Editor’s note: This is the latest entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Kate Shuster (@kateshuster on Twitter) is an education researcher, author, and project manager in Montgomery, Alabama. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I’m an independent education consultant. This means I am self-employed. I have basically spent my whole life trying not to have a “real job,” but I’ve only been fully on my own for the last 8 years. I’m the president of Shuster Consulting, Inc. I’ve been lucky to have spent the last ten years consulting for Teaching Tolerance, which is the education division of the Southern Poverty Law Center. I started off doing various projects for them and now they buy me out at close to full-time for project management. I work on projects where there’s no existing internal capacity yet, or projects (like podcasts) where there’s a need for proof of concept. Recently I’ve started a new initiative, The Hard History Project, designed to be an adjunct to this work. It’s meant to help museums and archives do a better job of working with educators.
Tell our readers what a typical day of work is like for you. For starters, is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
There are no typical days in the world I’ve fashioned for myself. Sometimes I’m on deadline with a massive project, like the revised Framework for Teaching Hard History, when I put in 7 days a week at 12+ hours a day.1 Although I try to contain working hours, sometimes when I’m in the idea phase I email colleagues at totally inappropriate hours, like when Jarah Botello and I were working on the first stage of the Freedom on the Move project (a searchable database of fugitives from North American slavery). But I’m working on corralling meeting times, especially as I work on more projects with more clients—I’m finding that specialized teams of experts are better for delegating the work.
That said, I feel so lucky that I can take a lot of time for reading and research. I never dreamed that someday there might be an economic upside to having my nose stuck in a book, but it’s worked out okay. I have learned that historians are real people who want to get their work into as many hands as possible. Andrés Reséndes’ book The Other Slavery absolutely changed everything I thought about the history of what is currently known as the United States. So I wrote to him. And he wrote back. And now tens of thousands of teachers are trying to teach the more inclusive history he’s documented.
Most days I’m consumed by email, as I aspire to zero inbox. Also I talk to a lot of current and future collaborators—I’m always trying to think about what my work will look like a year from now, and how it will pay for the mortgage & cat food. I used Zoom for these meetings before everyone else did, but that doesn’t mean that I like it. I have a time when I stop work. Usually this is by 6, and I rarely check my email after that time—or even look at my phone.
Everyone deserves to be loved by someone who sees them in this light.
Where did you go to college and graduate school? Was history your main area of study?
I went to Emory University. It was a long way away from my home in New Mexico, but they gave me a full ride for debate. This was like winning the nerd lottery. And maybe I should have known that I’d take a philosophy degree, which my engineer father helpfully said might qualify me to flip hamburgers.2
My advisor, Donald Phillip Verene, was a famously crusty expert on Giambattista Vico, which meant he had pretty rigid opinions about history—key among them: history is cyclic, and somehow involves Titans. His other interests included James Joyce and I Ching. By this time, I’d graduated to deeper rabbit holes—reading On Grammatology and feuding with the department chair about whether I was “mature enough” to read Nietzsche.
My Ph.D. is in Educational Studies from Claremont Graduate University. It took me about 15 years to figure out what I wanted to be a doctor of. When I started that program, I thought I’d do philosophy of education, but I ended up getting really interested in measurement and evaluation. I even took a bunch of statistics courses and wrote my dissertation using a secure data set from the feds.3
Have you always been interested in history? If so, what’s your earliest memory about a historical topic or event?
I’ve always been interested in history. My earliest historical obsession was Egyptology—my grandparents had some sort of Time-Life type copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I essentially memorized. This led to some upsetting dinner conversations where I’d entertain my parents’ friends with the grisly details of the mummification process. This interest has been renewed since I discovered Sarah Parcak.
Your background is not in history, but education studies, however your work on history and history education has been published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. What have you written for SPLC? Please tell us about it and where can we find it?
My work with the SPLC really got serious in 2010, when Maureen Costello (the former director of Teaching Tolerance) asked me what seemed at the time like a pretty simple question: “What are students learning about the civil rights movement?” I approached this like a measurement problem, and ended up reading thousands of pages of state content standards for social studies for what became the first Teaching the Movement report. We graded states based on their requirements for teaching about the civil rights movement. Most got a failing grade. And many states reached out to see how they could do better.
In 2014, the SPLC asked me to write a sequel. The methodology that year was slightly different. Without getting into too much detail, this was because a number of states had complained, reasonably, that their hands were tied by their legislature with respect to “required” vs. “suggested” content. But in the end, the news wasn’t that much better.
In 2016, we talked about whether the SPLC would issue another Teaching the Movement report, but decided to go in a different direction because a) state content standards were changing toward “skill based” standards in social studies; and b) it was pretty clear that a big part of the reason people were bad at talking about the civil rights movement was because they didn’t know how to talk about the nation’s larger history of racism. So we decided to start working on education about enslavement.
In 2017, the SPLC published a report that I authored called Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Again, this started with what seems like a simple question: “What are students learning about slavery?” But there aren’t a lot of simple questions in education—which is part of the reason the field interests me so much. This time around, I looked at textbooks, surveyed teachers and students, and examined a few sets of state standards. One of the most shocking findings was that only 8 percent of high school seniors correctly identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
At the same time the report came out, Teaching Tolerance published a suite of resources that I’d spent the last year stitching together. I got very inspired by the book Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, edited by Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, and worked with them to create for SPLC a first-of-its-kind instructional framework for teaching about slavery in secondary classrooms. And a fleet of graduate students helped to assemble a library of more than 100 original historical documents, complete with text dependent questions, that live in the free Teaching Tolerance online text library.
Return the Elgin Marbles. And also these amazing creatures.
In graduate school, what was your largest research project? Was it your dissertation?
My dissertation was at the time by far my largest project. It was about high school exit exams, and I got the idea from listening to an NPR interview with the then-Superintendent of the California schools.4 He said something to the effect of: “And this is how we’ll know the degrees have value,” and suddenly I had a lot of questions. Like: “Value to who?” and “How do you measure that?” So I did a literature review in an education policy class, which became my first chapter.5 At the time I was writing, there was a kind of natural experiment happening with exit exams—only some states mandated them, and there were a couple types of exams across the nation. To really drill down into the “does it work” question, I needed a national data set, so I went through the process to get access to secure federal data. This involved a lot of hoops, including getting a safe in my advisor’s office, and getting the university to set up a computer in a locked room with no Internet access.
But once I got the data, I ran the numbers and it was pretty straightforward. I did freak out my committee by moving across the country right after taking my comps (they were not especially impressed by my claims of true love, but it’s worked out really well for me), and I’ll confess that I didn’t dive right in to writing, but once I got my first invoice for “zero hour” tuition registration (seriously, folks, don’t pay that if you don’t have to), I told my husband that he had to make dinner for the next two weeks, and I sat down and just wrote the thing.
I did a lot of fancy statistical work in the dissertation—including something called path analysis—but the article I published out of that stripped down to the basic finding, which was essentially “no effect.” And that’s pretty much par for the course in social science!
I am obsessed with Worlds’ Fairs. Here I am with the Atominium in Brussels.
For those of us not familiar with it, can you explain what quantitative methodology is and how it factored into your research?
I have long believed that “evidence” is not the plural of “anecdote.” That said, I’m not a positivist.6 My interest in numbers is essentially strategic—I think they are a good way to make a certain kind of argument that can persuade a certain type of audience. So my interest in quantitative methodology is really an offshoot of my broader interest in argumentation—and my training in debate.7
I think most people feel like math is scary and weird, and I can totally relate to that. It helped me a little to learn that most modern statistical methods were developed by people who wanted to win money by gambling. Look, I feel like all of us are always already measuring things in the sense that we’re engaged in comparative analysis. Assigning numbers through measurement techniques is a tool that’s useful sometimes, and I like being able to speak that language. It’s a little bit of a superpower in the right crowd.
What do you think is the toughest part of tackling a research project?
For me, the hardest part is the “why.” I always want to know how my work is going to make the world better—especially for folks who have a hard go of it now. At the same time, I want to be here for people who nerd out in the obscure corners of archives. It takes all kinds, and I feel called to help those folks translate their work for practical ends.
Right now, I’m thinking a lot about how teachers aren’t counted among the ranks of public historians. Which is weird, right? They are the most visible and active of our interpreters, whether it’s on field trips or representing historians’ work to a wider audience. But history education is strangely separate from “history” per se (as if there was such a thing). I think this has to do with the way that education is often seen as a “lesser” discipline.
In the past, how have you developed your research projects?
I’d describe my process as a kind of punctuated equilibrium. For example, after two years of thinking about teaching slavery, I got absolutely consumed by the need to teach and learn about Indigenous slavery. I read The Other Slavery right after the first Hard History framework was published, and it kind of blew my mind. Seriously. I could probably count on one hand the number of books I’ve read that have had that kind of effect on me. I ended up reading a lot more (which I store under my desk right now, having no good place to shelve them).
Running out of storage space.
I think a lot about research design, and I try as much as possible to build my projects backwards—what will the abstract look like, or the book review? What do I want clients to say? Then I try to assemble a list of deliverables—concrete things that will make the end result possible. Whenever I work with a client on a research project, I try to be very clear about the milestones and their timeline. That also helps me to figure out pricing. I try to be honest with clients and co-workers when it comes to money. It’s very important to me that people get paid what they’re worth for the work that they do.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received about conducting research?
At some point, you have to stop looking and start writing. To me, this is one of the hardest calls to make—I’d luxuriate in Borges’s library forever if I could, but I want to change the world. Also clients want results and I have to buy dog food & pay the mortgage.
Visiting one of Alabama’s weirdest historical sites, the Ava Maria Grotto.
You have written or co-authored a number of books. Is there a particular work of yours we should read and read first? Tell us about it.
Among my books, I am most fond of Art, Argument, and Advocacy, which I wrote with my dear friend John Meany. It’s a debate textbook, decidedly not for everyone, but it did earn me one of my fondest accolades—a primary reference in the Wikipedia entry for the Simpsons phrase “Think of the children.”
Really, though, the things I’m proudest of right now comprise the revised Hard History frameworks for K-12, which folks can find here. I am so honored to have led a revision process for those frameworks with a diverse and dedicated team to tell a much more inclusive history of slavery’s scope, duration, and impact. This included bringing in new scholarship on Indigenous enslavement and teaching difficult issues in elementary grades.
Also, this process meant learning about and finding ways to operationalize the teaching of the many interlinkages between settler colonialism and anti-blackness. These social forces have deep roots in enslavement, but extend like rhizomes through the history of what is currently the United States. And, as anyone knows who’s ever tried to control a bamboo plant, they are super hard to contain—much less kill.
When you are working on a new piece of writing, whom do you reach out to for feedback?
My husband is my first sounding board. We’ve known each other for 25 years or so, and written many things to/with each other, so he knows when I sound stilted or off. Also he’s trained as a journalist, so he’s meticulous and helps me when I need a citation or a source to make sense of a broader claim. He’s also really good at encouraging me to speak in my own voice. I often find that academic training—where we think we need a cite for every single thing—is a huge disadvantage when it comes to learning to write stuff that people are actually going to read and use. And it’s okay just to be the expert, which is often especially hard for people who aren’t straight cis white men, on account of the various & complex & pernicious architectures of oppression.
Beyond his first read, I ask colleagues across disciplines who function both as collaborators and as reviewers. I’m a fan of the traditional peer-review process, of course, but I’m interested in getting my work in the hands of as many people as possible as quickly as possible with the best guarantee of good results. And it takes a lonnnnggg time to get into a journal. Also there are paywalls. So skating around the edges is sometimes sticky, and maybe doesn’t help my CV in a traditional sense, but I think that what we’re doing in history education is always trial and error. Usually, it’s even more error than trial, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
I’m lucky to work outside of the many silos that higher education imposes—I love to bring together comments and conversations between folks working across many disciplines. Education is at its heart interdisciplinary, so that helps open a lot of doors for me. And I always find that academics really want to find ways to get their research in front of actual humans. If we want history to be public, we have to get it in front of folks. So most of the time in my work, that means getting real live teachers to try out documents and strategies in their classrooms and give feedback. I’m so inspired every day by teachers who want to use their classrooms as learning laboratories to change the world.
In your experience, what is something people don’t know/understand/appreciate about doing the work of history?
I think people see historians as folks stuck in various dusty archives. Which is often true. But I don’t think that most people know that there’s a whole group of folks like me who are working hard to get that knowledge into the hands of the next generation of historians. And politicians. And public intellectuals. And, well, every kind of career.
I’m not a historian, but I do history—I’m out here trying to put the public into “public history,” and I am passionate about K-12 education in particular. I think that the stereotypes of K-12 teaching as “women’s work” (and all that accompanying baggage) continue to the present day, whether we see them or not. That’s a big part of the reason that new history generated at the university level doesn’t get translated to K-12—folks see that work as “vocational,” or something less than scholarship. But it’s hard to think of any practice more innovative on a daily basis than the work of a K-12 teacher. Imagine what the world would be like if we treated teachers as professionals.
If you weren’t a scholar or involved in researching and writing, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I think I’d be making robots. I have been teaching myself soldering, and I kind of want to make machines. In particular, I want to make panels for “smart houses” that aren’t connected to anything and are kind of smart-alecky.
- The Framework for Teaching Hard History is a comprehensive guide for teaching and learning about American slavery at all grade levels.
- If you are stupid enough to reveal your philosophy major, people on airplanes will immediately ask you something like: “I’ve always wanted to know: What is existentialism?” Four years and a hundred thousand or so of in-kind money taught me to neatly reply: “Existentialism is the idea that existence precedes essence.” Then I’d put my headphones in.
- I published an article from my dissertation research: “Re-examining exit exams: new findings from the education longitudinal study of 2002,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 20 (Jan. 2012).
- Exit exams are tests students must pass to graduate and receive their diploma.
- Charles Kerchner taught this class, and even though he was basically emeritus by the time I was looking for an advisor, he agreed to be mine—though he described his previous process as a “reverse roach motel,” e.g. advisees go out, but don’t come in. I’m lucky to have had his consul.
- Positivism is, basically, the idea that the only things that count as “true” are supported by data generated by experience.
- In 1996, I was only the second woman ever to win the college National Debate Tournament (with my partner, David Heidt). This is probably not the best place to go on about instiutionalized discrimination in college debate, so I’ll just say that as someone with sophisticated statistics training, I do not believe that this was a coincidence.