Teachers are hesitant to educate students on Virginia’s painful history of racial terror. As a result, teaching hard history has been overlooked in the Virginia high school curriculum. However, the collective silence is changing.
Communities have begun to honor lynching victims who had remained invisible due to racial injustice and inequities. The Governor of Virginia created the Commission on African American History Education and tasked the committee with reviewing and recommending comprehensive improvements to how African American history is taught in Virginia schools. Leaders at the state and local level, as well as community members, are demanding that painful histories are included in the curriculum.
Since the inception of the Racial Terror website, Dr. De Fazio has invited interested parties to engage with his research and materials in creative ways that produce new knowledge. At James Madison University, a group of interdisciplinary colleagues from the College of Education, Justice Studies, and the Libraries worked collaboratively with graduate students to write lesson plans centered on lynchings in Jim Crow Virginia. Dr. Taylor Jaffee, the Social Studies methods instructor, and Dr. Cancienne, the English methods instructor, designed and implemented a Racial Terror Lesson Plan assignment in their high school methods courses in the fall of 2020. The courses included 48 graduate students. Their lesson plans will be shared openly on OER Commons and the Racial Terror in Virginia website.
The “Teaching Hard Histories for Racial Healing: Lynching in Virginia Curriculum Project” seeks to provide curriculum development, professional learning experiences, and program evaluation for current 9th through 12th grade Social Studies and English teachers on lynching in Virginia. The project builds on recently approved edits to the 2022 Virginia Standards of Learning for K-12 History & Social Sciences. These changes center African American history throughout the curriculum. The learning experiences of pre-service teachers are grounded in authentic and open authorship and serves as an opportunity to explore the role of open resources in education. Pre-service teachers will benefit from these experiences as they enter the workforce.
The presenters will share how the Teaching Hard Histories project represents the complexity of integrating social justice work into the curriculum. Presenters will explore how the project centers student agency and authorship, discuss the role and purpose of publishing content openly, and reflect on the importance of sharing their work with a wider community to cut across the oppressive disciplinary silos that make up our current systems.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Explore how the concept of open was incorporated throughout the project-from open digital scholarship (racial terror site) to publishing lesson plans on OER Commons
- Identify the value of an interdisciplinary team for creating complex open projects
- Reflect on the connection of CDP as a decision guiding framework
- Experience examples of open lesson plans that center hard histories and racial healing
- Recognize the value of this work by hearing pre-service teachers reflect on their experience
