How Can Teachers Explain Slavery to Students?

In July almost 50 K–12 educators from 23 states attended a week-long summer institute at Harvard on how to teach about the history and legacies of enslavement and lead classroom discussions on challenging contemporary topics. The Past to Present Summer Institute was supported by the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (HLS) initiative. Meira Levinson, a professor of education and society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who served on the HLS committee, says there is currently much disagreement about what educators can teach, “including really anything that might be disturbing about U.S. society.”

Levinson recently shared some guidance and insights from the summer institute that she and EdEthics co-led with Harvard professor Danielle Allen and the Democratic Knowledge Project, for other educators looking to teach about troubling histories and tough topics.

1) Highlight your district’s and state’s curricular standards.
“Many of the educators who are teaching in increasingly restrictive environments emphasized how essential it is to highlight the state curricular standards that they are following when they teach complex historical or contemporary materials in the classroom. One of our participants explained she makes sure always to have the curriculum standards written on her whiteboard and on the materials that she gives to students so if she is challenged, she can point to them and say, ‘This is what I'm required to teach.’ Many educators from Oklahoma and Texas to North Carolina and New Hampshire shared similar stories.”

2) Draw strength from community with other educators.
“The teachers [at the institute] really found it immensely valuable to be able to talk to other educators from around the country who are experiencing similar challenges of feeling under intense scrutiny and having their professional judgment and curricular and pedagogical expertise called into question. That was a super valuable takeaway for so many of the educators that they now have a community of other educators whom they can draw upon and connect with. They were all exchanging emails and phone numbers on their last day.”

3) Use digital tools to help engage students directly with historical source materials.
“I was inspired by how many educators came to this institute who are already doing sophisticated work trying to teach their students about the histories and legacies of enslavement. On the second day, we watched a brief but truly horrifying two-minute video showing ships that were transporting human cargo — people en route from Africa to enslavement in the Caribbean, South America, and North America. It starts out slowly and then it just accelerates and accelerates and the number and sizes of the ships expands seemingly exponentially. One of our participants explained how he uses this incredible resource, SlaveVoyages.org, to help his students access and analyze original historical documents. On the Slave Voyages timeline, you can click on any of the dots representing an enslavement ship and then see data from the ship’s manifest, including the number of enslaved people who boarded versus disembarked. It is a way to get students quite quickly into primary source documents. The number of digital tools at teachers and students’ fingertips that enable them to engage directly with historical source materials is really amazing.”

4) Create spaces that enable students and educators to express and reflect upon their diverse identities across multiple dimensions. 
“In this time of increased suspicion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, it's tempting for many people to reject DEI ideals or practices, but having diversity of educators, of students, of political positions, of experiences, is essential for mutual learning and democratic co-construction. It is crucial we find equitable and inclusive ways to amplify diversity so that we can mutually learn from one another and create more powerful communities than we can create on our own.  One of the themes that came out so strongly throughout the institute was the importance of identity in all of its forms — racial identity, gendered identity, religious identity, political identity, family identity. We must create spaces in which people can bring their full selves into a learning space — that's true for students, and it's true for us as educators. We will engage in more powerful learning, individually and collectively, when we are able to bring our whole selves into the learning space. And we saw that in profound ways in the institute.”

5) Consider age and developmental appropriateness but be careful not to use these to avoid teaching and learning about hard issues.
“Throughout the week, we shared guidance and opened up space to talk about developmental considerations. When we put the teachers into their home groups, which they met with almost every afternoon, we grouped them by grade level so that those who are teaching early and middle elementary were able to have different conversations than those who are teaching in high schools. Our participants really appreciated this. But at the same time, no one was here to say, ’Oh, well we can’t teach this at all because our kids are too young.’

For example, the DKP shared developmentally-researched guidelines related to how to teach about enslavement, anti-black racism, and agency: For younger children, do not expose them to graphic images or text, and for all kids, do not have them role play being an enslaver or being enslaved. But also for all students, do discuss enslavement, and use the words of enslaved people as one teaches about how enslaved people and their allies worked also to end enslavement.  

We need to be able to hold in our heads simultaneously that developmental considerations really matter and that we do children, and our society as a whole, a tremendous disservice if we delay teaching about enslavement entirely on grounds of developmental appropriateness. We actually need to start introducing these concepts and facts early enough that, as students become more sophisticated and more capable of integrating new conceptual schema later on, young people have scaffolding in which to fit this new information in. That’s why content and pedagogical expertise is essential — and is why we run institutes like Past to Present, to help teachers do that work that is possible if they are well prepared to do it.”