Students Learn about Civil Rights

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].