How universities are training the next generation of history teachers.
HOW SCHOOLS IN THE SOUTH ARE TEACHING CIVIL WAR HISTORY
When Robert Bland teaches the Civil War, the legacy of the great American conflagration looks back at him from the seats of his classroom.
“I have students I’m certain who are the great granddaughters and grandsons of Confederate veterans and also students who are the great-great-granddaughters and great-grandsons of enslaved people,” said Bland, a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who teaches about the African experience and the postwar South. Universities across the South are training the next generation of history teachers, and they do so knowing that teaching Civil War history in the South requires extra vigilance to ensure a truthful account comes through.
Teachers have to focus on using reliable primary sources, teaching students how to identify an accurate source, and be willing to have an open dialogue about the South’s Confederate past and legacy of racism.
Logan Istre, a high school history teacher at Brother Martin High School in New Orleans, said that legacy is front and center in his classroom, too.
“The difficult issue with teaching Civil War history in the South is that most people who live here have ancestors who participated in the war in some way or have ancestors who were enslaved,” Istre said. “And so, for a large bulk of the population there’s like a direct lineage relation to the events.”
He tries to approach teaching history so that students “don’t hate their heritage, but also understand it.” That means creating space for discussion around the historical events, while putting them in context of the larger conflict happening at the time in America.
Bland said it’s important to recognize that students will come to classes with their own perspectives. “So, you want to encourage a classroom where there’s a civil discourse,” he said.
It’s also important to provide historical context. Bland said he teaches with a “triangle approach,” discussing the Civil War and Reconstruction through the perspectives of white Northerners, white Southerners and African Americans.
“I use the phrase ‘the past is its own country,’ in the same way you go into a French class or Spanish class, and you have to learn a new language I think, studying history is a lot about learning the language of the past to understand the past on its own terms and not seeing it through kind of a 21st century kind of lens,” Bland said.
Digging for the war’s root causes
When Caitlyn Bender begins teaching Civil War history to her seventh grade classes, she designs her lesson like a mystery students have to solve.
Students go to different stations in the classroom, where they are given clues about what could be the cause of the Civil War, including things like the election of 1860 and growing tensions around slavery.
“We start off with a movie clip or something that’s like, ‘The shots of the Civil War have been fired,’ ” Bender said. “And I’m like, ‘What? How did we get here?’ And then they have to go around and investigate with all of these suspects. And at the end of each one, they have a question like, do you think that this is the cause of the war?”
Bender is in her third year teaching social studies at Mckinley Middle Magnet School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At Mckinley, over 80% of students are Black, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Bender said her students are deeply interested in talking about and learning about the Civil War and slavery.
“The way that we approach it is just to talk about it,” Bender said. “It’s usually something kids are most interested in.”
Bender also creates a gallery of images from the Civil War era to talk about slavery, including images of slave ships and slave markets. Those images show students the reality of conditions for slaves.
“Every year, that’s really shocking to students,” Bender said. “It’s like, they know it’s bad, but then it’s worse than they thought.”
Zevi Gutfreund is a history professor and the adviser of the Social Studies Secondary Education Teacher Certification at Louisiana State University. In that program, he teaches future social studies teachers to rely on primary sources.
Gutfreund was a teacher in California, New York and Hawaii before coming to teach at LSU. The program at LSU has between 20 to 30 students each year who are focused on teaching social studies.
“I think the key for teaching is to get into the history, to use original sources,” Gutfreund said.
He spends time teaching students how to find original sources and make them “accessible to younger students.” Then, he encourages students to play the role of historians themselves and draw conclusions from those sources.
“So once you find an appropriate source that is digestible, then have them read it and come to their own conclusions,” Gutfreund said.
In the past he’s had students examine the inaugural addresses of Abraham Lincoln, the Union president, and Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and compare the two to get at the reality that the war was about slavery.
“Looking at those documents, there’s no question that slavery was one of the main causes of the Civil War,” Gutfreund said.
Countering misinformation
As schools turned to virtual learning this year, and as students are using the internet daily, teaching them how to identify reliable sources has become key.
As virtual learning has become mainstream this year, Gutfreund said there is also an emphasis on validating that sources are real and teaching digital literacy. Future teachers need to be able to validate sources, as well as teach their students how to validate sources,
“Teachers are under incredible pressure,” Alderman said. “One to teach to teach you know these moments from the past and the right way, but they’re also of the great pressure from their students from the parents of students from administrators from the public for politicians, not to get it wrong, not to do it in an insensitive way.”
Derek Alderman Professor in the department of geography at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Gutfreund said.
“We have to teach our teachers to use all of the free online material that’s available but also to understand which sources are are authentic and which sources have an agenda and should not be used,” Gutfreund said.
Derek Alderman, a professor in the department of geography at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, studies how African Americans physically move around the United States, and how that has been historically restricted.
Teaching an accurate history of the American South is critical for young students, Alderman said.
“I think there’s been sort of a conventional assumption that somehow when you speak to students at that early age, you can only go so far in terms of getting into some of these very difficult chapters of American history,” Alderman said. “But I would suggest to you that our young people are quite savvy and quite well-versed in the way the world works.”
Alderman said students are not well-served “by hiding and selectively framing some of these discussions of history.”
“We don’t want to traumatize (young students) in terms of how we teach about the past, but at the same time we do them no favor when we sugarcoat or whitewash, or you know, to try to avoid or deny discussing these things,” Alderman said.
Using textbooks and primary sources
In Louisiana, students are not taught Civil War history in high school. That curriculum takes place in seventh grade, unless a student is in a high school advanced placement class.
There has been some reckoning with the area’s Civil War history. Lee High School, named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, was renamed Liberty High School this summer. Confederate statues have been removed around the state, especially in New Orleans, in recent years.
Gutfreund has seen teachers and students rely less on textbooks and more on digital versions of primary sources.
Bland echoed the same idea. Bland said he encourages teachers to “be very mindful about textbooks.”
History is told from a perspective, and some textbooks may also be written from a perspective that is “very filtered … and tends to whitewash the kind of horrors of slavery the violence of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, and even kind of don’t explain or tell the full African American experience,” Bland said.
UT summer program
Alderman recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to hold a summer institute for teachers. Titled “Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle,” the institute will bring experts to K-12 teachers from across the country to learn more about the Civil War, Confederacy and Civil Rights movement.
The institute will focus on how the Confederacy was established in order to allow Southern states to keep their slaves, and also looking at how “at the heart of the society that the Confederacy was defending was a very tight control of Black movement.”
“What impact did enslavement have on the control of movement of African Americans?” Alderman said. “How did it usher in a control system that we still see, to some degree, today in terms of legacies of how communities of color are policed and their movements or control?”
Alderman said he recognizes that K-12 teachers are under enormous pressure to teach history and teach state standards, while also being the people who get blowback for teaching on subjects like slavery or the African American experience.
“This kind of education where you’re training and working with and collaborating with teachers is especially meaningful, because teachers are really the front line or a lot of this education about these very critical chapters in the nation’s racial history,” Alderman said. “And they’re also, by the way, in the front lines of the public attack and public pushback on these histories being taught.
“Teachers are under incredible pressure,” Alderman said. “One to teach to teach you know these moments from the past and the right way, but they’re also of the great pressure from their students from the parents of students from administrators from the public for politicians, not to get it wrong, not to do it in an insensitive way.”