During 1997-98, six faculty from different areas and levels of teaching received a Parrington grant to fund a series of seminars for the purpose of improving the teaching of African American works and topics at Lakeside. Seminar members were Midge Brenner (English, middle school), Brenda Brock (Library, upper school), Phyllis Byrdwell (Music, middle and upper schools), Judy Lightfoot (English, upper school), Gray Pedersen (history, upper school), and TJ Vassar (LEEP and Diversity, middle and upper schools). The group held a dozen seminars on African American works and topics, attended by visiting teachers and led, in turn, by individual group members and by visitors.

The project grew out of a belief that including African American works and topics in the Lakeside curriculum is not enough -- faculty need to work on how they teach them. For example, making Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man a major requirement of the required 11th-grade American Writers curriculum was a significant achievement of the English department, but a departmental meeting with TJ suggested that teachers need help in working with that book and others. Brenda had made similar observations about the10th-grade English unit on the Harlem Renaissance.

The principal goal of this Parrington group was to develop a useful conceptual framework for teaching African American works and topics. We would commit to using the framework to guide our teaching of any African American subjects that formed part of our work with students, and we would help colleagues use the framework as well.

Besides designing a specific product, we engaged in a sustained and transforming process -- one that was at least as educational to us as the usable results of our inquiry. We were a group of different races, sexes, and teaching levels engaged in conversations on very difficult subjects. Their difficulty stems from social and political stresses around race issues that are a part of the inherited culture of our nation, and from a defensive silence about teaching practices that is part of the inherited culture of the school. Such conversations must begin to happen if they are ever to become easier. We hope what we learned about discussing race and teaching can raise the general level of discourse on these topics at Lakeside while showing, too, that it's all right to be uncomfortable, make blunders, and forge onward to learn together.

Below are the 13 principles we developed.  Please contact any members of this Parrington seminar group at Lakeside for conversation about them.

BE ESPECIALLY CONSCIENTIOUS ABOUT  CLASSROOM ATMOSPHERE:

1.   Students should be invited to question and critique all claims and assumptions made in class, including the teacher’s.  This is possible only in a safe atmosphere where everyone can risk openly expressing and analyzing ideas.

2.   Teachers should expect the study of African American topics and materials to touch people personally.  Autobiography, fiction, poetry, drama, music, visual arts, and storytelling (including history told in narrative form) can simultaneously help express and help contain strong feelings.

3.   Teachers should carefully frame content that includes racist or bigoted language and attitudes—preview all materials carefully, warn students of coming difficulties, and explain that course content is presented not as a Truth or an Ideal but as individual perspectives that require critical responses.

ENSURE A MULTIPLICITY OF PERSPECTIVES:

4.   Teachers should acknowledge that African-American subjects are large and complex, and that schools typically address only small parts of them.  Basic expectations for both students and teacher should be to perceive the limits of what they think they know and to explore beyond those limits.

5.   Teachers should expect that everyone in the class will have a different understanding of the subject and that such differences will be useful to learning.

6.   Teachers should encourage all students to enter deeply into the experiences and outlooks of African American characters in literature, history, and the arts, and to discover that African Americans have complex, often divergent views of white people and their culture.

7.   Teachers should help students see that African Americans do not constitute a politically, philosophically, economically, or socially homogeneous group, and that their works are not windows on African American life in general but expressions of the particular visions of particular persons.

8.   Teachers should not expect African American students to represent African American people in general.

9.   African American topics and materials should be incorporated into other subjects and units; African American topics and materials should be taught as separate subjects and units.  A school must do both.

10.   As with any subject, in discussing particular persons, characters and voices in African American materials it is important to affirm both the commonalities of human experience across racial and ethnic boundaries, and the uniqueness of each individual.

11.   At the secondary level, it is important to teach about various schools of aesthetic and historical theory in the field of African American studies.  These conflicting perspectives offer useful analytical language for discussing the material and for constructively responding to fears about academic conspiracies to conceal or distort the history and culture of particular groups.

DEVELOP ONESELF AS A TEACHER OF THE SUBJECT:

12.   Teachers should be serious students of African American topics and materials, even if only at a beginning level.  They should be engaged in ongoing research into African American culture, history, traditions, and other contexts.

13.   Instruction must do more than just cover the subject.  Teachers should convey to students a personal need for studying African American material and cultivate a genuinely celebratory attitude toward it —as they should toward everything they teach.