Teaching Strategies
Class Discussion and Journaling
The introduction of the unit will focus on student responses to the essential questions. Students will preview images and terms associated with the Civil Rights Movement to prompt them as needed. Students will record and share their responses.
As an introduction to comics and the Civil Rights Movement, students will read part of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. This preview will focus on the visual presentation of comics. Instruction on the visual display will help students identify the purpose of comic book features including narrative boxes and speech bubbles.
Instruction will emphasize Lewis’ study of The Montgomery Story as it relates to this curriculum unit. This comic inspired John Lewis as an adolescent. The comic was distributed in Cairo, Egypt. It influenced some protestors during the nonviolent mass movement that led to the overthrow of the Egyptian government in 2011 during the Arab Spring.52 The Montgomery Story will provide students with immediate evidence in responding to the questions related to the significance of the Civil Rights Movement. Lastly, I hope the idea of studying methods of nonviolent resistance just as John Lewis did will pique student interest in the unit.
The essential questions previewed in the first discussion will be revisited throughout the unit to evaluate student learning: What was the Civil Rights Movement? How is the Civil Rights Movement significant? How does the study of history help us understand our present? How do movements begin and end?
While reading March, students will engage in journaling to reflect on what they have learned about the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and its relation to our present moment. There are multiple parallels between March and our current experience. Lewis’ segregated and underfunded schooling even after Brown v. Board mirrors the de facto segregation of today. Many major events including the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott affected him as a youth. Students will be able to relate with the idea of being changed by historic moments as witnesses or participants in movements like the George Floyd protests. His teenage inspiration of applying Martin Luther King Jr.’s gospel of bettering society relates to core ideals of BLM and other social movements.53 The brutalization of nonviolent protestors by police forces during the George Floyd protests is akin to the violence committed by white Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Footage from "Bloody Sunday," the police attack on civil right marchers in 1965, draws direct connections to the use of police violence during the George Floyd protests.54 These journals will help me gain insight on facilitating discussions around the graphic novel and aspects of modern social movements.
One of the final assessments of the essential questions will align with Wineburg’s approach to teaching historical inquiry. The Stanford History Education Group developed a reflection activity related to the Greensboro sit-ins.55 The assessment included an iconic photograph of four Black students denied service by white Americans in Woolworths. The assessment asked what event was represented in the photograph and why was it historically significant. These questions will complement the essential questions in our curriculum unit and will encourage students to display their historical thinking. It will allow them to identify the event in the photograph and connect its significance to the sit-ins in March. At this point in the unit, the class will have only focused on the Nashville sit-in movement. Students will be able to draw from their own historical knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, BLM or the George Floyd protests beyond the curriculum unit.
Inquiry Based Learning - Gallery Walk
The class will move to the Richmond sit-in movement after concluding March. The components of the content objectives associated with primary sources related to Richmond during the sit-in movement and the George Floyd protests lend themselves to gallery walk activities. Links and adapted copies of the newspaper articles and video resources identified in the curriculum unit will be printed and posted along the wall of a classroom or hallway. Student groups will move from resource to resource and take notes on the bibliographic information, perspectives, and significance of the source material. The documents focusing on the Richmond sit-in movement will allow students to compare perspectives of a paper owned by Black Americans to one owned by white Americans.
The materials from the 1960 sit-ins in Richmond will help students support the Civil Rights Movement’s evolution and importance. During the gallery walk, the dates of the article will be removed. Students will be asked to explain which publications and events occurred first and to support their conclusion. The primary resources will center around four events: the first day of sit-ins in Richmond, the initial arrests of the Black students, public response, and integration. This activity will require students to discuss how they ordered the events and why. The students will vote on the order before the teacher reveals the correct chronology to the class. Students will be able to justify the significance of the Civil Rights Movement from their knowledge of the sit-in movement through reading March or through the newspapers’ reference to a national sit-in movement. Interaction with multiple documents will allow students to synthesize information and display their historical reasoning.
The class will next move from Richmond in the 1960s to the summer of 2020. The collection of articles and videos detailing the George Floyd protests in Richmond will be used to compare the memory of our class versus history. Before interacting with the primary documents, students will reflect and discuss the following questions: What was the George Floyd protest? How did it start? Did it end; how do you know? These questions allow students to display their historical thinking. It also allows for unprompted connections to the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement. Student groups will engage with source material during a gallery walk.
These materials will focus on the initial protests in Richmond, the city’s response, and the aftermath. The material will be used for two separate activities. The first activity examines the idea of a start and an end to the protests. This section will highlight the preceding Black Lives Matter movement, the demands of protestors during the George Floyd protests, and activist reflections a year out from the protests. Students will then revisit the initial questions: What was the George Floyd protest? How did it start? Did it end; how do you know? After class discussion, the teacher will ask if the protests connect to the Civil Rights Movement and how. Focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and its consequences can help students make sense of their understanding of the George Floyd protests. Studying past social movements shapes our understandings of the present and highlights how movements evolve.
The second activity will focus on historical inquiry. Students will sequence events based on chronology. The sources will examine the initial use of tear gas on protestors, the mayor’s apology for the “unintentional” use of tear gas, the continued use of tear gas, and the mayor’s retrospective. The dates from the article will be removed. Student groups will order them before the teacher reveals the correct sequence. If the mayor’s apology was taken at face value, the logical ordering would place uses of tear gas before the apology. This order conflicts with reality.
Wineburg’s methods for historical inquiry helps make sense of the mayor’s op-ed. In asking students what bibliographic information is provided, they would be able to identify the publisher, The New York Times. A precursory search on a cellphone would tell students this paper is based in New York City. It would tell them it is a big paper.
This discovery leads to questions on how or why this document was created. Students could speculate on the possibility of controlling a narrative on a national stage. They could conclude it is about monetary benefits or fame.
The most important reflection is on what this document tells us about the past. What does the “unintentional” use of tear gas mean? What happens if we only read the mayor’s account? Students will have to make sense of the op-ed in relation to their prior knowledge and the presented sources. The op-ed does not acknowledge the complexities of the movement. The use of “unintentional” absolved the mayor of wrongdoing. His account buried the police’s continued role in attacking protestors. The more complex and critical narratives including the Richmond Times-Dispatch article that outlines the protestors’ role in taking down the Confederate statues do not benefit the mayor on a national stage. Studying the mayor’s op-ed and other sources will be beneficial because it exposes how memory can replace history.
A Field Trip to the Future
Several museums document the Civil Rights Movement. It is likely that artifacts from the George Floyd protests will make their way to some of these museums or into museums of their own. Many artifacts related to the protests in Richmond including a bus set ablaze by protestors have been collected by museums for preservation.56
In this activity, students will select artifacts for a museum exhibit that reflect contemporary social movements. Students will imagine themselves as museum curators in the year 2071. Students will document how a contemporary social movement evolved. They may select the George Floyd protests or choose another event or social movement to represent an issue of interest to them.
One of the artifacts they select for their exhibit will predate a traditional start date of their social movement. Historians and curators often emphasize the idea that a movement originates in events that occurred earlier. As an example, they could select Black Lives Matters as a precursor to the George Floyd protests. The chronology of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee starts with slavery in the United States.57
Students will demonstrate their understanding of historical significance by making a prediction on the consequences of the social movement of their focus, as well. Beyond their own reflective experiences, students will study the idea of future societies looking to the past. They will review the retrospectives in the curriculum unit including the Richmond Times-Dispatch articles published 50 years after the sit-ins. Additionally, students will read Franny Choi's “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History.”58 The poem focuses on a classroom trip to a museum. The setting is a future utopian society. Police do not exist. Objects like nightsticks seem terrifying and unconscionable to members of their egalitarian society. Reading and discussing the poem will help students realize new possibilities outside of our present mode of thinking. In reading this poem, the newspaper retrospectives, and applying their historic knowledge, students will demonstrate historical thinking by justifying artifacts to explain the present to the future.
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