Teaching the Middle East in Portland Public High Schools

This paper examines the ways in which the Middle East is taught to high school students in Portland Public School. Specifically, it focuses on the required history courses, Modern World History and United States History for Freshman and Juniors, respectively. Beginning with a definition of the Middle East, this paper starts by placing itself and the author within a discourse community of educators, historians, and writers who discuss the issues with incorporating multiple points of view into their curriculum. After a discussion of the methods by which the data was collected, this paper concludes by offering a description of that data, as well as an interpretation of the results. Data collection in this case was done by way of interview with four teachers from four different schools in Portland Public, as well as in-depth content analysis of the two textbooks that were adopted by the Portland Public School District in 2008. Through this research, this paper concludes by offering a brief glimpse into the difficulties facing these teachers in incorporating the complex issues surrounding the Middle East in required high school history classes