Hye-Won Gehring

History Teacher, Kensington High School for Urban Education, Philadelphia

Gehring and students say thank you for their new people's history classroom materials.

Hye-Won Joy Gehring is a high school history teacher working to educate and empower the next generation of students and community leaders to become teachers themselves. Her school “grows teachers for the community, from the community.”

Graduating from Montclair State University in New Jersey with a degree in political science, Gehring did not plan on becoming a teacher. She wanted to help solve some of the major problems of inequality in our world and therefore had her eyes set on studying international law. Luckily for us and her students, she realized before graduating that education is still a key contemporary civil rights issue and that one need not look overseas to find gross inequalities. She abandoned the idea of a career in law and instead joined the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows Program.

Her first year was challenging. With only one month of training she was thrown into a chaotic school unprepared. She felt isolated and overwhelmed. In addition to these challenges, Gehring found it tremendously difficult to make history relevant to her 14- and 15-year-old students. “Nothing in school was relevant to their lives, especially history,” she explains. “Nothing empowered them, and most felt disconnected from the history they were taught all their lives, and felt that history was boring and irrelevant.”

Gehring and students opening their box of people's history classroom materials including "Voices of a People's History of the United States," "A Young People's History of the United States," "The People Speak-DVD," and a classroom set of "A People's History of the United States." Books and DVD donated by Seven Stories Press, The People Speak, and HarperCollins.

To make her history classes relevant and empower her students, she decided to teach outside of the standard textbook. Since history is not a subject tested by NCLB, nobody seemed to care what she did with her classes. Hye-Won found Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and other progressive resources for her students by going out and first educating herself. She started at an independent bookstore in her area where she knew she could find alternative titles. She was told to look up Zinn. She did, and got deep into his work, eventually finding the Zinn Education Project online.

“The Zinn Education Project is awesome because it empowers teachers to bring people’s history into the classroom,” Gehring says after using the site and its free downloadable resources with her students.

Starting with the story of Columbus, she challenged her students to look critically at the history they had been taught. She gave them handouts that helped explain this famous story from multiple perspectives. Most students are never asked to imagine how the native Tainos and Columbus’ men thought about what was happening. In The People vs. Columbus, et al. teaching activity, the murder of millions of Tainos is considered a monstrous crime that the students must solve together in class. Gehring’s classroom became a court, with students playing all the roles, defending the actions of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella or whomever they are assigned to play, accusing others like Columbus’ Men for the massacre, arguing their respective points before a jury of their peers, quite literally, and deciding on a final judgment as a class.

The effect of using this lesson was noticeable. Her students were shocked, expressing feelings of betrayal and anger. They felt like they had been lied to by previous teachers. They had never heard many of these perspectives on famous history lessons. Columbus was a murderer, a rapist?

Gehring's students reading "A People's History of the United States."

Her students were also engaged. They now “get excited about what lies and cover-ups will be exposed with every chapter and have become analytical thinkers because of Zinn’s A People’s History.”

In addition to her work in the classroom, Hye-Won devotes much of her time outside of school to creating a more just and equitable education system for all. She is an active member of TAG, the Teacher Action Group in Philadelphia, a local chapter of the national network of Teacher Activist Groups. Instead of a top-down system that creates textbooks and curricula unrelated to the lived experiences of students, Ms. Gehring and TAG are advocating for a grassroots, bottom-up approach to teaching our students history.

“We are looking for organic, community-based reform,” says Gehring. As part of her organizing with TAG, each year she helps organize a curriculum fair in Philadelphia that seeks input not only from experts but also from the local community. Seeing this as much of a social justice issue as it is an educational issue, Hye-Won is proud to volunteer her time and energy to change the way schools teach in Philadelphia. By doing this, she is teaching her students one of the most important lessons that we learn from A People’s History: that every day, ordinary people can and do change society, and we too can, do, and will make history.