Choices in Little Rock Seminar for Educators in Catholic School Settings
Path Creator: Clark
This seminar is offered in partnership with the Catholic Schools Office of the Archdiocese of Boston and Facing History and Ourselves. In 1957, nine black teenagers faced the threats of angry mobs on their first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Their attempt to desegregate Central High School ignited a crisis that historian Taylor Branch described as “the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War” and illuminated the question of membership in a democracy. Using our resource Choices in Little Rock, participants examine ways to engage students in the issues raised by the civil rights movement in the U.S. and their implications for today.
This teaching
strategy will be used throughout the seminar
Facing History and Ourselves is committed to helping students develop their ability to critically examine their surroundings from multiple perspectives and to make informed judgments about what they see and hear. Keeping a journal is one tool that Facing History has found instrumental in helping students' develop these skills. A journal might be defined as any place where thoughts are recorded and stored. Loose-leaf and bound notebooks both make excellent journals. Many students find that writing or drawing in a journal helps them process ideas, formulate questions, and retain information. Journals make learning visible by providing a safe, accessible space for students to share thoughts, feelings and uncertainties. In this way, journals are also an assessment tool-something teachers can review to better understand what their students know, what they are struggling to understand, and how their thinking has changed over time. In addition to strengthening students' critical thinking skills, journal writing serves other purposes as well. Journals help nurture classroom community. Through reading and commenting on journals, teachers build relationships with students. Frequent journal writing also helps students become more fluent in expressing their ideas in writing or speaking.
Students use their journals in different ways. Some students may record ideas throughout class while others may only use it when there is a particular teacher-driven assignment. Some students need prompts to support their writing, while other students feel more comfortable expressing their ideas without any external structure. Just as students vary in how they use their journals, teachers vary in their approach to journal writing as well
Rationale:
Identity charts are a graphic tool that helps students consider the many factors that shape who we are as individuals and as communities. They can be used to deepen students’ understanding of themselves, groups, nations and historical and literary figures. Sharing their own Identity charts with peers can help students build relationships and breakdown stereotypes. In this way, identity charts can be utilized as an effective classroom community-building tool.
Procedure:
Step one: Preparation
Before creating identity charts, you might have the class brainstorm categories we consider when thinking about the question, “Who am I?” such as our role in a family (e.g., daughter, sister, mother, etc), our hobbies and interests (e.g., guitar player, football fan, etc), our background (e.g., religion, race, nationality, hometown, or place of birth), and our physical characteristics. It is often helpful to show students a completed identity chart before they create one of their own. Alternatively, you could begin this activity by having students create identity charts for themselves. After sharing their charts, students can create a list of the categories they have used to describe themselves and then use this same list of categories as a guide when creating identity charts for other people or groups.
Step two: Create identity charts for a historical or literary figure, group or nation
First, ask students to write the name of the character, figure, group or nation in the center of a piece of paper. Then students can look through text for evidence that helps them answer the question, “Who is this person?” or, “Who is this group?” Encourage students to include quotations from the text on their identity charts, as well as their own interpretations of the character or figure based on their reading. Students can complete identity charts individually or in small groups. Alternatively, students could contribute ideas to a class version of an identity chart that you keep on the classroom wall.
Step three: Use identity charts to track new learning
Reviewing and revising identity charts throughout a unit is one way to help students keep track of their learning.
Little Things Are Big
In the 1950s, segregation and ideas about "race" shaped the way Americans in all parts of the nation saw one another as well as the way they saw themselves. As writer Jesus Colon discovered on a subway ride in New York City, those ideas also influenced the decisions people made about one another
3 episodes, 56 minutes each, on three videotapes or 1 DVD
Source: California Newsreel
What is this thing we call race? Where did the idea come from? Race: The Power of an Illusion compels viewers to examine some of their most fundamental beliefs about concepts of race.
Race is one topic where we all think we're experts. Yet ask 10 people to define race or name "the races," and you're likely to get 10 different answers. Few issues are characterized by more contradictory assumptions and myths, each voiced with absolute certainty.
In producing this series, we felt it was important to go back to first principles and ask, What is this thing called "race?" - a question so basic it is rarely raised. What we discovered is that most of our common assumptions about race - for instance, that the world's people can be divided biologically along racial lines - are wrong. Yet the consequences of racism are very real.
How do we make sense of these two seeming contradictions? Our hope is that this series can help us all navigate through our myths and misconceptions, and scrutinize some of the assumptions we take for granted. In that sense, the real subject of the film is not so much race but the viewer, or more precisely, the notions about race we all hold.
We hope this series can help clear away the biological underbrush and leave starkly visible the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that disproportionately channel advantages and opportunities to white people. Perhaps then we can shift the conversation from discussing diversity and respecting cultural difference to building a more just and equitable society.
Tuesday, Connections -Exploring the Consequences of Plessy v. Ferguson- The Road to Brown docmentary
This film tells the story of the legal campaign against segregation that launched the Civil Rights Movement. It is also a moving tribute to a visionary black lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, “the man who killed Jim Crow.” By guiding students through the world of segregation sanctioned by the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision, the cases Houston waged during the 1930s, and the final triumph in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education, this film provides a concise history of how African Americans struggled for full legal equality under the constitution.
2. Fighting Back (1957-62)
Traces the African American community’s rejection of "separate but equal" education, from the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision to the efforts of the first black high school and college students to integrate white schools.
Rationale:
Reader’s theater is an effective way to help students process dilemmas experienced by characters in a text. In this activity, groups of students are assigned a small portion of the text to present to their peers. As opposed to presenting skits of the plot, reader’s theater asks students to create a performance that reveals a message, theme, or conflict represented by the text. The more familiarity students have with reader’s theater, the more proficient they become at using the words of the text to depict concepts and ideas.
In 1965, Catholic nuns from across the country answered Martin Luther King's call to join the voting rights marches in Selma, Alabama. These courageous women became powerful agents of change. Nearly 40 years later, they look back on the civil rights movement, their role in it, and how it changed their lives.
Format: *
Activity:
1. Introduce the theme of community by asking student to consider following quote on community and obligation. Display the following quote without attribution:
"I love my daughters more than my nieces,
my nieces more than my cousins,
my cousins more than my neighbors.
But that doesn't mean that we detest our neighbors."
2. Use the think-pair-share process to debrief this quote.
3. With a larger group, focus a discussion on the following questions or themes:
•What is this person's vision of community?
•In what ways does this vision of community make sense?
•Does this vision make you at all uncomfortable? Why or why not?
4. Discuss the idea of a hierarchy of caring. What happens if we expand this hierarchy out to include people like us in the form of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, political beliefs, profession, clubs, schools, etc.? Who would you save from a burning building first? Who are we obligated to and in what ways?
Introduce the idea of a universe of obligation. In the introduction to Chapter 2 of Holocaust and Human Behavior, Helen Fein defines this important concept as the circle of individuals and groups "toward whom obligations are owed. to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for [amends]" (HHB, p. 56).
5. Now read entire quote (from The New Yorker, April 28, 1997):
I love my daughters more than my nieces, my nieces more than my cousins, my cousins more than my neighbors. But that doesn't mean we detest our neighbors. The fact of being Francophile doesn't require being xenophobic. The fact that I prefer the French does not mean that I detest the English. I like them less than the French - over all. Because it could happen that I like an Englishman better than a Frenchman, individually, or a Senegalese more than an inhabitant of Saint-Cloud. It depends on his quality, on his affinities with me, on his opinions, and all that. But I think that it's very difficult to make people understand.
6. Before discussing the quote further, identify the author of the quote, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder and President of The National Front, a French far-right political party. For more information about Le Pen, view the Anti-Defamation League's website.
7. Using think-pair-share, re-examine the entire quote now, and with the context of Le Pen's political viewpoint. Return to a larger group discussion, and revisit the concept of the universe of obligation.
8. Have students use their journals to further develop the concept of a universe of obligation.
Rationale:
“Save the Last Word for Me” is a discussion strategy that requires all students to participate as active speakers and listeners. Its clearly defined structure helps shy students share their ideas and ensures that frequent speakers practice being quiet. It is often used as a way to help students debrief a reading or film.
Procedure:
Step one: Preparation
Identify a reading or video excerpt that will serve as the catalyst for this activity.
Step two: Students read and respond to text
Have students read or view the selected text. Ask students to highlight three sentences that particularly stood out for them and write each sentence on the front of an index card. On the back they should write a few sentences explaining why they chose that quote - what it meant to them, reminded them of, etc. They may have connected it to something that happened to them in their own life, to a film or book they saw or read, or to something that happened in history or is happening in current events.
Step three: Sharing in small groups
Divide the students into groups of three, labeling one student A, one B, and the other C. Invite “A”s to read one of their chosen quotations. Then students B and C discuss the quotation. What do they think it means? Why do they think these words might be important? To whom? After several minutes, as the A students to read the back of their cards (or to explain why they picked the quotation), thus having “the last word.” This process continues with the B student sharing and then student C.
Found poems are created through the careful selection and organization of words and phrases from existing text. Writing found poems provides a structured way for students to review material and synthesize their learning.
From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives by simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders took brave and decided actions to dismantle the structures of discrimination—specifically segregated interstate bus travel—through nonviolence.
Freedom Riders features testimony from the Riders themselves as well as from state and federal government officials, and journalists who witnessed the rides firsthand.
Democracy in Action supports educators and students in their use of the documentary Freedom Riders. This film tells the powerful story of the Freedom Riders taking brave and decided actions to dismantle the structures of discrimination—specifically segregated interstate bus travel—through nonviolence.
Democracy in Action prompts students to consider the relationship between the political context in which the Rides took place and the stories and motivations of those who became Freedom Riders. The guide begins with an exploration of the identity and choices of the Riders. Then students explore the greater context of the Rides from the institutionalized and culturally-accepted racism of Jim Crow South to the adoption of nonviolent direct action to inspire social change. From this groundwork, students analyze the complexities of the relationships between the Kennedy administration, the media, and the activists in the ultimately successful desegregation of buses and bus facilities.
