We will share our final projects with one another in short sessions. The creator will briefly share intent – the rest of us will offer peer review and feedback. We will also do our SmartEvals and make plans for our final exit chats.
When someone clicks on your author tag, they will see all of your posts in reverse chronological order. Think of this post as the introduction to your work.
Be sure to give it a good title and featured image. This will introduce your work to the world.
This class will showcase some resources in Civic Education – they’re grouped in three broad categories – law-related ed, civics / government, and information literacy.
Law-Related Education
I’m a big fan of using mock trials – they embody critical thinking in the classroom. The need to develop and deliver a theory of the case, reminds me of constructing a coherent historical narrative. And the use of rules of evidence parallels the mastery of historical thinking skills like sourcing, contextualizing and corroboration.
With the rise of social media and the decline of legacy news sources, students must be learn to critically evaluate news sources to be functioning citizens. Great resources are available at:
Civics Online Reasoning (Stanford History Education Group): free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.
News Literacy Project: programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.
“Old ex-slave on a farm near Greensboro, Alabama” (1941) by Jack Delano / LOC
Historians study how societies change. In order to do that, we examine sources created at the time—newspapers, teapots, speeches, tweets, photographs, landscapes, and so on-—and judge what we think happened by comparing these primary sources to things other historians have said, on the basis of evidence they have found. We argue a lot. But if we cannot see an ever-widening story, we cannot give an accurate account of how societies change. An inaccurate picture of what creates change means that people cannot make good decisions about the future. They are at the mercy of those who are creating the stories. Knowledge is indeed power. So the destruction of accurate history is about more than schools. It’s about self-determination. It’s about having the freedom to make good decisions about your life. It’s about the very things that democracy is supposed to stand for.
Conservative discomfort with hard history and fondness for historical fiction
It would be negligent to teach a social studies methods class in 2021 without addressing the elephant in the room – the conservative assault on history instruction in American schools.
“When conservatives attack Critical Race Theory — or any meaningful discussion of systemic racism in American history — they insist they do so only because such material ignores the progress made since the nation’s founding and leads students to think badly about America.But actually, the right wants to paper over historical injustices — to cancel the truth — so as to keep students from asking difficult questions about inequality in the present.They fear that if students realize how central racism has been to the country’s development, they may connect the dots between that historical injustice and ongoing disparities in the present.” ~ The Right Wants to Cancel the Truth
The current disruptions of school boards across the country is the latest installment of a right wing effort to use social issues as a political wedge to divide the Democrat’s “big tent.” For example, in the early 1990s’ the country’s first national guidelines for teaching American history were torpedoed by conservatives. Rush Limbaugh lambasted the standards as a “bastardization of American history” and complaining that the United States “does not deserve the reputation it’s getting in multicultural classrooms.”
During the closing days of the Trump administration, the outgoing president fulfilled a promise to issue a report that promotes a “patriotic education” about race and the birth of the nation.
The Conservative response to 1619 Project
The 1776 Report, [not coincidently] released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, followed Donald Trump’s September announcement to form a commission to refute teachings on systemic racism, critical race theory, and deeper examinations of how slavery has affected American society.
The Heritage Foundation – a right wing think tank – followed up with a strong rebuke of the 1619 project –A Celebration of America. The video below is from that website.
Conservatives target history classrooms via school boards
That was compounded by a coordinated effort to inflame right-wing anger by weaponizing a term for a school of legal scholarship. How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. That has led us to the current situation where school boards are under assault in many parts of America.
A right wing group – Citizens for Renewing America – has created a “tool kit” for Combating Critical Race Theory in your Community. Including tips on how to recognize CRT, how to “win back your school board,” and recommendations to monitor social media of teachers, administrators and school board members.
They have also produced a template for creating “Anti-CRT” school board regulations – Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory(pdf). The document includes recommendations to ban teachers using many concepts or terms such as: CRT, Social Emotional Learning (SEL), Cultural relevance, Diversity training, Equity, Land acknowledgment, Multiculturalism, Patriarchy, Racial healing, Social justice, Systemic racism, White privilege or Whiteness.
In Class Activity
Students will discuss their reaction to joining the ranks of social studies teachers in this current climate of anger and distrust. They will also work in teams using this Google slide set to explore how documented hard history can be “whitewashed” with historical fiction.
Credit: This template was adopted from a Keynote template created by Jamie Clark @XpatEducator. See his collection of Teaching & Learning Resources. (Lots of free downloadable templates.)
Students will share the results of their research and then we will use a Jamboard or other graphic tool to mind map the relationship of redline status to contemporary racial disparities in a variety of social, economic and policy arenas.
Be sure to cite specifics from at least four classmates Redline Stories. Consider a wide array of redline legacies in factors such as: income, wealth accumulation, health, schooling, policing / criminal justice, services, livability, environment.
For inspiration, here’s a few resources that explore connections:
“Segregated By Design” examines the forgotten history of how our federal, state and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major metropolitan area in America through law and policy.
There is no assignment for this class. Students should be working on their final project.
Featured image created using Redline map of Portland Ore