Presenter – Dr. Daris McInnis
Month: March 2026
Social Justice as Discipline Reconstruction
BlogUnit co-designed by Katelyn Zarr and Jessica McCullough
On a color-coded anchor chart are the ways historians read, write, and think: they interpret primary and secondary sources, identify bias, compare and contrast accounts, and ultimately synthesize information from multiple sources to create accurate narratives and timelines (Lent, 2017). While a concise (and visually appealing) resource, these practices cannot be taken exactly as they are, especially in K-12 schools. Underpinning these practices is the fact that the sources, accounts, and information to be interpreted are often one-sided, missing or entirely misrepresenting perspectives. What is required of educators [and students], then, is that the disciplines themselves are approached as pathways to social change, by which their texts, practices, and ways of knowing are continually questioned and reconstructed.
In our fifth-grade Causes of the American Revolution History Unit, this took the form of seeking out the perspectives of Black Americans, which were limited within district-provided textbooks and readily accessible primary and secondary sources in online databases. The very process of hunting for inclusive texts opened up a conversation between me and my fifth-graders: Why are only some perspectives prioritized, and, in turn, how can we amplify the voices of Black Americans when studying United States’ history? The snapshots below not only capture our search for multiple perspectives but also our reflections on the importance of doing so.
Questioning disciplinary texts can lead to the construction of inclusive and accurate pictures of history. When examining the Boston Massacre as one ‘cause’ of the American Revolution, for example, I noticed that our district textbook centers Paul Revere’s engraving, “The Bloody Massacre,” where British soldiers are depicted armed, against a row of white colonists, some wounded, some reaching to help one another, and some fleeing the square. While a biased depiction of the event itself, as many colonists, too, threw rock-filled snowballs at the soldiers, a key participant, Black American Crispus Attucks, is missing from the scene. I searched for alternate depictions of the event, pairing Paul Revere’s engraving with John H. Bufford’s, “Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770,” which places Crispus Attucks front and center (Museum of the American Revolution, 2021). After joining the illustrations in a text set, my role in questioning texts, fifth-graders then compared and contrasted the accounts through a socratic seminar – drawing upon both to establish colonist and soldier involvement, infer deeper meanings, such as Attucks’ actions as a symbol of protection and independence, and contextualize the 13 Colonies as rooted in racism, a system perpetuated even in the media. By questioning which texts were included, and later, their contents, students were able to compare and contrast accounts to make sense of an event in its entirety and its connections to society at large.
Questioning disciplinary texts can amplify the joy and brilliance of Black Americans throughout history. Students’ inclusion and discussion of Attucks as a champion of independence and positive, social change left us eager to extend this work into writing. Using teacher, student, and librarian collected texts on Black Americans from the Revolutionary Era, including Crispus Attucks, Salem Poor, and Phillis Wheatley, students crafted biographies of their chosen ‘Revolutionary Hero.’ Only, when constructing the narratives or timelines of their hero’s role in the Revolution, students asserted the importance of learning from them today: Wheatley’s poems a means of social justice that can be continued today, Attucks an example of what it means to be a patriot, and Poor a symbol of unwavering bravery. By seeking out multiple accounts of history, students reconstructed the discipline by creating texts that amplified the perspectives and contributions of Black Americans that should have been included all along.
This Causes of the American Revolution Unit simply puts into action the pursuits of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, where she asserts criticality, or examining and disrupting power structures, as a non-negotiable of teaching and learning (2023). Not only does criticality build empathy, connection, and perspective, but it allows us to understand the world [and the disciplines] entirely – to seek and sustain social justice. Beautifully, this often looks like pushing the disciplines themselves. As my fifth-graders engaged in reflective discussion on their reading and writing in consideration of multiple perspectives, they shared things like, “Why isn’t it [history] always done this way? Otherwise, we wouldn’t know the full story!” Their comments demonstrate the power of criticality as well as the brilliance and readiness of students to change the disciplines in the pursuit of racial justice.
References
Muhammad, G. (2023). Unearthing joy: a guide to culturally and historically responsive teaching and learning. Scholastic Inc.
Lent, R. (2017). Disciplinary literacy: a shift that makes sense. ASCD Express, 12(12).
Museum of the American Revolution. (2021, March 5). Boston massacre and propaganda: changing depictions of Crispus Attucks. https://www.amrevmuseum.org/boston-massacre-and-propaganda-changing-depictions-of-crispus-attucks.
Where’s the Joy? Cultivating Black Joy in K-12 Classrooms
Webinar
Joy and Pain: Incorporating Black Joy in K-12 Classrooms
Blogby Dr. Kristen Duncan
Happy Black History Month! This year marks the 100th anniversary of what began as Negro History Week, which evolved in to Black History Month. Founded by Carter G. Woodson, these Black celebrations are intended to help us celebrate the achievements of Black Americans as well as help us understand the ways Black Americans have contributed to the progress of the nation.
Black History Month has an amazing purpose—a purpose that is often not fulfilled in K-12 classrooms in any month. Michael Dumas has argued that schools are a site of suffering for Black students, and I contend that social studies classrooms often serve as sites of suffering for Black students. In traditional social studies curriculum, the only times Black people are present are slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow/Civil Rights Movement. What do these historical eras have in common? Dehumanization. Black people were seen as less than human during slavery, had their rights stripped as Reconstruction ended, and suffered through the oppression and dehumanization of the Jim Crow Era. Even in the Civil Rights Movement, as Black people fought for their rights, they were subsequently dehumanized by various arms of the government, including being assaulted with firehoses and dogs and losing their jobs for joining the NAACP amongst other things.
When students only see Black people appear in curriculum while being dehumanized, they come to associate Blackness with dehumanization. For Black students, there is the possibility that they internalize this association, but it is important to note that non-Black students may also begin to associate Blackness with dehumanization after seeing this reflected in social studies curricula year after year.
This is why Black joy is a necessity. Black joy is a form of resistance, as finding joy in the midst of oppression and dehumanization is, as Bettina Love has noted, the ultimate form of resistance. Black people have been able to find and create joy amidst some of the worst circumstances the U.S. has ever created, and it is that joy that has sustained Black people through oppression and dehumanization. Although Black joy has been present as long as Black people have been on North America soil, it remains largely absent from K-12 classrooms.
Teaching about and with Black joy requires an understanding of context and nuance. If we are to teach students about Black joy, we must position it as an act of resistance. We don’t want students to think that historical Black actors did not understand the pain of the oppression they endured. They absolutely understood their circumstances and sought joy despite their despair—that is what we need our students to see.
How do we go about this? We begin this work by incorporating Black joy in the curriculum in any place where there is Black pain. Enslaved people found ways to steal away and create joy away from the oppressive gaze of their enslavers. Black people in the Jim Crow South found numerous ways to experience joy in their segregated communities. And even when fighting for freedom, Black people found ways to create some joy for themselves, away from the arms of the state that sought to harm them for believing themselves equal to white people. Including Black joy in the curricular locations where Black pain is centered is a critical starting point.
We need students to understand that Black people are more than vessels of pain. Incorporating Black joy in classrooms helps students, both Black and non-Black understand the full range of Black humanity.
