Education Week has an interesting article on how teachers are preparing for back-to-school discussions in class on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The article looks at a week-long training program held at Ford’s Theater on teaching the period. According to the article:
“Teachers are tasked with being this objective authority—’you can’t be biased, you can’t be presenting an argument, you have to just give the facts’—but the reality is, we’re all responding to the world around us,” said Alexandria Wood, the education programs manager at Ford’s Theatre Society. “We are making choices about the stories we tell and how we tell them. … It’s really hard, and it’s really overwhelming to dig into this history when there’s limited time, when there’s so many different perspectives coming to the floor.”
Many teachers, she said, receive pushback from their administrators or students’ parents about wading into such charged issues like the movement to take down Confederate statues.
“How can we possibly be neutral? This isn’t a neutral subject,” Wood said. “[This program is] really trying to figure out, how can we support our teachers and give them ways to, with courage, dive into these hard histories, this non-neutral territory, [and] teach the students how to think, not what to think. … As a student, as a person, as a lifelong learner, questioning how you think is really hard, and it’s a challenge. It comes with doubt, and it comes with unanswerable questions, and it’s hard to live in that discomfort.”
The author of the article also spoke to historian Kevin Levin:
“the teachers will get a crash course in the history of this time period, said Kevin M. Levin, a Civil War historian and educator who facilitated the Ford’s Theatre training. The first step to leading conversations with students about Confederate memorials is understanding the Reconstruction—the period right after the war ended where freed men and women were granted some rights, but where Southern states passed restrictive laws known as “black codes.” It’s an era in history that’s often given short shrift in schools.
Many teachers who’ve gone through this training have said they didn’t learn much about the stories of this time period in their own schooling, Levin said. But so much of what happened then laid the foundation for the civil rights movement and still resonates today. When teachers are well-versed in the history, Levin said, they’re more confident leading these complex conversations.”
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