The following reflection was written by Abigail Henry, recipient of the 2024 1619 Impact Grant. Henry facilitated a Teaching Lab for educators in Philadelphia, PA.
I am currently in my 13th year of teaching Black history and, despite my experience and expertise, I am always looking for opportunities to grow professionally and further develop my teaching practice. My practice has developed through innovation within my classroom and the cultivating of resources for other educators. My previous experience resourcing others includes serving as a Content Lead within my school building, founding the education consulting company, the BLK Cabinet, participating in Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Education Network program, and supporting the revision of the School District of Philadelphia’s African American History curriculum with Ismael Jimenez. My 1619 Impact Grant project allowed me to continue this work and remain connected to teachers in the classroom even as I began my doctoral studies at University of Buffalo.
The 1619 Teaching Lab brought together nine teachers from the Philadelphia area who engaged in learning and conversation about how to teach Black history and how to talk about the Black community’s role in shaping American democracy. Throughout the four-week lab series, I modeled seven lessons for teachers and asked them to implement two of the modeled lessons and submit student work. Participants included two elementary educators, seven secondary educators, and one educator working with hard of hearing students of all ages. The diversity of grade levels, subjects, and student audience provided me with the challenge and opportunity of designing lessons that could be used in multiple grade levels, or easily scaffolded up or down.
Making the Teaching Lab fully accessible to our hard of hearing teacher also required that I educate myself on how to support deaf learners and inspired me to include a lesson about Black deaf history. I learned that many pre-service Black deaf teachers face double marginalization; some want to attend an HBCU, but fear disability discrimination; others desire to go to the prominent Gallaudet University, but fear racial discrimination. This made me think more deeply about Black deaf students, how they were/are treated, and what we as educators can do more to support their success. I also appreciated learning about Black ASL, and learning from the experiences of the Black deaf teacher and her interpreters. This education was invaluable. The lessons about Black deaf children, and all others modeled in the lab, are now also available to all African American Studies teachers in the School District of Philadelphia and on a 1619 Teaching Lab Google site for those outside the district.
In the end, the Teaching Lab was a beautiful experience. It created a safe place for teachers to discuss the challenges in teaching Black history. Teachers rarely receive effective professional development on how to teach Black history, and many reported that the Teaching Lab was incredibly helpful in helping them think about how to teach about slavery, resistance, and everyday Black lives. They appreciated the live-modeled lessons that incorporated high quality resources like The 1619 Project and felt motivated through talking to and hearing about other teachers doing similar work.
The virtual space we cultivated truly felt like what Jarvis Givens describes as teaching in “fugitivity, ” a practice I’ve reflected on previously for Pulitzer Center. Teachers in the lab created a sense of solidarity and developed strategies to counter racial curricula violence that occurs in classrooms by centering Black narratives that explore a diversity of Black histories.
I was also impressed with the student work that was submitted from all the teachers who participated in the lab. Each teacher is beyond DOPE in so many ways. Teachers took the model lessons and put their own unique spin on it before delivering it to their own students. As such, students across all grades experienced a diversity of lessons and resources incorporating The 1619 Project.
The most popular content from the lab included the lesson around African masks and the lessons around resistance. After reading Born on the Water, many teachers made connections between African culture and African masks. Students developed language to articulate and describe a mask that reflects their identity, and many also developed artistic skills as they created their mask.
Through their lessons, students learned about types of resistance, such as the Haitian Revolution or Harriet Powers quilts. Several teachers had their students make their own quilts. I teared up looking at all the masks, quilts, poetry, exit tickets, and more submitted as student work. The work created in this lab was a positive reminder that despite the current political divisiveness that exists in education today, there are many teachers willing and ready to teach Black history on a deeper level and center stories previously left out of classrooms and textbooks.
Lastly, one of the most insightful pieces for me was crafting a lesson around the life of Isaac Woodard. I was particularly moved after learning about his life in Nikole Hannah Jones' opening “Democracy” essay. Woodard was a World War 2 veteran that was beaten blind by a police officer five hours after returning home from service.
I spent several hours searching for primary sources and lesson plans about Isaac from the Black perspective, and all the suggestions I found highlighted the leadership of President Harry Truman, journalist Orson Welles, and NAACP member Walter White. Each of the suggested sources highlighted their moral concern of the injustice done to Isaac Woodard and the political and social action they took to move his cause forward. I could not find one easily accessible or classroom-friendly source from a Black perspective highlighting the Black rage of the racial violence enacted on Woodard. I also could not find any sources detailing the Black community that must have cared for and supported Woodard in his day-to-day life once he was disabled.
Current suggestions on how Isaac Woodard should be taught unfortunately only perpetuate a white savior narrative. This was a telling reminder to me that so much more work needs to be done to develop Black history curricula that uncovers and incorporates primary sources from a diversity of perspectives. Thanks to this Education Impact Grant I have more insight, motivation, and direction into the type of work I hope to do around Black history education in the future.
