Tag: civil rights

How I Built a Narrative Lecture: Teaching Reconstruction in U.S. History II

Jonathan Wilson

This spring, I’m teaching a college course called United States History Since 1865. It’s a staple of American curricula. I have decided that it might be interesting to provide a walkthrough of the first lecture.

This should be an opportunity to articulate, step by step, some basic intuitions about how to achieve truthful storytelling in the classroom. (It’s also a chance to show—in a real situation rather than a political taking point—how I handle “divisive concepts” and “widely debated and currently controversial issues” related to American racism, inasmuch as this first lecture was about Reconstruction.)

This lecture was not perfect. It didn’t represent especially sophisticated historiography. But I am going to try to use it now to demonstrate the problem-solving nature of an interactive lecture about a fraught topic.

Specifically, I believe this walkthrough will illustrate the following nine aspects of my method for telling a story in the classroom:

  • Setting scenes
  • Posing problems
  • Integrating primary sources into a lecture
  • Enlisting students in telling the story
  • Showing change over time through examples
  • Identifying specific turning points
  • Explaining the significance of key memorizable concepts
  • Building to a crisis, confrontation, or moment of decision
  • Creating an open or provocative ending

Each of these elements will appear in the description that follows, and most will appear several times.

Continue reading “How I Built a Narrative Lecture: Teaching Reconstruction in U.S. History II” →

Tennessee’s First CRT Complaint: Kids Are Learning About the Civil Rights Movement

Jonathan Wilson

The Nashville Tennessean reported yesterday that the Tennessee Department of Education recently dismissed its first official complaint about a reported violation of the state’s new law banning supposed “critical race theory” from schools. The law prohibits Tennessee public and charter schools from teaching history that makes students feel “discomfort” about their race or sex.

The department dismissed the complaint, which was filed this summer, on a technicality: It referred to teaching that happened before the law took effect.

The details of the complaint, however, are instructive.

Simply put, the “Moms for Liberty” chapter in Williamson County, near Nashville, alleged that their county’s public schools illegally taught children about the Civil Rights Movement last year.

If you don’t believe me, look at the actual complaint letter, which is provided in a link by the Tennessean.

The complaint says Williamson County Schools used a second-grade language arts curriculum that included the following four books:

All four of these books are about true events that happened between the 1940s and 1960s.

The complaint says the school district illegally used these books to make second graders “hate their country, each other, and themselves.” It says these books had this effect because they depict African Americans and Mexican Americans in the mid-20th century being mistreated by white Americans, and because the teacher’s manual directs teachers to say negative things about their mistreatment.

The complaint, moreover, accuses the school district of using the word injustice too frequently in its teacher’s manual, with illegal anti-white classroom exercises like asking students, “What injustices did people face before the civil rights act of 1964?” and “How can people respond to injustice?”

The complaint sums up its position this way: “There does not have to be a textbook labeled ‘Critical Race Theory’ for its harmful tenets to be present in a curriculum; the evidence is present in the outcome.”

The illegal outcome, apparently, is for Tennessee children in second grade to learn about the history of American racism or civil rights protests at all.