ABSTRACT
Above Becker’s desk at home hung two framed statements that helooked at regularly. The one on the left said, “To teach is to learn twice.” He was unsure where that statement originated, but he thought it had come from Joseph Joubert, the eighteenth-century French essayist. As he was planning his unit on Indian removal policies of the Jackson period, his gaze turned to the second statement, which actually was formed as a question: “Who are my students and what do they know?” He often turned to this question as he thought about how to design and order his investigative questions. Knowing who his students were-their sociocultural backgrounds, race, ethnicity, and the like-helped him imagine how they would take to what he was trying to accomplish with them. Understanding-or at least hypothesizing-what they knew about history and what they could do with what they knew was also crucial to his pedagogical decision making.
