Bettina Love put the concept of “Black joy” on the map in the education space with her groundbreaking book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. In it, she argues that students must not only learn about the suffering and oppression faced by Black people, but also about the resilience, creativity, and humanity of  this community. There are many ways to incorporate Black joy into one’s teaching, and one approach that educators can consider is the rich world of afrofuturism.

Facing History Cleveland recently offered a riveting professional development webinar to Ohio-based educators called “Standing on Their Shoulders: Unsung Women of the Civil Rights Movement.” There, Program Director Pamela Donaldson and Senior Program Associate Lisa Lefstein-Berusch provided educators with strategies and frameworks they can use to broaden students’ knowledge of the contributions Black women made to the movement, as well as deepen students’ understanding of specific strategies that have driven social change. And soon, educators around the country will have the chance to access this professional development opportunity. As we teach about histories of oppression—including the events of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras—making space for stories of agency is critically important. At Facing History, we believe it’s vital that students not only learn how Black women have been acted upon by outside forces, but also how Black women have taken action to shape the world and their own lives.

As we begin Black History Month 2021, it is clear that we are living through extraordinary times. We have seen many landmark events in Black history over the last year ranging from the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement to the election of the first Black female Vice President of the United States. Determining how to structure reflection on these subjects in the classroom can be challenging, and one way to get started is to prioritize our own learning as educators.

Black History Month will soon begin and, after a history-making twelve months, we have an opportunity to expand our understanding of what Black history is and how we teach it in the classroom. 

We believe at Facing History that Black history is American history and that all educators have the responsibility to teach it well all year. But in these times of rapid, profound change and always-on news cycles, it can be difficult to know where to start. The enhanced focus on Black history that accompanies Black History Month each February is an opportunity to commit or recommit to learning and teaching Black history and contemporary issues, regardless of one’s starting point as an educator.

As we delve deeper into the holiday season, many of us may find ourselves in the midst of contentious discussions. The events of 2020 have brought a host of challenging issues to the surface as we reach levels of political polarization not seen for decades. Irrespective of the many factors that got us here, one of the most important questions now is how do we have meaningful conversations in the midst of it? Especially in conversations with relatives and other loved ones—conversations in which establishing bonds of familiarity and shared history is often not required—what does it look like to reach across ideological chasms to engage in productive dialogue? Whether around the dinner table, in a place of worship, or over a virtual video chat, we need to hone these interpersonal skills if we are to move forward.

Amidst all of the ups and downs of 2020, we at Facing History have been proud to share a wide variety of new curricular resources, webinars, and blog posts with our educators and allies. Check out some of our top pieces of content from 2020 below:

During Universal Human Rights Month this December and every month, optimizing classroom activities to foster learning and caring about global human rights is a crucial task of modern educators. For all of the vital information that is available about histories of struggles for human rights and coverage of ongoing struggles, teaching this material demands parallel attention to deepening our capacities for empathy and perspective taking. Based on a bedrock of social-emotional learning (SEL) methodology, Facing History offers these 5 remote-friendly teaching strategies to aid thoughtful teaching in remote and mixed learning environments:

Each December, we observe Universal Human Rights Month—an opportunity to reflect upon historical and ongoing struggles for human rights around the globe. Yet understandings of human rights are constantly evolving, raising new questions, and calling into question aspects of social life that some of us take for granted. In the following five books published within the last year, scholars, a biographer, and a memoirist reflect upon different dimensions of human rights, offering educators a number of areas for further exploration of this important subject. Below, the publisher of each title outlines what is to be found within each book:

In a recent interview, I spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Jackson—Professor of History at Rhodes College and author of Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis. In this interview. Dr. Jackson discusses the untold story of Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, a French lesbian couple who intervened in the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands through an expansive artistic campaign during World War II. Better known to art historians by their adopted names of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Schwob and Malherbe’s story of resistance is told for the first time in Dr. Jackson’s new book. Here he shares a first look at their incredible story with Facing History.

“Our culture has an odd relationship with race: it structures every aspect of American social life, but in ways that can often seem invisible and undetected. Like an electrical current running through water, race has a way of filling space even as it remains invisible.”
—Dr. Eve L. Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard