Making Sense of Multiple Interpretations
Trinity College, Hartford CT
Some teaching innovations
arise from a combination of good intentions, last-minute planning, and
incredible luck. Colgate University hired me in late July 1997 as a visiting
professor for the fall semester. As I scrambled to finish my dissertation and
move my family, only a few days remained to pull together the syllabus for a
course on Race and Education. I wanted to begin this contemporary course
with an historical focus, delving into African-American experiences with school
desegregation during the mid-twentieth century, but couldn't decide on which of
the many excellent historical case studies to assign. The bookstore wanted my
order as soon as possible due to a labor strike that threatened to delay their
deliveries. So I ordered two books — David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road
and Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential — hoping that at
least one would arrive on time. When both magically appeared on the bookstore
shelves a day before the first class, I decided to innovate and revise the
syllabus. Half would read Cecelski; the other half would read Walker. Despite
some initial confusion, my thirty students began to engage in serious
discussions over historical interpretations of school desegregation,
demonstrating a level of depth that would not have happened had I assigned only
one book to the entire class.
What began as an accident has evolved into an intriguing learning
exercise in historical thinking. Over the past four years at Trinity College, I
have
continued this approach in my history of education course, Education
Reform: Past and Present, though with some modifications. First, I switched
the book
pairing and now assign
Constance Curry's Silver Rights to half
of the class and
David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road to the other. These
books better complement one another because both focus on how Southern blacks
responded differently to white-organized "freedom of choice" plans that emerged
in the mid-1960s to comply with federal school desegregation mandates. Curry's
book tells the story of the Carter family, the only African Americans in
Sunflower
County, Mississippi who defied intimidation and dared to leave their
dilapidated black schools for the better-resourced white ones. In 1967, they
successfully sued to
eliminate the so-called "freedom of choice" plan, demanding
that everyone participate in a mandatory school desegregation plan. But Cecelski's book describes
events that took place a year later in Hyde County,
North Carolina. Under federal pressure to eliminate "freedom of choice," local
white leaders imposed a one-way desegregation plan that threatened to close
schools that the African American community had long supported, leading many of
them to protest and call for the restoration of "freedom of choice." When my
students read these books together, the underlying issue was not simply a pro
or con on school desegregation, but how its implementation had different
meanings in these two communities. My broader objective is for students to
analyze Curry and Cecelski's competing interpretations of the past, evaluate the
supporting evidence, and understand how these vastly different narratives might
arise from particular contexts and perspectives.
Second, I inserted more structure in the course to help students
recognize the parallels between the book they had read and their classmates'
book (which they had not). At the beginning of the unit, some background lecture
and a reader's guide sheet briefly laid out Curry's and Cecelski's perspectives,
the community settings, and major historical actors, followed by four analytical
questions common to both books. After students had
finished their respective book, I reorganized them into a two-part "jigsaw"
discussion format. Students first met in small groups with classmates who had
read the same book, to confirm each other's understanding and rehearse how they
would summarize its essential points for the other half of class. Once they had
developed expertise on their own material, students moved into new groups of
four, with two representatives for each book to summarize their narrative. Then
this new group compared and contrasted the two interpretations, relying upon the
broader analytical questions from the reader's guide. The class typically closed
with a whole-group discussion, where I drew out a common theme that African
Americans were not simply struggling for school desegregation but rather for the
power to uplift the race through school reform in a way that fit their
particular community's needs.
Teaching competing
interpretations takes time and requires thoughtful assessment and support. One
semester, amid record-breaking snowstorms that drastically cut back class
sessions, I foolishly rushed my students through the discussions described above
in merely twenty minutes. They revolted, and rightfully so; not only had each
individual invested considerable time in preparing for class, but I had cut
short the time necessary for them to complete an interdependent learning
exercise, where students relied upon their classmates to teach them about a book
that they were not responsible for reading. Furthermore, student evaluations of
this exercise have led me to redesign my assessment. My typical open-book
midterm exam question for this unit asks why the Carter family in Silver
Rights opposed "freedom of choice" while many African Americans in Along
Freedom Road supported it. But I have added a line stating that students
must identify which book they have read, noting that I will hold their
supporting evidence to a higher standard for this book than for the other.
Finally, I have experimented with requiring all students to read a third book,
James Patterson's Brown v Board of Education, whose broad synthesis of
the NAACP's evolving legal strategy over the twentieth century provides context
for the case studies. In addition, the trio of Curry, Cecelski, and Patterson
raises a new set of questions for my students about how historians writing
national-level studies face different issues than those who write community
histories.
While I may have stumbled into this pedagogical innovation by
accident, the concept of teaching competing historical interpretations is
certainly not new. Looking back, I realize that it reflects one of the best
parts of my graduate-level historical training at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, where professors Carl Kaestle, Linda Gordon, and especially
Jurgen Herbst pushed our seminars to comprehend and evaluate two (or three or
four) interpretations simultaneously, and sort out the arguments and evidence as
a community of scholars. I can also trace its influence back to my years as a
high school history teacher, working alongside more experienced colleagues who
offered me working models and a richer vocabulary for organizing complex group
exercises. Finally, much of my thinking about teaching multiple interpretations
arose while contemplating my own scholarly work on the evolution of conflicting
and overlapping black school reform movements.
The deeply symbolic fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision falls upon us at a pivotal moment. Present-day school desegregation proponents are under fire, often by advocates of private school choice, over the best strategy for uplifting African Americans and reducing inequalities across the nation. As educators, our mission is to bring the underlying historical issues to the forefront of our students' minds, to help make sense of how we have arrived at our contemporary debates over race and school reform. Indeed, there is not enough time in the semester to read every book on the subject. But if we select two (or three) books and organize our students to teach one another about different historical perspectives on school desegregation and choice, perhaps they will also acquire some of the skills necessary to ensure the survival of a participatory (and racially diverse) democracy, as we struggle with the educational policy decisions facing us today and in the future.
From "Teaching Brown:
Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities"
History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004)
Copyright by the History of
Education Society. Reprinted with permission.
Resources:
Cecelski, David S. Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Curry, Constance. Silver Rights. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995. [See also in a video documentary format, The Intolerable Burden, First Run/Icarus Films, 2003.]
Dougherty, Jack. More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming Spring 2004.
Dougherty, Jack. Educ
300: Education Reform — Past and Present, syllabus available at
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/educ/dougherty.htm
and Curry/Cecelski reader's guide sheet (PDF
file)
Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford Press, 2001.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.