Welcome to the brand-new History Matters Podcast. I’m your host, Barbara Davidson, President of StandardsWork and Executive Director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

This podcast was born out of a vision—one I believe all educators have—of inspiring our students to ask big questions, develop their love of learning through reading, and feel empowered to go out and explore their community and the world.

We believe great history education can be a spark that causes this to happen. The History Matters Podcast will explore how it’s done.

We decided to launch the podcast because, while the national conversation about the science of reading is growing, the role of content knowledge in reading is still woefully understated. We’re also concerned that much of the interest in civics education is ignoring the groundwork that must be laid in the elementary grades.

I hope this podcast will show you how history serves both literacy and civic goals, and how some ground-breaking work, and practicing educators, are out there, right now, getting it done!

Welcome to the History Matters Podcast: Season 1.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Elementary schools spend almost no time teaching history. How did we get here, and how can we reprioritize this crucial foundation for literacy and knowledge? Host Barbara Davidson begins the eight-part “History Matters” podcast with a reflective and forward-looking conversation with guest Robert Pondiscio, an author and former fifth-grade teacher who founded the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

Pondiscio recalls his youthful passion for history, sparked by the nation’s bicentennial celebrations nearly 50 years ago. As a teacher, he found his students had learned very little about the past. Rather than learn facts, administrators wanted students to grapple with “essential questions”—which Pondiscio notes is impossible without the knowledge to understand them.

Later, federal accountability rules prompted schools across the country to overwhelmingly focus on tested subjects. But reading is more than decoding—it is comprehension. Without background knowledge, students cannot make sense of what they read. “Everything was reading, reading, reading, math, math, math,” he says. “That’s just not how you build a reader.”

Historical knowledge is especially powerful: Pondiscio notes that the nation’s founders recognized that a republic is fragile and needs virtuous, educated citizens to maintain it. Davidson asks: If you had a magic wand, what would you do? Pondiscio sets forth two big changes. First, that every school use knowledge-building curriculum. Second, that representatives from every state and district decide what basic, foundational historical knowledge kids should learn in each elementary grade:

“What is it we expect kids to know to be literate, to be competent citizens, to be engaged, to be excited in participating and playing a part in the American experiment? I’d love to see schools take up that challenge.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Teaching history involves balance: too many facts and it’s boring, too few and students don’t have enough information to make sense of what they’ve learned. And in elementary school, history is often “a random collection of holidays,” with topics presented out of sequence and scant connection from one to the next.

That’s not what’s happening in Louisiana, where students and teachers are joyfully engaged in a high-quality, knowledge-building history curriculum. In this episode, host Barbara Davidson speaks with Sean Dimond, a former middle-school teacher and Louisiana state social studies director who is now senior social studies editor at the Core Knowledge Foundation.

Dimond recalls his early struggles as a social studies teacher following vast and vague state standards. “In sixth grade, we were basically expected to cover all—and I’m not really exaggerating here—of human history,” he recalls. The standards started with the Stone Age and extended through the late Renaissance, following a “broken sequence with no narrative,” he says.

That’s no longer the case: Louisiana created, adopted, and is implementing the high-quality Bayou Bridges curriculum. Now, “the material moves generally chronologically and sort of spirals, so students return again to similar topics at a deeper and deeper level,” he says. Dimond shares the example of an exciting lesson from a Civil War unit that combines expository, vocabulary-building text with a variety of primary sources, includes excerpts of presidential speeches, and culminates in a classwide debate about Lincoln’s heroism.

Such curriculum and instruction build literacy and historical thinking skills, but “content is king,” Dimond asserts. “My ability to make an excellent claim about the Antebellum South is pretty predicated on my specific knowledge about the Antebellum South.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.