Beyond the "Master Narrative" – w/ Nishani Frazier and Adam Sanchez
Teaching Hard History
Learning for Justice
4.2 • 588 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2020
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. When it comes to the civil rights movement, we often have to help our students unlearn what they think they know while we're teaching them what actually happened. The people were more complex, the strategies more complicated and the stakes more dangerous than we like to remember. In this episode, historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez demonstrate the value of teaching the movement from the grassroots up.
Check out Nishani's Harambee City website and Adam's "Teaching SNCC" classroom activities.
You can find more useful resources like those – along with an enhanced transcript – on our website.
For more Movement Music, check out the Spotify playlist for this episode.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I can rebuild a nation. |
| 0:05.0 | I can rebuild a nation. |
| 0:10.0 | I can rebuild a nation. |
| 0:15.0 | No longer working. |
| 0:18.0 | No longer working out |
| 0:22.6 | No longer working out |
| 0:26.6 | It is easy to forget that students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. |
| 0:46.3 | They come in with very specific versions of the civil rights movement. |
| 0:51.3 | Unfortunately, these versions are often wrong. |
| 0:55.0 | So as teachers, we have to help our students unlearn what they think happened, as well as learn what actually happened. |
| 1:04.0 | In the tradition of veteran grassroots organizer Ella Baker, we've got to start where the people are. |
| 1:11.6 | Our students need to understand what's distinctive about the movement, |
| 1:17.6 | and also that the movement is a part of a long and rich tradition of black resistance. |
| 1:23.6 | And this tradition wasn't just in the South. |
| 1:26.6 | This was happening across the country. |
| 1:29.4 | And our students also need to understand that icons like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and |
| 1:34.9 | Malcolm X are much more complicated than the simplified and sanitized ways they are usually depicted. |
| 1:43.3 | I'm Hassan Kwame Jeffers, and this is Teaching Hard History. |
| 1:47.7 | We're a production of teaching tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. |
| 1:53.1 | This season, we'll be offering a detailed look at how to teach the Black Freedom |
| 1:57.4 | Struggle or the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. |
| 2:00.3 | In each episode, we'll explore a different topic, |
... |
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