January 08, 2007 Watson’s Choices for the 21st Century Education Program is doing nationwide outreach to high school teachers on the subject of slavery and slave trading in New England, in conjunction with the work of Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
Last month in Washington, DC, the Choices Program sponsored a keynote session titled “Slavery in the North” at the annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the nation’s largest association dedicated to social studies education. An audience of 600 educators from around the country gathered to hear the story of slavery in New York and New England from two leading scholars: James T. Campbell, associate professor of Africana studies and American civilization at Brown and chair of its Committee on Slavery and Justice, and James Horton, professor of American studies and history at George Washington University. Many audience members also visited Choice’s booth featuring A Forgotten History among its other curriculum units. In the past, NCSS has also published sections of Choices’ instructional materials on slavery in its professional journal, Social Education, reaching some 27,000 social studies teachers K-16.
Here in Rhode Island, Choices also gathered high school teachers from across New England last month for the fifth in a series of professional development institutes on slavery and slave trading in the region. The slavery institutes, which began in 2004 with funding from the US Department of Education, have varied in scope and scale from statewide to national, including one- to five-day institutes for teachers in the region and a seven-day institute for teachers from around the country. Choices staff members have also been invited to conduct workshops in Boston, Connecticut, Kansas City, New York, Michigan, and elsewhere, in addition to the often oversubscribed institutes in Rhode Island. In all, some 350 teachers have been reached directly through Choices' slavery institutes and workshops.
The Choices Program, which produces educational materials and provides professional development for teachers, brings critical discussion of history and foreign policy into high school classrooms nationwide. A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England is one of Choices’ more than 30 curriculum units. Since its publication in 2005, it has reached more than 1,500 classrooms around the country, helping to bring to light for students the history of northern US involvement in the slave trade and slave ownership in New England. Brown’s Committee on Slavery and Justice, which is leading a much broader public reflection on slavery, also distributed complimentary copies of the unit to all high school social studies teachers in Rhode Island and supported the most recent slavery institute held at Watson.
A Forgotten History presents background readings and lesson plans to help students explore slave trading and ownership in New England in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Armed with this background, students take on the role of the people of Rhode Island – the center of the American slave trade – and debate policy options that were considered in the state in 1783. Finally, students view the topic within the context of society today.
Teachers attending the slavery institute last month engaged in role-playing themselves, to explore how best to guide their students in the process. Groups of teachers presented the four options that Rhode Islanders faced in 1783, including a continuation of the ownership and trading of slaves, gradual emancipation, immediate and complete emancipation, and returning Africans to Africa. Listening, questioning, and arguing these options were teachers representing a cross-section of free citizens and slaves.
In lively portrayals of free blacks, fiery ministers, self-righteous slave traders, abolitionists, angry slaves, and others, the teachers ran through moral, religious, economic, natural, and social arguments for and against slavery. For instance, slavery was variously described as humane, morally unjust, a responsibility, counter to the Declaration of Independence, endorsed in the bible, against the laws of nature, and a sin.
These and other exercises from A Forgotten History were complemented by lectures from Joanne Pope Melish, associate professor of 19th century US history at the University of Kentucky, on such topics as the contribution of gradual emancipation in the North to the transfer of negative assumptions about slaves onto free blacks, leaving a legacy of racial bias that remains today.
Campbell has come away from his participation in the NCSS conference and from his previous participation in Choices’ slavery institutes seeing a very specific value in these activities. “Probably the most exciting aspect of the Choices Program, the NCSS session, and the slavery institutes is the way in which they bridge two constituencies that don't often connect with one another,” he said. “On the one hand, you have university-based historians who have been conditioned, by their graduate trainings and by the mounting pressures to publish in scholarly journals, to write for one another, without regard to any broader readership. On the other hand, you've got history teachers at the pre-collegiate level who are constantly looking for new knowledge, as well as for creative ways to share that knowledge with their students.”
Perhaps the greatest indication of Choices’ inroads around the country is the growing base of knowledge among high school teachers about a subject that has often been referred to by historians as “a forgotten story.” Sarah Kreckel, the curriculum writer leading Choices’ work on the subject of slavery, put it this way: “Since our curriculum unit was published – and since the Brown Committee started its work – the number of teachers who give me puzzled looks when I talk about New England slavery has decreased significantly. To me, that is a major milestone.”
Read an overview of A Forgotten History here.
Read the Slavery and Justice Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice here.