\u2019s culture, diversity and inequality, children and war, friendship and peer relationships, and biological realities and cultural variation– and ongoing debates, such as how much childhood has changed over time and how extensively children\u2019s developmental stages have varied.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014<\/em>Steven Mintz, \u201cTeaching the History of Childhood<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

I not only accept Steven Mintz<\/a>\u2019s challenge, but add an additional layer: I teach the comparative <\/em>history of childhood.\u00a0 \u201cOver the course of the twentieth century,\u201d I write, \u201cRussian children\u2014like their American counterparts\u2014grappled with far-reaching changes, with each decade or era characterized by diverse childhood experiences.\u00a0Russia\u2019s children played, attended school, ate sweets, acted in plays, and learned to ballroom dance. But, for many of them, the twentieth century was an extraordinarily brutal one. Like adults, children faced family disruption, starvation, arrest, disease, and death.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0By offering a unique side-by-side consideration of Soviet and American childhood and children\u2019s culture over the \u201clong twentieth century,\u201d my course examines how adults sought to control children\u2019s lives (this theme resonates with students) as well as how children experienced historic and quotidian moments.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0Ultimately, I seek to make the familiar (for most of my students, childhood in America) strange and the strange (the history of Russian childhood) familiar. \u00a0Students enrolled in my seminar engage in a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue about children and youth.\u00a0 Together, we study children in the context of historic upheavals–the Great Depression, the Gulag, and the Great Patriotic War or World War II.\u00a0 We explore coming of age on the two sides of the Cold War; the centrality of school in children\u2019s lives; the growth of consumerism and material culture in the second half of the twentieth century; state and market efforts to shape children\u2019s leisure activities; and inequality and the diversity of minority experiences.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the \u201cbig questions\u201d that we consider: What was it like to grow up in the Soviet Union?\u00a0 Was it intrinsically different from growing up in the United States?\u00a0 In what ways do geography, class, gender and historical era shape childhood?\u00a0 Who gets to define childhood? \u00a0What counts as a \u201cgood\u201d or normal childhood?\u00a0 How did the understanding and experience of childhood shift from decade to decade?<\/p>\n

So who takes this course?\u00a0 Given its institutional home in the Curriculum in Russian and East European Studies and my affiliation with the Department of History, once would expect graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with the Curriculum in Russian and East European Studies, Department of History, and Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures to enroll and they do.\u00a0 In addition, students from the following campus units also took the course: Curriculum in Global Studies; Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense; the Department of Public Policy; Gillings School of Global Public Health; and the School of Education, including the School Administration program.\u00a0 One student, a native of Russia who emigrated at an early age, expressed a desire to \u201cbetter understand her parents and grandparents.\u201d\u00a0 The diverse backgrounds of the students not only makes for lively class discussions; it also attests to the broad interest in and appeal for interdisciplinary studies of childhood and the history of childhood.<\/p>\n

My course strives to prepare global citizens who are adept at thinking in a comparative framework.\u00a0 Importantly, students cultivate an understanding of young people\u2019s complicated roles and relationships in the development of modern societies and cultures as they gain familiarity with some of the scholarly research and writing on children and childhood.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Jacqueline Olich, \u201cThe Russianists Love Their Children, Too,\u201d The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth<\/a> \u2028Volume 1, Number 3, Fall 2008<\/a> \u2028pp. 445.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone has a childhood.\u00a0 Therefore, the history of childhood is accessible to students of history and intrinsically compelling.\u00a0 It creates spaces for students to question implicit assumptions about both history and childhood.\u00a0More history courses, I argue, should include a reading or project relating its contents to the burgeoning field of childhood studies. While the history […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46215,1181,46216,22261,22264],"tags":[88927,46217],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-children","category-comparative-history","category-featured","category-soviet-history","tag-children","tag-jacqueline-olich","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/teachinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}