After the Unite the Right Rally of 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, many continue to contemplate these events and ask how and why they occurred. Precipitated by debates about the Confederate statues, the rally demonstrated the resiliency and violence of white supremacy. Unsurprisingly, Charlottesville and the nation at large were and continue to be deeply disturbed by the events and grapple with how we move forward as a community and country.
Many people are experiencing angst about what America will emerge, hoping it will be more equitable, just, and democratic than the past. While there has been much conversation about what the future will look like, there is a critical gap in our understanding of the past and how it impacts our current realities. Ultimately, people must possess a deep, critical knowledge of historical processes to advocate effectively for a better future. Moreover, central to any Democracy, there must be space to have a generative conversation about contentious issues with people who may think differently from us to create effective solutions. Concerningly, we are living during a time in which dialogue is under-utilized, and perspectives different from our own are often ignored or dismissed.
The Curry School at UVA has bear witness to these issues. The Educating for Democracy Initiative was born out a desire to merge what we know how human development with what we need to know about the past. Created by researchers and practitioners from Youth-Nex, Center for Race and Public Educationand Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Educating for Democracy is a set of resources which uses draws on critical historical perspectives to engage K-12 students in developmentally appropriate conversations about race and ethnicity within the American context.
The resources explore race and America from various perspectives. While there are many issues the social justice resources could examine, we assert race and America continues to be crucial point of contention and injustice that must be reckoned with to create a more equitable society. The resources provide K-12 students the opportunity to participate in dialogue with peers about issues of race, justice, and fairness with developmentally appropriate questions and high-quality content. Importantly, though the use of various forms of literature, including primary resources and historical fiction, K-12 students engage in perspective-taking to create the best solutions to issues of injustice at the personal, relational, and societal levels.
The resources include individual lesson plans, integrated units, independent activities, and support for teacher professional development. K-12 learning resources are structured to allow teachers to use in the way that best suits the needs of their unique classroom environments—resources can be used as supplements to existing units or classroom activities or merged with existing curricular activities. Curricula resources have additional extension activities for social and civic engagement. Teacher professional development resources provide information on key topics, including research on the theoretical perspectives used to create materials, teacher’s racial-ethnic identity development, and information on existing alternative social justice curricula to support teacher efforts.
Ultimately, we hope to join a robust group of educators working to create a more just world one classroom at a time. With the focused goal of creating justice-orientated citizens, we hope these resources pave the way for “beloved classroom communities” in which tension is embraced to realize justice. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heightsof understanding and brotherhood”.