Takeaways from the Teaching Black/Latinx Studies: Lessons from the Pilot Year Webinar
On February 10, 2022, more than 140 teachers, students, administrators, and community members gathered virtually to learn for the ARTLC’s “Teaching the Black and Latinx Studies Course: Lessons from the Pilot Year.”
Legislation passed in 2019 by the state will require every public high school in Connecticut to offer the Black and Latinx Studies course in the 2022-2023 school year. Ahead of this mandate, many high schools chose to pilot the course this year.
At the beginning of the event, Daisha Brabham, an ARTLC teacher organizer who is teaching the course this year at Windsor High School explained, “teaching really comes from community… so I think that there's a really strong power and a kind of collective knowledge that we have and can bring to the course.” Over the next hour and a half, teachers and students from Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven, Staples High School in Westport, and Westhill High School in Stamford shared their experiences and provided some key insights that allowed us to build that collective knowledge. Below are 10 main takeaways from the discussion.
1. Importance of Collaborative, Collective, Project-Based Work
Nataliya Braginsky and her students, Jennifer and Maxwell, provided examples of how in their class at Metro, students work together on projects that then extend beyond their individual classroom. For example, this year students created a pop-up Latinx History Museum to educate each other; Braginsky notes, “A lot of our guests were ninth graders and it's mostly twelfth graders who are teaching them, so I just love this model of older students teaching younger students.”
Jennifer talked about how empowering the experience was for her, as a Latinx student in particular, to work with a partner and present their findings to other students and even teachers. In the classroom on the day to day, Jennifer emphasized how students were not just receivers of information waiting for an assessment but are actively learning from each other through active participation in conversations.
The fluidity of the curriculum and the project-based assessment style also allows for more collaborative learning. As Staples High student Madeline observed, in her class students really drive the learning and the flow of the conversation, allowing for deeper connections and engagement. Jennifer also discussed how the fluidity and power students had in directing the course was a highlight.
This collaborative and empowering approach to the classroom is having an inadvertent effect: more students are wanting to become teachers. As Braginsky observes in their classroom:
“One of the powers of this course is that students see, ‘I can be teaching this,’ [or] ‘I could be teaching in this interactive way,’ and they really take on the roles of teachers.”
2. The Importance of Knowledge Production Extending Beyond the Classroom
In Braginsky’s classroom, for the third year now, students have contributed to an interactive map of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx history in New Haven. The map has been viewed tens of thousands of times. Braginsky views this work as being a public service:
“The work students are doing, the knowledge production is really a public service. They're educating their community and I just find that powerful and inspiring.”
For students, the work feels more meaningful and important as well when they know it’s extending beyond the classroom. Both Maxwell and Jennifer noted that they were not just working on this project for a grade, but felt this would be a legacy they could leave to benefit their community.
Staples High School student Gemelle talked about how empowering it was to share the things she learned in this class with others outside the classroom, saying:
It was fun to teach other people, and just know that I'm kind of doing something good in the world, because I'm educating more people on being inclusive.”
3. The Importance of Rooting Content Locally
Braginsky emphasized that looking at local history is first and foremost, engaging for students and secondly, is a microcosm that reflects larger histories, in Connecticut and in the country and beyond.
Maxwell, a student who has lived and attended school in New Haven for the past 13 years, talked about how meaningful and surprising working on the New Haven Black/Latinx/Indigenous history map was.
“I've gone to a new haven school for 13 years so since I was three years old, I thought I knew everything about new haven, you know, but then this class really taught me that there is so much more to know and that history is not something that ever stops. You really learn like the more you grow up, the more history grows around you. This project really helped New Haven feel warmer to me because we learned about it.”
Maxwell elegantly stated the pride he felt throughout this project, both in his city and Black and BIPOC communities:
“It really taught me to be proud of where I'm from and that New Haven is a beautiful city and that Black people and BIPOC people built the city and they should be honored for it.”
4. The Value of Teaching Histories That Have Long Been Excluded
Gemelle talked about how special it was to see her family’s history taught in the form of the Haitian Revolution. While she says that knew most of the history already from her parents, it was powerful to see other students learning about positive things about her family’s country. She said:
“I really didn't think anyone, or any white people at our school, really cared about these issues, so it was really interesting to see that there's a lot of positive feedback.”
It provided her, as a Black student, “hope for the world.” Witnessing white students “willing to unlearn certain things and really learn to become a better person and be more inclusive of people of color and LGBT people… is really just refreshing.”
Jennifer also talked about how what she is learning in this class allowed her to go home to her parents and community and engage with them about this content. It is exciting for her to “learn history that I would have never learned without this course” and then share it.
Ruth-Terry Walden, as a teacher at Westhill High School, explained that for the past 20 years, she “threw out the playbook” and has been teaching these hard histories because she saw that it was what her students were hungry for and needed. She emphasized the importance of teaching Black, Latinx, and Indigenous histories because it is these histories that contextualize social issues today:
“It's important for us to understand how valuable these classes are and how it's a gateway not just to teaching Black and Latinx history and literature, but how it's a gateway to teaching who we are, as a people.”
5. The Importance of Learning and Unlearning
Slade, another student of Schager’s at Staples High School, talked about how much weight this class held for him and the difficulty of learning and unlearning in this class:
“This class requires a huge amount of patience because you're going to get something dropped on you and then it's gonna hit you like an anvil and then you're going to be like ‘Wow, that hurt,’ but then you have to be like, ‘Why did that hurt?’and then ‘How can I remedy it?’ You have to kind of look at the causation behind everything and contextualize it.”
While it was hard, he ultimately believed the class was extremely important:
“It definitely takes some adjusting and takes a lot of willpower to really unlearn and relearn, but it’s for the greater food of our society.”
Madeline, another student at Staples, also raised the importance of not continuing to shelter students at predominantly white schools from these histories, as they will be going out into the world and interacting with all different types of people:
“If we don’t acknowledge the history that we’ve played a part in, that’s just harmful for us in the future.”
6. The Importance of Creating a Safe Community for Learning
Madeline mentioned that at the beginning of Ms. Schager’s class, a lot of time was spent to ensure that it was a safe space for students to feel comfortable sharing their different opinions and dealing with arguments if they came up at all:
“I just love that the students that are there want to talk about these things. The community of the class is so distinct from my past classes, because they want to have the conversations and I just feel so privileged to be able to sit and just listen to my peers talk about their history.”
As Slade states:
“This class is designed to make you comfortable with uncomfortable subjects.”
In order for students to successfully be able to navigate these hard histories, it is vital that they feel comfortable in the space.
Part of this also includes the teacher's willingness to be vulnerable with their students. Ms. Schager explained that in her classroom, she always has to acknowledge her own limitations as well as the limitations of the curriculum. This transparency is a vital part of being an anti-racist educator.
7. The Importance of Centering Excluded Histories
Ruth-Terry Walden discussed how deeply engaging her students found this content; how they asked for more, would talk about it outside of class, and would dive deeper into it of their own accord. From this experience, she believes that:
“If it's that rich, then it's not something that we should move to the side, this should be front and center for all of us, because these are the children that we’re teaching today, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of color, regardless of origin. If this is what they're engaged in and if this is what they're dialoguing and discussing about, this is front and center for us.”
8. Integrating Pop Culture and the Now
Ruth-Terry Walden emphasized these histories are important because they better help students to understand the world they are currently navigating and the social issues that are affecting their lives. Daisha Brabham seconded this point, saying:
“Learning from our students is so important. So often our students are saying to us, ‘We want to learn about us.’ But that goes far beyond just kind of culture or identity. It's also just, ‘I want to learn about my time, I want to learn about what I'm experiencing, I want to come about and learn about these names and discussions’ you know.”
9. Depth Over Breadth: Highlighting Empowering Histories
In thinking about the question of what to include or not include in the curriculum, all the teachers emphasized the importance of depth over breadth. It is impossible to include everything; therefore, it’s vital to pick content that is experiential, engaging, and connects with historical movements and present-day conditions
Teachers Braginsky, Schager, and Walden all also brought up the importance of telling stories of resistance and cultural production and using those empowering narratives to drive much of the curriculum. Walden talked about how she always starts her courses with pre-colonial history:
“For our children, our black and brown children and our indigenous children… [it is important] to understand that there were civilizations, there were people, there were languages, there were customs, there were accomplishments before Europeans even touched the soil. So that's important because that builds self-esteem that builds self-confidence that lets our children know that they come from people who accomplished things.”
Brabham also explored the importance of teaching children that so many social movements came from collaborations that were multi-racial and multiethnic. She emphasized that the goal isn’t to teach students everything; rather it is to help them become lifelong learners:
“I do think that it is really important… thinking about how we approach the course mentally, of not feeling like we have to have our students learn every single thing because that's not realistic. You're not there to deposit all of this information to students who are kind of empty vessels, but rather to help guide them in how they see the world because we're all inheritors of it.”
10. It’s Not Just What You Teach, It’s How You Teach It
Finally, Brabham brought up the fact that Social Emotional Learning and Anti-Racist teaching is much deeper than just what you teach; it’s also about how you teach it. Through leaning into collaborative and project-based learning, you have the opportunity to teach students not only the content but also deeper learning skills with greater retention.
As Slade said:
“With a project, the critical thinking involved forces you to really think about the theme that you're trying to convey with that project and have it stick with you. I still remember most of my projects that I've done in this class and most of my writing. I don't remember a single quiz in any other class.”
Brabham emphasized the power that this course can have as a model for how all of education can be done.
“We need to see this course as a model for how we look at education. We have a vision that we're sharing on this call, of how we see public education, the real true potential that it can be. And so I think that when it comes down to assessment, really thinking deliberately about what kind of skills you want your students to leave the classroom with.”
Conclusion:
All together, the event was a remarkable testament to the power of this course and collective learning. For teachers teaching or interested in teaching this course, Ruth-Terry Walden emphasized: “Don’t be afraid to ask what you don’t know.”
Walden urged teachers to reach out to the Anti Racist Teaching and Learning Collective. which was created by educators and students for educators, to create a space for support and collective learning:
“For new teachers and for the course: don't be afraid to ask what you don't know because you're being supported. In other words, the Anti Racist Teaching and Learning Collective was created to serve as a human resource for teachers out there. And we've learned from each other and and and we're giving we're open. Because we believe in the content, we believe in what we're teaching, because we know what it means to our students and how it engages them.”