This is one of those moments where I thought, if only I planned for that. My students were reading newspaper articles from the two-day long Tulsa Race Massacre in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. I asked my students to use the articles to answer the central question: “What caused the Tulsa Race Massacre?” Going into this discussion, I knew the topic was teeming with the potential to produce tension within my class. While I did prepare my students, I did not foresee what actually happened. A student wanted to quote a newspaper article that argued that the cause of the massacre was a White woman accusing a Black man of assault. But, the newspaper did not use the word “Black,” and instead referred to the man as a “negro.” When the student got to this word, I could sense her hesitation and I could feel her anxiety as she fumbled through the sentence. I knew the word was in the document, but forgot to mention it. I could tell everyone was a bit uncomfortable and I did not know if it was too late to say something.
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Ashley
Mixed Grade
Economics
Preservice Teaching Year
- What is the teacher's dilemma? Consider the teacher's goals, possible actions, beliefs about the situation and the students, and their own self-perceptions.
- Complete or modify the following sentence in a way that captures the teacher's central tension in the situation: "While on the one hand, the teacher believed/wanted/felt/did __________, on the other hand, they believed/wanted/felt/did __________."
- Thinking about your own classroom, how do you handle it when you realize mid-discussion that you neglected to prepare students for outdated language in primary source documents but feel you should have preemptively addressed this terminology?