ABSTRACT
As the population of culturally and linguistically diverse US public school students increases, the demographics of the teaching population have remained largely unchanged: White, middle class, and monolingual. This chapter describes how two teacher educators have used the difficult history represented in Precious Knowledge as an opening to critical conversations around issues of the history of racism in public education. It then advocates for the role of sociopolitically conscious film as a central feature in teacher education programs and their relational commitments with school-community partners. From critical multicultural perspectives, the chapter conceptualizes difficult history as a history that claims space and place in schools and other institutional settings because it calls into question dominant or "master" historical narratives. The film introduces a difficult history for students to begin to reconsider the role of language, culture, politics, race and racism, xenophobia, power, and White privilege in American society.
