Confronting the Misrepresentations about African Americans’ History within Curricula
Location
Virtual
Start Date
3-5-2021 10:00 AM
End Date
3-5-2021 11:00 AM
Description
I report how children’s and young adult non-fiction books, literature, and textbooks (mis)represent the Black Freedom Movement, which contains the centuries of slavery until beyond the Civil Rights Movement. If unchallenged by teachers, students will remain ignorant of slavery’s ubiquity and brutality, its centrality to America’s emerging economy, and enslaved African Americans’ humanity and resistance. Similar misrepresentations appear in Civil Rights-based curricula. Omission of the period after slavery before the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement leaves students oblivious to the racial terror, legislative disenfranchisement, and judicial re-enslavement. I demonstrate how teachers, parents, and students can first identify and then fill the gaps within misrepresentative curricula.
Target Audience: Students, K-12 teachers, and Parents
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Confronting the Misrepresentations about African Americans’ History within Curricula
Virtual
I report how children’s and young adult non-fiction books, literature, and textbooks (mis)represent the Black Freedom Movement, which contains the centuries of slavery until beyond the Civil Rights Movement. If unchallenged by teachers, students will remain ignorant of slavery’s ubiquity and brutality, its centrality to America’s emerging economy, and enslaved African Americans’ humanity and resistance. Similar misrepresentations appear in Civil Rights-based curricula. Omission of the period after slavery before the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement leaves students oblivious to the racial terror, legislative disenfranchisement, and judicial re-enslavement. I demonstrate how teachers, parents, and students can first identify and then fill the gaps within misrepresentative curricula.
Target Audience: Students, K-12 teachers, and Parents
Comments
John H. Bickford is a former Mid-Prairie (Iowa) Middle School Social Studies Teacher and a current Professor of Social Studies/History Education in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Foundations at Eastern Illinois University. His undergraduate degree in History, graduate degree in Education, and doctoral degree in Secondary Social Studies Education are all from the University of Iowa. He teaches and researches about the sources and strategies that facilitate students' history literacy, historical thinking, and historical argumentation. He can be contacted at: jbickford@eiu.edu or @SSHistoryEduc