The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of the Civil Rights Movement

Strategies

Equitable Instruction Rooted in a Vision of a Just Society.

Lessons will start with where the students are, in order to build their particular skill sets to where they need to be. The following will be essential parts of the overall strategy to build student knowledge, develop positive attitudes about the content and highlight its utility and strengthen their critical reading and writing as well as their social interaction.

Student/Teacher/Student

This is the process of 1. beginning with where the students are by surveying their existing knowledge, experience and skills about the topic, 2. teacher incorporating this prior knowledge in the actual delivery of the lesson by adjusting/tailoring the lesson to build bridges to student understanding (ie. finding useful metaphors and analogies as schema for the students from which to build understanding), 3. deliver an effective lesson (based on the interaction between student and teacher and anchored to the lesson objectives) with the student. In Paolo Freire's seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire asserts that,

"Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one- who-teaches, but one who is him[her]self taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow."¹⁴

The teacher must recognize his/her power in the classroom. S/he must see the classroom's potential as either a destructive place where student morale, self-image, confidence, etc. can be suppressed or as a creative space where knowledge can be created, skills and positive behavior can be fostered. By recognizing the power relations and mitigating the powerlessness many of our students feel, the space can be maximized for learning for liberation (from student to teacher and from teacher back to student).

Multiple Intelligences¹⁵

Using Howard Gardner's theory on Multiple Intelligences, this unit will be composed of lessons that incorporate and target a number of intelligences to facilitate student learning and success. I will use engaging lectures (verbal/linguistic) that will allow students to practice active listening and note taking (bodily-kinesthetic). Teaching students to use the tool of "metacognition" by guiding them in how to take note of their own thinking process will allow them to more effectively internalize the content; critical reading of primary source documents and "talking to the text" (visual/kinesthetic); Socratic seminar (interpersonal/verbal-linguistic); debate (interpersonal/verbal-linguistic); and performance pedagogy (interpersonal/verbal-linguistic/visual-spatial/musical).

Addressing teaching by recognizing that multiple intelligences exist, identifying our students strengths and building upon those strengths to develop as a well rounded student is a key to equitable and effective lessons.

Transformative Resistance¹⁶

This unit will continue to build student knowledge about the fight for civil rights as a way to move them to apply the values of the Civil Rights Movement (self-determination, sacrifice, responsibility to self and community, intellectual discipline, creativity, faith in humanity, resistance to oppression, love of life and commitment to justice) to the service of their own lives. Through these values, students will have developed a positive sense of the past, hope for the future, as well as a useful framework for affecting change in their lives. Most importantly, students can redirect their energy to excel as students and as servants and stakeholders in their community.

Rigorous/Relevant Coursework

Students will be challenged with "higher-order" questions through the study of sophisticated material. Through differentiating the instruction and assessment of the content, the high expectations of student performance will be met with equitable instruction of the material. In relation to the content, students will study primary source documents, complete various writing, engage in vigorous debate and discussions and develop creative interpretations/applications of the content through performance of a civil rights play.

We will compare and contrast the rich intellectual tradition of African Americans and their fight for civil and human rights. Students will be exposed to the writings of Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., June Jordan, among others.

In relation to the instruction, I will draw upon my experience with making sure that all text is organized to allow readers of different reading levels to access the material. I will support student reading with both strategies and graphic organizers to guide them.

Students will also be allowed and encouraged to complete their assignments within mixed- ability groups. The assignments themselves will incorporate the examination of the topic through a variety of perspectives.

The end result of their work will be measurable development based on established and clear criteria. Students will be taught to use presentation software in a creative and effective manner.

Educational Principles

"Take the best and leave the rest"

This is the principle of finding something valuable in any and all experiences.¹⁷ Given the conditions that many of my students survive on a daily basis, it often shapes their outlook, thus inhibiting them from seeing anything positive - whether in school, in interactions with adults or exposure to new ideas. I always tell my students that very few things, if any, are 100% good, or bad - that they must be able to find a positive lesson in any interaction, lesson, experience, etc.

"Honor the histories of our ancestors,"

This roots our study beyond the present. It holds us accountable to furthering our journey for progress. It gives us the long view to the immediacy of our struggles - individual as well as collective¹⁸

Education for Liberation

This emphasizes the task of using education to serve our respective communities by facilitating their evolution. To engage in pedagogy that is "problem posing", Paolo Freire believes, is to engage them in their completion, their fulfillment of their potential. Ultimately, this principle encourages our students to see progress as measurable not merely by the advancement of the individual, but by the progress and well-being of the whole community - Less incarceration, more education; less violence and more peace; less exploitation and more justice. Freire states that "problem-posing education" is

...prophetic (and as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the movement which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion an historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its objective..¹⁹

Teachers Toolbox

"Critical Summa-flection" - is a tool for active note-taking. Similar to the process of meta-cognition, it encourages the reader to "think about her/his thinking". Students take an aggressive approach (as opposed to a passive) to reading by 1. reading as if their lives depended upon it, 2. being okay with not knowing all the words, 3. concisely taking notes and 4. actively reflecting, questioning, connecting, opining/postulating alternatives.

"Socratic Seminar" - "The Socratic method of teaching is based on Socrates' theory that it is more important to enable students to think for themselves than to merely fill their heads with "right" answers. Therefore, he regularly engaged his pupils in dialogues by responding to their questions with questions, instead of answers. This process encourages divergent thinking rather than convergent thinking.²⁰

"Team-up/Break-it-down" - combines students into groups of 3-5 (sometimes self-selecting/sometimes identified mixed-ability groups). Students collectively critically summa-flect upon the text and share questions, connections, insights with each other. Teams then share an insight with the class until all information is exhausted.

"Talking To The Text (T4)" - Thinking is the process by which you and I come to know what we know. In short, we know what we know because we think about it! When we are introduced to a new concept, we might get overwhelmed or confused, and we sometimes are unable to "get it". So, the way I want you to improve your thinking and learning, is by trying this strategy of "getting it", called metacognition.

Metacognition is "talking to the text". To talk to the text is to do your thinking about the reading, on the reading itself. It makes you take what's going on in your head and put it on paper so you can look at it, think about it. By doing this, you can see how, what and maybe why you are thinking what you are thinking.

In this class, I want you to constantly reflect on your thinking. In other words, I want you to think about what is going on in your head, and then write it down on the paper. For example:

1. If you have a question about what you are reading, you should write it down.
2. If you can think about a personal connection to the reading, you should write it next to the part to which you are "connecting".
3. If there is a word that makes you think, "huh, what the hell does that mean?" circle it, get a dictionary and then write the most appropriate definition in the column.
4. If there is something that you think is important, highlight/underline it. Then, try to summarize that point in one sentence (incomplete sentences are fine in this case) in the margin.