Meeting Standard Seven ~ Engagement with Subject Matter

The student teacher demonstrates mastery of the skills and knowledge central to the discipline. Interest in, and energy for, his/her discipline are demonstrated through the creation of lessons which present diverse students with challenging activities and projects, engage them, and encourage them to solve problems, raise questions, and interact in ways that contribute to a positive learning environment while developing skills as critical, inquiring thinkers.

Engagement with Subject Matter was the standard that probably gave the most anxiety since I come to this work without a formal degree in history.  However, I was quickly reminded about how much I enjoy being a student and gaining knowledge that is critical to navigating this world.   Moreover, as we began the unit on slavery, I felt a particular responsibility to make sure students were deeply engaging with this history in a way that was rigorous, but also empowering.  My mentor and I both shared the worry that the pain contained in the history of slavery would overshadow the empathy that students needed to practice in order to truly humanize those who’d been enslaved.   

For the initial unit on slavery, we read a note posted at the beginning of our primary text that was written 30 years after the work was initially published.  In the note, the author discusses the hope that readers would humanize those who had been enslaved and additionally their descendants. Julius Lester also states that history is about practicing empathy instead of simply being about facts and events. I include this excerpt as Artifact One because during this lesson students were explicitly thinking about the purpose/role of history and why it’s critical to practice empathy in learning the histories of oppressed peoples in particular.

As we got deeper into the text, I knew I wanted students to understand slavery as a system of oppression so that we could understand how resistance was also a central component of slavery.  I also wanted students to develop an understanding around internalized oppression which is the psychological form of oppression that leaves its imprint on oppressed peoples.  Beyond understand the very physical realities of slavery like violence of starvation, forced labor and whippings, I wanted students to understand what it does to the mind to consistently traumatized and experience trauma as a result of a marginalized identity.  I created a lesson during which students mapped out some of the beliefs inherent to slavery and how these affected the minds of enslaved persons. I thought this was important to also understanding how resistance foremost begins inside a person although we often only name the external forms of resistance. 

Finally, even though the Civil War wasn’t a part of our study of slavery (since they would study it in eighth grade), I wanted students to at least be thinking about the meaning of freedom for black people following both emancipation and abolition. Students thus needed context about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War and how slaves participated in physical resistance against the system of slavery.  I thus created a second set of stations similar to the ones I discussed in Artifact Three in the Classroom Practice section.  While I wanted students to be thinking also about some of the legacies of slavery during this station work, I decided there was already enough content for students to grapple with.  I actually really enjoyed confronting some of the false notions students had about rebellion, emancipation, and abolition.