Texts introducing students to women's and gender history typically emphasize how gender refers to the social meanings attached to sexual difference, which vary over time and across societies and cultures. As one of these texts explains, “Definitions of what is masculine and feminine are learned as each society instructs its members from infancy through adulthood as to what behavior and personality attributes are appropriate for males and females of that generation.” Given wide agreement that gender is learned, it is surprising how seldom the places and people who institutionalize learning appear in the texts used to teach U.S. women's and gender history. Teachers are remarkably scarce in the literature, even though vast numbers of U.S. women have taught since the mid-nineteenth century. The reasons for this absence are not clear. Perhaps teachers' social location, at the murky boundaries of the working and middle classes, has contributed to their omission from sharply defined studies of class and gender consciousness. Or perhaps the conventional association of women and teaching has deterred gender historians, following the theory that studying the margins of women's experiences better reveals the mainstream. Yet, the perceived ordinariness of the woman teacher may be especially helpful to illuminate periods of significant change in the meaning of gender.

My History of Southern African American Education, 1865–Present class, a mid-level survey course, examines the history of education for African Americans in the South from Reconstruction to the twenty-first century. It draws a variety of undergraduate students, as it is cross-listed with the College of Education, Department of History, African American Studies Program, and the Institute of Southern Studies. We examine issues of power and privilege, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status interact with educational opportunities and achievement. A major objective is to help students understand the ways in which public education in the United States was shaped by competing economic, political, and ideological interests; this focus includes learning the ways in which schools reinforced and reshaped the larger society. Another objective is to use local, state, and regional educational issues to provide a background for understanding the history of education as well as patterns, trends, and changes in the larger historical narrative.

The city of Charleston, South Carolina, illustrates how educators can use people- and place-based case studies as pedagogical tools to reconstruct a Southern public and historic landscape. Teaching the Foundations of Education course in the city of Charleston makes the history that frames contemporary educational issues such as (re)segregation more visible. In the wake of the recent tragedy at the historic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston that claimed nine lives at the hands of Dylann Roof, place and local history help make a silent history more pronounced. A history of resistance and an ongoing struggle for freedom is inscribed into Charleston's landscape as much as the colonial and antebellum grandeur that captures the imagination, and dollars, of a thriving tourism industry. The public and historic landscape, in short, is in and of itself an educative space that allows educators and students to disrupt popular narratives by making the invisible more visible.

In the summer of 2008, we met at an alehouse in Columbia City, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on Seattle's south side, to begin conceptualizing and designing a School & Society class we were teaching that fall in a Master of Teaching (MIT) elementary teacher education program at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. One of us (Isaac) was working on a dissertation and was the instructor of record, while the other (Michael) was transitioning from master's to doctoral student, and was the teaching assistant. This was the first preservice teacher education social foundations course either of us had taught. The experience of working together on that course has led to several years of collaborative thinking about social foundations in teacher education, including developing what we call a “place-conscious approach”—an approach that grounds the political and normative questions at the heart of social foundations in the history of places in which preservice teachers learn to teach.