Introduction

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about the Brown v Board of Education decision. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers:

• How do we "keep the struggle alive" in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?
   
• How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged white supremacy, and another that celebrates the good qualities of black segregated schools?
   
• How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power, without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?
   
• Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

These essays describe our first steps (and missteps) to address these and other dilemmas through pedagogical innovations in our history courses. None of us claim to have invented "the one best system" for teaching about Brown. But collectively, we believe there is great value in pooling our reflections on various efforts to combine primary source materials, secondary literature, writing assignments, class simulations, oral history projects, and university-school collaborations. To be certain, teaching is a contextual art, built upon the relationships that form between a particular group of students and their instructors. What works in one location is not guaranteed to succeed elsewhere. Even the tone of our essays — whether celebratory, skeptical, or ambivalent about Brown — varies depending upon the setting in which we have taught. Therefore, to underscore how much context matters, we intentionally drew together essays from a variety of educational settings, ranging from graduate universities to middle schools, and rural white institutions to multiracial campuses. Since our small, ad-hoc group of writers is not nationally (or internationally) representative, we encourage other educators to join us in publishing future essays about teaching Brown in their own classrooms and communities to broaden everyone's learning. For if we continue to keep teaching hidden — behind the safe and secure closed doors of our individual classrooms — we sacrifice a potentially richer education for all.
 

Leading scholars of the broader civil rights movement also recognize the need to reconsider how we convey its stories in our classrooms. In a related volume titled Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement, historians Patricia Sullivan and Waldo Martin argue that the uncritical use of historical film footage and photographic images of black freedom struggles from the 1950s and 1960s has inadvertently "frozen the movement in time." Ahistorical portrayals of a single-minded march from "Montgomery to Memphis" mistakenly conjure up "an air of inevitability in the popular imagination," where the civil rights movement unfolds in lockstep order, lacking any real sense of historical contingency and context. To counteract this tendency, Sullivan and Martin brought together dozens of educators of the southern black civil rights movement in their popular National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars. As a result, they report, several past participants have published essays that "challenge the conventional or master narrative of civil rights history," recounting how they do so in their individual history classrooms.[1]
 

Few scholarly journals publish essays on teaching. Even the History of Education Quarterly (HEQ), whose readers strive to understand the life of schools from long ago, has scarcely published any articles that examine how we teach educational history in our classrooms today. Scanning over forty years of back issues revealed only one essay by a reviewer who described how he intended to use the featured book in his upcoming seminar, and a discussion of textbooks on American educational history.[2] The disconnection should not surprise us. Subfields like educational history have typically struggled to earn the respect of the mainstream discipline, a game that has traditionally been won through the quality and prestige of scholarly publications. But advocates of the "scholarship of teaching," such as Lee Shulman at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, have recently urged academics to reconsider how we value and disseminate our pedagogy. Through scholarly journals, we can transform the private act of teaching into a more public form of academic work, subject to critical review by our peers, so that innovations may be thoughtfully considered, and perhaps modified and used by others in both scholarly and general communities.[3] We welcome the opportunity granted by the HEQ editors to take a step in this direction, particularly on Brown, a topic where dramatic changes in the scholarly literature and contemporary policy debates have pressed us to rethink and improve how we teach. And we invite readers to join us for a brief walk on this long journey.

Jack Dougherty

Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

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.