Jeff Matlock

Social studies teacher, Scotts Valley Middle School, Scotts Valley, Calif.

Jeff Matlock is a listener. He is a middle school social studies teacher, a husband, an avid traveler, a gardener, amateur photographer, and an active user of the Zinn Education Project too, but more importantly for the students he teaches, Matlock is a listener, and this is an essential part of his teaching style.

“If I expect them to listen to me and take interest in a ‘bunch of dead people,’ I have to listen to what is important to them,” says Matlock when asked about how he engages students in the study of history. “When I was a student I felt that most teachers, or adults for that matter, couldn’t have cared less about my life or what I was experiencing,” he explains.

Currently living about two blocks from his childhood elementary school, Matlock has been teaching for about 20 years. “I have always brought in different perspectives as a teacher,” he explains. “It seems natural to me.” Teaching history from multiple perspectives, being sure to include and highlight the narratives of the less powerful in society, is the heart of what it means to teach a people’s history. The Constitutional Convention simulation and the activity on the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention are two of the free downloadable teaching activities on the Zinn Education Project website that Matlock appreciates the most, using them each year to bring in people’s history perspectives his students may not have been exposed to prior.

In the Seneca Falls activity, students take on the roles of New England Mill Workers, Enslaved African American Women, Cherokee Women, Middle- and Upper-Class White Reformers, and Women in the Newly Conquered Territory of New Mexico. Playing these parts, the students must educate one another about the lived experiences of these different populations and decide upon the three most important resolutions to come out of the convention. The debate that ensues is very engaging, offering Matlock a chance to listen to and learn from his students in a new way.

Matlock was first exposed to this important teaching and learning style when he was a student in high school. Thanks to a history teacher who noticed that his interest in history went well beyond what he was supposed to know for the tests, Jeff got his first copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States 1492—Present at a young age.

“After reading Zinn I was embarrassed that it had never been obvious to me that there are two sides at least to every story and that it was the ‘winners’ whose story was usually told.”

Matlock graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1988 with honors and a bachelor’s degree in history and received his teaching credentials from San Jose State University. He is now teaching very close to his hometown so that he can provide students from his community with a better, more complex view of history, one that is not merely the stories of “a bunch of dead people,” but a living and breathing question students must grapple with today.

“I like being in an environment where curiosity and inquiry reigns,” says Matlock. Encouraging students to question the dominant narrative they are taught in textbooks and through the media, teachers like Matlock ensure that students not only learn facts, but critical thinking skills as well.

“I like that the lessons are written by people who clearly are good at what they do and enjoy writing meaningful curriculum (and don’t mind sharing it!). So far, the lessons I’ve used provide insights into different perspectives. Oftentimes students see history as black and white. The lessons I’ve used have shown that there were (just as there are today) many different ways of looking at something that is happening in the world.”

Taking time (before, after, between, and sometimes during class) to listen to the stories and concerns of his students, Matlock is able to help them draw connections between their current lived experience and the lessons of the past they are learning in school. By teaching a people’s history he is able to spark a curiosity in his students that is in no small part reflective of Matlock’s own passion for studying multicultural narratives in history.

“I like uncovering further truths or debunking myths about ‘traditional’ history. The punk rocker in me likes showing that what most people think isn’t exactly true.

“Hopefully, by the time my students leave my classroom they understand not to be content with just one version of a story. There’s always another point of view to ponder.”

Helping to provide some of those “other points to ponder,” the Zinn Education Project found its way into Matlock’s classroom two years ago. Now his students are challenged to think critically about the struggle for women’s rights and the constitutional convention, and the myriad experiences and power relations that determined the outcomes we know of as the history of those times.