How Curiosity Can Help Us Name and Reframe, An Expansive Approach to Teaching Slavery
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses
This week’s focus: “How to,” recommendations on how to expand what we teach and/or how we discuss this topic
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is around 1600 words, an estimated 6-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month our theme is: Who’s Holding the Camera? Seeing the World Through Expanded Lenses.
In a recent newsletter, we discussed The Danger of a Single Story and How We Benefit from Many Lenses. For our “Hidden History,” we highlighted Corky Lee, whose life’s work expanded the human story, one photograph at a time.
This week, we’re examining how curiosity can help us name and reframe how we narrate history and the people who impacted our world. To illustrate this idea, we’ll focus on expanding the way we discuss and teach about slavery and the lives of those who were unjustly enslaved.
Across U.S. classrooms, the teaching of slavery is largely substandard. Often, the substantial and complex topic, institution, or era of slavery is accompanied with incomplete framing and context, misrepresentation, and few or single stories.
According to a report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, there is palpable unease around the topic of slavery: “Although teachers overwhelmingly (over 90 percent) claim they feel ‘comfortable’ discussing slavery in their classrooms, their responses to open-ended questions reveal profound unease around the topic.” Resources may also be insufficient: “Fifty-eight percent of teachers find their textbooks inadequate.”
The report found that many state standards fail to address the role that racism, including white supremacy, played in attempting to justify and spur the dehumanizing institution. The standards also failed “to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery, about the lives of the millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was essential to the American economy.”
Discussing slavery may easily and obviously inspire intense feelings. Rising emotions, coupled with a lack of knowledge, may result in avoidance. One way to counter such avoidance is to leverage curiosity and inquiry.
Curiosity As One of Our Greatest Strengths
People are curious, both adults and children. While curiosity can be illustrated and defined in many ways — and nurtured to varying degrees — it’s a trait that is dispersed across humanity.
As described in this study, published in the National Library of Medicine: “Curiosity is such a basic component of our natures that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives. Consider, though, how much of our time we spend seeking and consuming information, whether listening to the news or music, browsing the internet, reading books or magazines, watching TV, movies, and sports, or otherwise engaging in activities not directly related to eating, reproduction, and basic survival.”
If anyone has worked with children, or has raised their own children, they’ll know just how curious they can be — often demonstrated through a vocalized, peppering of questions, or sometimes exhibited through quiet, concentrated observation, deep reflection and forms of creativity.
Applying this innate sense of curiosity can be a helpful approach when confronting “challenging history,” especially the broad category of slavery. Curiosity — often labeled as “inquiry”— is already embedded in many social studies frameworks and guidelines around best practices.
The National Council for the Social Studies — the “largest professional association in the country devoted to social studies education” — states, “inquiry is at the heart of social studies.”
The highly referenced and utilized “C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards” features inquiry as a primary arc, or the foundational, organizing structure for students to evaluate history, as well as economics, civics, and geography.
The C3 framing speaks to the importance of leveraging curiosity with students: “Children are naturally curious, and they are especially curious about the complex and multifaceted world they inhabit. Whether they articulate them to adults or not, they harbor an almost bottomless well of questions about how to understand that world…Young students will need help in framing useful questions and planning their inquiries, but even the youngest children want to make sense of the social and cultural environments around them.”
Questions are powerful, they drive inquiry. Instead of avoiding a topic, or teaching it in superficial or inaccurate ways, we can apply a lens of curiosity to expand and root our approach in something that is more grounded in facts and humanizing connection.
We can, of course, generate our own questions. For guidance, we’ve offered some as well.
Before teaching a “challenging topic,” like slavery, we can first reflect on our emotional responses: What feelings arise when I think of slavery? What kind of regulation strategies would help me unpack this topic (especially if it is something I have to teach, or something I want my children to know about)?
We can investigate our awareness, understanding, and accuracy: What do I know or think I know about slavery? Where did I learn this, or how do I know that I know? (How can I corroborate these ideas?) What don’t I know? Whose stories — and what facts — may be missing? Where can I go to learn more?
Investigating Our Sources, Who’s Outside the Frame?
Historians use an array of resources to piece ideas and stories together, including primary and secondary sources. Applying a lens of curiosity, such sources can offer us windows to the past.
There are many ways to investigate sources. In this document, “Analyzing Primary Sources,” the Library of Congress provides a three-question framework to apply when reviewing artifacts and first-hand accounts: observe, reflect, and question. To observe, we may ask: What do I notice? To reflect, we may ask: Where did this source come from? Why do I think it was made? What tools were used? What did I learn from examining this? To question our learning, we may ask: What do I wonder about?
This framework, while helpful, does not include thinking about what is missing. Or, as we considered last week — when reviewing the “Golden Spike” photograph and how it inspired Corky Lee’s journey — Who is holding the literal or symbolic camera? How could social identity, or access to social power and opportunity have impacted this person’s worldview? Whose stories are being centered, and who is outside the symbolic, or literal frame? Where can we go for more stories?
Humans are imperfect, we have bias and that can impact who is and is not included in the “traditional” framing of what we learn. When it comes to slavery, (though some of us may have been raised in households that proactively taught it or discussed it with us) many of us would benefit from expanding the likely narrow lens we inherited from school curricula.
How We Name and How We Reframe
One way to expand and humanize how we approach slavery, and other “challenging topics,” is to consider how we name and how we frame — and want to reframe — historical narratives.
Reflecting on how we name people, or avoid naming people, is important.
First, we may reflect on the language, or vocabulary, we use: Do you say “slaves” or “enslaved people”? (Do you see a difference?)
When discussing slavery, do you name the enslavers? Do you name the enslaved? For inspiration, consider the lives of historical figures, such as but not limited to Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equaino, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth.
We can also include the names of people who are less known. As an example, the New York Historical Society and historian Leslie Harris, designed an exhibit and created a curriculum — Slavery in New York — which featured “Life Stories” of people who were enslaved throughout New York’s history. With care and intention, this may be a great resource for upper elementary or middle school.
Reviewing primary sources, like the 1870 Census Records, and subsequent decades, may be an engaging way to examine names, such as how formerly enslaved people had the legal opportunity to select their own surname after Emancipation — last names like Freeman and Freedman became popular. Facing History and Ourselves developed a lesson that centers this, which may work in a middle or high school classroom.
Researcher Reinette F. Jones discusses the importance of naming: “To refer to a person by their given name is to recognize the individual as a person. When African Americans gained their freedom from enslavement, they also gained the freedom to name themselves and their children.”
To expand the lens further, consider the 10 Million Names Project, which is a “collaborative project dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America (specifically, the territory that would become the United States) between the 1500s and 1865.”
Reflecting on how we frame slavery is also essential.
If we had to explain slavery to a child, how would we describe or frame it? Do we embed the discussion in facts, social and economic contexts? Do we include a description of European colonization? Do we discuss how the U.S. gained much of its wealth through the ingenuity and forced labor of enslaved people? Do we highlight that slavery existed in the South and the North (as well as colonies around the world)? Do we discuss the creation of racism? Do we highlight acts of resistance and resilience?
While we don't have video footage from the era of slavery, we do have voices of people who were formerly enslaved. Recorded between 1932 and 1975, this collection,“Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories,” held in the Library of Congress provides incredible first-person accounts. Hearing the voice of someone who was formerly enslaved is a way to humanize how we tell the complex story of slavery.
We Can Also Look for Fingerprints
Sometimes we can’t name the formerly enslaved, but some of their literal fingerprints are still with us — hidden in plain sight.
Consider the work of Ben Jackson, as described in the Cardinal News, as someone who has “trained his eye to detect the fingerprints of [enslaved people] imprinted in handmade brick produced in Southwest Virginia well over 200 years ago.”
Paul Garbarini, as described in AP News, also points to the imprints of the formerly enslaved on bricks, many left behind by children: “Forever captured in brickwork are the fingerprints of former enslaved children. There aren’t many of them, but they are evident.”
Looking at these bricks, forever marked with fingerprints, or even the bricks used to construct the White House, it’s clear that of all historical topics, slavery is one that would benefit from many stories, over single stories.
As a country, we need a humanizing expansion of how we name and frame millions of lives and stories, some of which may include our own ancestors, some of which we carry with us today.
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