A simulation of an auction during a fifth-grade lesson about slavery last week is just the latest illustration of why we need better ways to teach hard history.
Teach and learn about the struggle to integrate Central High School with video clips of Dr. Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, and with accompanying lessons and texts.
Local history advocates say preservation, education and healing should include community redevelopment and respecting the agency of descendants of enslaved people.
T. Elijah Hawkes has been a public school principal for 13 years. He is currently principal at Randolph Union, in Randolph, Vermont. He was founding principal of the James Baldwin School in New York City. His writings about adolescence, public school and democracy have appeared in the Huffington Post, Education Week, Kappan, Schools: Studies in Education, and in two books published by Rethinking Schools: The New Teacher Book and Rethinking Sexism, Gender and Sexuality. You can follow him on Twitter @ElijahHawkes.
A viral video of high school students and a Native elder in D.C.—and the responses that followed—shows why we need to introduce students to the concept of settler-colonialism.
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