A framework for teaching American slavery – from Teaching Tolerance

After a quick six hour visit to the the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture yesterday, it just made sense to stop in at the #NCHE2019 session by Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance. Maureen shared Teaching Tolerance resources that can help you effectively teach issues surrounding the history of slavery in the United States.

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”

James Baldwin
Black English: A Dishonest Argument

Maureen started by sharing that most of our students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of the United States – or how its legacies still influence us today.

Slavery’s long reach continues into the present day. The persistent and wide socioeconomic and legal disparities that African Americans face today and the backlash that seems to follow every African-American advancement trace their roots to slavery and its aftermath. If we are to understand the United State and the world today, we must understand slavery’s history and continuing impact.

Unfortunately, research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 shows that our schools are failing to teach the hard history of African enslavement. They surveyed U.S. high school seniors and social studies teachers, analyzed a selection of state content standards, and reviewed 10 popular U.S. history textbooks. The research indicates that:

History is a bunch of grass. And we need to let our kids play on it.

Bob Edens had been blind since birth. Fifty-one years of darkness, sounds, smells, and touch followed. But after a remarkable laser surgery, Bob can now see. For 51 years, Bob had imagined what things looked like based mainly on the descriptions of others and what he could feel.

I never would have dreamed that yellow is so . . . yellow. But red is my favorite color. I just can’t believe red.

He’s now seeing for himself what he had only imagined.

Grass is something I had to get used to. I always thought it was just fuzz.  But to see each individual green stalk . . . it’s like starting a whole new life.  It’s the most amazing thing in the world to see things you never thought you’d see.

Sometimes I think we do this with kids. We tell them about history and have them read about history but we never let them experience history. They never get to actually “see” the individual people and events and details – students rely on us to describe those things for them. We can forget that history is supposed to be a verb, not a noun – especially at this time of the school year when we’re trying to make sure to “cover” everything.

So . . . how can we help our kids see history?

Advise the President. Cause you’re just that smart.

Okay. Not that president. Other presidents. You know, from history.

Like Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan. And they need your help. Even better, they need your students to help. The National Archives have put together something called Advise the President. And like everything else the Archives do, it’s awesome.

Throughout history, every president is faced with having to make difficult decisions. The Advise the President series gives you the chance to bring the deliberation process surrounding these historic decisions to the classroom. Each booklet focuses on a significant topic during the administration of a specific president.

There are currently five problems and presidents that you and students can work with:

ESSDACK PLC meets Russel Tarr & ClassTools. Everyone gets smarter.

We had just spent an hour or so using Russel Tarr’s simple but powerful Breaking News Generator. I wanted to talk a bit about online civic literacy and combating fake news. So I had asked our ESSDACK social studies PLC that had gotten together to use Russel’s tool to create two different stories – a factual Breaking News story and one that was biased or fake.

And, of course, the group came through in typical fashion.

The activity led to a great conversation around effective tools and resources that teachers and students can use while accessing and organizing online information. But it also led to another discussion about all of the tools available at Russel’s awesome ClassTools.net site.

Most of the group hadn’t heard of or used ClassTools.net before. So we explored some other tools including Headline Generator:

Tip of the Week: Forget the gym. These 5 New Year’s resolutions are what you really need

You’re right. Most New Year’s resolutions are made closer to the actual New Year. But it’s still January . . . so I’m good, right?

And it’s never too late to make a few 2019 social studies resolutions. Best place to start? Asking questions about our current practice, especially during this middle of the year period: What’s working? What’s not? What do my students need? What resource needs to be phased out? How can I get better?

The middle of the school year is a perfect time to think about these sorts of questions. In that spirit, here are five New Year’s resolutions every social studies teacher should make:

Yup. It’s both / and. Your kids need a balance of process and content

I had the chance this week to spend two days with 13 social studies teachers as we continued our work on revising the state social studies standards.

Way back in 2011, we started the same basic process. State regulations require a standards review every few years. Most times, the whole business is usually an empty exercise – fix a few typos, move some sections around, update the list of review committee members.

But eight years ago, with some excellent leadership from department of ed social studies consultant Don Gifford, we jerked the process off the rails and moved away from a content-based standards document to one focused on process and skills. At the time, it was a major philosophical shift.

We created five standards: