Teachers from across the country have reflected on what they are learning and how they are learning it in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the national protests that followed.
Some lessons to remember: the deniers assume that it was simply “the norm” that Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves in the late 1700s and language around the “discovery” of Christopher Columbus of America.
“You reported that people were not here for Columbus for thousands of years,” said Stefanie Wagner, a former teacher in Des Moines, Iowa, who is president of the National Council for Social Studies.
While the nation holds a moment of racial reckoning, many conceptions are challenged over the long term, as seen in the reversal of Confederate monuments and the pressure to defuse police. What is taught in US classrooms is no exception. NBC News spoke with teachers around the country who said they were working to redesign lesson plans to better reflect the fullness of America’s multicultural history.
Additions to history classes would include lessons about infectious figures, such as Bayard Rustin, the Black man who organized in Washington in March 1963, but was largely ostracized in the civil rights movement because he was gay.
“I heard a lot of responses from teachers about their need to have more education on Black History because of George Floyd,” said LaGarrett King, the founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri.
He is not alone.
Wagner said, “I think that has been in everyone’s mind in the first place,” along with how they will safely educate in the coronavirus pandemic. “These two big topics have been the talk of the summer for sure.”
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That was reflected in the third annual Teaching Black History Conference, which King hosted last month. More than 1,000 teachers – about 700 more than last year – attended hearings from around the world to hear and discuss improving their lessons. Unlike previous events in person, this conference was held this year with a series of video sessions.
King, who is an associate professor of social studies education, said it is important to understand intersexuality within Black history in terms of “exploring the full humanity of Black people”, including women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, poor and other groups.
Janella Hinds, a teacher of global studies at a high school in New York City, said teachers also re-examined those topics at the recent convention of the American Federation of Teachers, an important union for teachers.
“There are educators who started thinking about anti-racist instruction in the spring and talks about how to invoke the oppression that students experience,” said Hinds, vice president of academic high schools at the United States. Federation of Teachers, a union representing The New York City Public School Masters.
“It’s not everyone, sure, but we have a lot of teachers, especially at the high school level, who have done some great work to incorporate the current events in the courses of study in our convention, “she said.
Hinds said she worked with her school, Brooklyn’s High School for Public Service, to create an elective course focusing on activism and anti-oppression movements, as well as linking current events in her class to global studies.
“It’s about thinking about this long history of oppression and resistance. This is part of the American experience,” she said.
Adina Goldstein, a seventh-grade social studies and English teacher in Philadelphia, said she thought about how she would describe her social studies class in more of a course in ethnic studies to reflect more African-American and Latin American history. That, in turn, would reflect the identities of the majority of their students.
Goldstein, who is Chinese American and Jewish, said she recently spoke with a former African-American history teacher who said “something really insightful to me: ‘We learn what we know.'”
Goldstein notes that although the majority of students are Black and Latino in Philadelphia, nearly 70 percent of teachers are white. She said they believe school districts should invest in providing teachers with resources and continuing education so that they can educate themselves and improve their curricula to better reflect the identities of their students.
“I have to take that time, and that’s what I did a lot this summer, to learn about Latin America and really focus not only on white academic voices, but central on academic voices that are Latinx,” Goldstein said , who teaches at Vare-Washington Elementary School.
Goldstein said that by the end of the academic year, some teachers had a virtual ‘learning’ in which seventh- and eighth-grade students studied George Floyd, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The students undertook group activities, such as writing letters to Congresses and representatives of the state, creating art to express how they felt, and demonstrating ways they could help and resources they could use to better to understand what happened, Goldstein said. They also discussed how the current situation was applicable to their community and school and how they could support the Black community within their school.
“That was something that was really, really powerful, and the things my students wrote and the art they produced were unbelievable,” she said. “It never stops me to just make myself so proud and excited to see how many children are able to think critically about the world around them.”
Kimberly Rodriguez, an English language teacher at John Adams High School in the New York City borough of Queens, said she would work with her school this month to shift lessons to more related to her students’ lives. the nas of the national moment.
She said she would work with all departments to see how they can fit culture-responsive learning into their curricula, which includes more diverse backgrounds in their lessons and they then relate to students’ experiences.
“It’s great for her to express her opinion on how she feels and what’s going on in her life, and as educators we need to listen and be involved,” she said. “How can we live that in our curricula? How can we live that in our lessons? How can we take a break from testing and ask students about their perspectives of what is happening in their lives?”
Anton Schulzki, a high school teacher in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said the state recently held a virtual conference in which dozens of teachers discussed social studies changing their approach to their curricula to go beyond their own benefits.
“At the forefront was the issue of race and how we should change our approach,” he said.
Schulzki said the interview specifically covered how Native American history, LGBTQ history and the history of other minority groups are being taught.
“There is a definite pressure for us to really start exploring our own benefits and how we approach things in our classroom. Schulzki, who has been elected president of the National Council for Social Studies.
That attempt will not be easy for teachers everywhere, especially in districts where progressive change is unlikely to be well received, he said.
“For some it will be easy to jump in. For others I can understand their caution, because there are many things that teachers have to deal with. There are some school districts in the whole country that not seeing a set curriculum change well, and that’s hard, “Schulzki said.
However, he said, “we need to have these conversations, and it needs to start with the colleagues in your school.”
