February 7, 2007, Brookline, MA- On Tuesday January 29th, students,
parents, teachers, and community members gathered at The Lincoln School
in Brookline to hear Dr. Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine,
share his personal account of life during the civil rights era. Dr.
Roberts, who in 1957 helped to end segregation in American schools by
integrating into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, spoke
about his experiences in a poignant and inspiring dialogue that served
as the culminating event of a six-week long project by the 4th and 8th
grade students. The multifaceted project explored the history of
discrimination and the civil rights movement, combining history,
literature, art, and self-exploration. Before his evening appearance,
Dr. Roberts spent the day with the students, admiring the work that
they had done and answering their questions.
"It was an incredible group effort," said Pat Rigley, praising not only
the students, but everyone involved in the project. Rigley, who teaches
7th and 8th grade English, organized the project with the help of
fellow teachers, and in cooperation with the non-profit organization
Facing History and Ourselves, an educational organization based in
Brookline who provided the students with a wealth of materials
including photos, films, books, and a comprehensive curriculum entitled, Choices in Little Rock.
During the project the students took part in a number of artistic and
academic assignments. Before they began the 8th graders read Melba
Pattillo Beals's biography, Warrior's Don't Cry, and studied the cases of Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson,
while the younger students engaged in discussions with their teachers
about the civil rights era. Then the two grade levels came together in
a cooperative pairing of fourth and eight grade students to share an
array of images, narratives, and personal accounts which gave the
students the opportunity to step back in history and look at the real
faces of those who were discriminated against and explore their own
responses.
The pairing of the 4th and 8th grade students allowed them to share
their knowledge with each other. Novels and documentaries allowed the
8th graders to experience a sophisticated level of scholarship and
understanding, while the 4th graders were able to view and create
images of what they were learning. Together the students created a
number of projects to document what they learned and how they grew.
"It was obvious that they all really enjoyed the whole experience," Ms.
Rigley noted. "In a lot of ways the 8th graders became teachers and
found out how challenging that could be, but all the students learned a
lot from each other." The older students chose books to share with
their partners, and at the end of each class the students joined
together to share what they learned and how it affected them. Students
wrote poems, created identity boxes, drew pictures, wrote essays, and
documented all of it in their daily journal entries before stitching
their work together to form a paper quilt. But the pinnacle of the
experience came with Dr. Roberts' visit to the school.
"He did a wonderful job speaking and fielding their questions," said
fourth grade teacher Paula Reilly. "They were desperately wrestling
with what he endured." As a high school student, Dr. Roberts had to
suffer the daily discrimination and persecution as he fought for his
right for an equal education. "They couldn't imagine what he went
through."
"Meeting Terrence Roberts was like having a book character jump off the
pages and come to life... it was sad to learn how painful it was for him
to be discriminated against 50 years ago when all he wanted was a good
education," remarked Jake Smith, one of Ms. Reilly's 4th graders.
"Having him come to The Lincoln School is a memory we will never
forget."
Facing History and The Lincoln School have had a long-standing
relationship of cooperation in education. Facing History and Ourselves
is a nonprofit organization that promotes democratic citizenship
through curriculum and strategies for teachers, students, and
communities, employing an interdisciplinary approach to teaching
history. The teachers from The Lincoln School who collaborated on this
project, including the preparation for the visit by Terrence Roberts
were: Sabrina Avnor, Linda Cohn, Martha Gammie, Roz Gold, Pat McEachen,
Paula Reilly, Pat Rigley, Kathy Tower, and Steve Wilmore.
For more information, contact Caitlin Meyer [1].
