Expanding How We Teach Exploration: When Does the Story Begin?
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons/NASA/National Library of Portugal/The New York Public Library
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Expanding How We Teach Exploration
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 900 words, an estimated 3-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
Think back to how you learned about explorers in school.
Maybe you learned names like Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, or Marco Polo.
Maybe you built construction paper ships or hats, traced routes across the ocean, or acted out a voyage.
Maybe, like me, you crafted a stapled, hand-written report — complete with colored pencil-illustrations — about an explorer. I was assigned Henry Hudson.
You might have learned the dates, the places people traveled, and the reasons they ventured out — often stories framed around freedom, trade, and “hopes of treasure.”
And there might have been something exciting about these stories. Explorers are often framed as brave. Adventurous. Curious. People who ventured into a big, “unknown” world.
But underneath such familiar stories are foundational questions: Who gets to be an explorer? And when does the story of exploration actually begin?
This month we’re examining the lens for how we tell the story of exploration and explorers.
We’ll look at the people, places, and objects that can help us expand the story.
Today, we’ll focus on how we frame it.
Where Do We Begin?
Imagine opening a history textbook to a chapter titled The Age of Exploration.
When and where do you think the timeline begins?
For many students, especially in but not limited to the United States, the story of exploration is framed around European voyages in the 1400s and 1500s, with Christopher Columbus occupying a particularly prominent place.
From there, the story may move through Spanish and British colonization, and other European forms of colonial expansion.
Research on how Columbus has been taught in U.S. classrooms has found that many students have often encountered simplified narratives centered on his navigational “skill,” "bravery," and “talent.”
Bickford and Wilton describe how textbooks, worksheets, and other classroom materials have sometimes contributed to the “herofication” of Columbus, often leaving out historical complexity and Indigenous perspectives, including their own forms of innovation and knowledge.
While this certainly does not describe every classroom or teacher — as many educators have long worked to teach history with greater complexity and multiple perspectives — it does bring up an important framing: When and where we begin, and whom we center, matters.
Who’s Holding the Camera?
Human movement is not new. Neither is exploration.
Across time and place, humans have moved for many reasons. We migrate. We navigate. We trade. We settle. We flee. We search. We follow opportunity. We often wonder what is beyond the horizon.
So what happens if we reserve the word “explorer” for certain kinds of movement?
When many European colonists arrived in the Americas, the land was unfamiliar to them. But it was not unfamiliar to the people who already lived there. They already knew the land and water. The languages, communities, trade networks, histories, technologies, stories, and relationships to the places they called home.
Even a phrase like “New World” tells us something about whose perspective is being centered. The world was not new to the people already living there.
This is where the image of a camera may be helpful.
From one angle, if the camera is only on the shoulder of a European colonist, or “explorer,” we see someone arriving to a new, unfamiliar place.
But if we turn the camera around and place it on the shoulders of those who already lived there — and have lived there for thousands of years as a result of their own mix of exploration or adventure or bravery and skill — the narrative, and the question, changes.
Instead of simply asking: Who discovered this place? We may ask: What kinds of human movement and knowledge do we recognize as exploration? And do we describe them differently? What parts are the same?
This doesn't require us to erase figures like Columbus, or topics like European colonization, or the stories of navigators students may have already learned.
But it does invite us to zoom out.
To see exploration not as a story that suddenly began when people from one part of the world crossed an ocean, but as one part of a much larger human story — one that often includes movement, navigation, encounter, exchange, conflict, exploitation, resistance, and knowledge.
And, of course, we may still highlight the parts that make some chapters of exploration — including colonization — different, such as but not limited to global impact.
Applying It to Our Classrooms
Making a shift in how we teach a unit like Age of Exploration does not necessarily mean reinventing a unit from scratch. Sometimes a first step can include looking at where we actually begin.
We can first ask: Where does our story begin? And what does that starting point make possible for students to see?
We can analyze: Whose perspective is centered? Who else is already there? What becomes harder to see from this angle?
We can widen the lens: What other forms of movement, knowledge, encounter, exploitation, resistance, or exchange belong in the story?
Consider the student experience: What do we want students to understand about people and the world from (and beyond) this particular historical story?
Sometimes humanizing history includes adding hidden histories and names to the figurative textbook. Sometimes it also includes asking why we framed the story in a particular way in the first place.
Next week, we’ll highlight a specific way to expand the lens around exploration.
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