Historical and contemporary issues and events do not happen in isolation. Often, students miss the connections among historical and contemporary issues and events, and through this process, they struggle to see the relevance between the past and present. Helping students make thematic connections with civil rights issues during the century after the U.S. Civil War was the focus for the project at the I3 Academy in Birmingham, Alabama.

We started with the sixth grade teacher’s first unit, Reconstruction, creating a one-week instructional sequence focusing on Jim Crow segregation laws designed to keep African Americans second-class citizens. Throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, we will design and implement nine one-week instructional sequences on different civil rights issues across 150 years of U.S. History. We just began our sixth one-week sequence examining how the Tuskegee Airmen defied racial stereotypes and strove for civil rights during World War II. In each instructional sequence, we ask analysis prompts and craft assessments designed to help students make thematic connections among similar issues and challenges that civil rights activists faced.

Our year-long project is being implemented at the I3 Academy, a new free public charter school in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the first year to include the sixth grade, as a new grade is added each year. The three I’s in the I3 name stand for imagine, investigate, and innovate. The school’s mission is to “empower learners to become agents of change who solve the problems they see in their world.” The 6th grade class is 93% African American, which made the focus on thematically teaching civil rights issues in U.S. history a good fit. The sixth grade social studies teacher at the I3 Academy, Mrs. Katie Rowland Ellis, is an experienced teacher with more than a decade in different schools in the Birmingham metropolitan area. Mrs. Rowland Ellis argues that her focus in teaching social studies is “to make students passionate about learning about the world around them. I love to use the history from our content standards and have students form options about the way they want to impact their world. It is not just about learning dates, people, places, and events. It is making passionate connections to the content. This trade book project has enhanced this goal by having students learn and connect to impactful leaders that they can be inspired by.”

Each instructional sequence is centered around a trade book and includes primary sources to scaffold the information from the trade book. Many of the books selected are award winners, including the NCSS notable trade book, Harlem’s Little Blackbird (Watson & Robinson, 2012). Trade books allow students to explore a topic in more depth and to humanize the historical figures being examined. We provide the following table with the trade books that we used and eras on which each book focused. 

We did not start out having students make thematic connections in our analysis prompts and summative assessments. Our goal was to orient students to the focus of the project, since thematic teaching is not something that is stressed in Alabama. The students were making subtle thematic connections without any prompting from the teacher or researchers. This can be seen with the student example of the Janus figure that a student made in which he argues that Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells both advocated for women’s suffrage and civil rights. Students have made more direct thematic connections as we have progressed through the year-long project. For example, several students pointed out during the Tulsa Race Massacre instructional sequence that violence experienced by African Americans in Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921 was similar to the experiences highlighted in the Ida B. Wells book. Students argued violence was a tool employed to prevent African Americans from making economic, social, cultural, and political gains.

These direct thematic connections we suspect are the result of the analysis prompts students were asked regarding parallel issues civil rights activists faced. The teacher and researchers provided scaffolding to students through individual and class discussions to assist them in making these connections.

We have already observed positive outcomes in just the first six months. Students have demonstrated a curiosity and enjoyment of learning more about civil rights activists. During one of our visits to the I3 Academy, a student stopped Jeremiah and said, “I like the fact that we are learning about other African Americans than Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.” The thematic teaching project allowed us to integrate lesser-known historical figures into Mrs. Rowland Ellis’s social studies curriculum. This lets participating students see how underrepresented historical figures were also agents of change. 

Students are able to examine how racial discrimination pierced every facet of African Americans’ daily lives in the century after the U.S. Civil War. Our approach to teaching civil rights issues moves Black history from a month in a school year to the driving force of the U.S. history curriculum. In a time when many state legislatures are trying to restrict the teaching of race issues in schools, the students at the I3 Academy are learning about the central role African Americans and systemic racism have played in shaping U.S. history.

References

Watson, R., & Robinson, C. (2012). Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The story of Florence Mills.

Random House.