East Lansing High School plans Black American history class for 2023
EAST LANSING — East Lansing High School will offer an elective class starting in 2023 that dives into Black American history amid national arguments over how race should be taught in a classroom.
The East Lansing Public Schools Board of Education on Feb. 14 approved the addition of a Black American History course to the high school’s elective offerings. The optional course for juniors and seniors will be taught starting in spring 2023.
The course will touch on pieces of Black history already taught in classrooms, including the slave trade and civil rights movement, while going beyond that to examine achievements by Black people throughout history, rather than focusing on negative actions against Black people over time.
“It’s more about achievement, resilience and joy,” said Julie Berridge, the high school social studies department chairperson who teaches a ninth grade and Advanced Placement U.S. history course. “Having more of that balance.”
East Lansing High School Black American History Course Proposal by LansingStateJournal on Scribd
“Achievement” is among the words used in the class description to describe the content that will be taught. While the class will review pieces of the slave trade, Jim Crow era and current events, students will learn about additional history, , going back, for instance, to study African civilizations and empires, and other topics and issues that highlight Black achievement, as well as cultures and identities.
As teachers develop the course curriculum over the next year, Gorman said, they plan to include local Black history in the class, as well as bring in guest speakers and take field trips. This summer will be spent developing the specific units and lesson plans.
State standards dictate required history courses cover certain time periods, Assistant Superintendent Glenn Mitcham said, and it often leaves teachers with little time to get all of those lessons in.
“You can only really give a cursory dive into Black history and Black American history,” he said. “(This class) allows us to take a deeper dive into that.”
Teaching Black history debates
The announcement of the new course comes at a time in national education when school and university history courses and how they teach Black history have been under scrutiny as debates continue over Critical Race Theory (CRT) and how Black history should be taught at the K-12 and college levels.
Last year, a MacDonald Middle School social studies assignment led to a complaint filed with the Lansing branch of the NAACP. It was a Black History Month assignment that included violent images and descriptions of slaves, slave quarters and rebellions and asked students to imagine what it would be like to be a slave.
The school district apologized for allowing the assignment to go before students. Offering the new Black American History course is not a response to the incident with the social studies assignment, Mitcham said, rather the class has been a project several years in the making.
The Board of Education's unanimous vote was one of several visible indications of support for the class.
“We’re not forcing any student to take it,” Mitcham said. “Beyond that, a course like this, it’s very defendable on how you would teach a course like that and how it can enrich the experience of high school students.”
Berridge, Gorman and other staff members began developing the course in 2016, reviewing various history syllabi, philosophical articles on Black history education, and working with experts and scholars, including Pero Dagbovie, a university distinguished professor in the Department of History and an associate dean at the graduate school at Michigan State University.
A similar Black history course was offered at East Lansing High School more than 20 years ago and both Gorman and Berridge hope to learn more about it and perhaps pull some of its course content into their curriculum.
School district staff members are eager to bring the offering back.
“It’s a service we need to provide to our students,” Gorman said. “We have a diverse student body and our courses and the history that we teach should reflect that.”
Contact Mark Johnson at (517) 377-1026 or majohnson2@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ByMarkJohnson.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: East Lansing elective class to dive into Black American history
