-there's a risk of them going their separate ways. The question was asked about teaching Eyes II, because they claim it's not perceived as a morals issue. And I'm, I have to take umbrage, you know with that. I do see Eyes II very much as instruction for morals even more so than One. Because One is clearly identified as something that you can take up very easily. You know this is the wrong side. This is the right side. The thing that makes Two a critical issue is that it gives some-it's a matter of taking the fine points and saying, These subtleties still are reflective of the morals that were established years ago and are still the battles that have to be waged. Let's not fool ourselves into believing that because we've been able to film twice that we've gotten so far into our educating the population that it is no longer a, a matter of teaching people morals. It's a matter of teaching morals every day of our lives. The fact that we have to sit here and even think that we would have to go back and discuss with the department head, a school board, a parent that this is an issue that is not to be taught in class says that we've been remiss in making sure that our morals are still as strong, and our convictions are still as clear as they always should have been. And that's my thought for your lunch discussion.

And before we get into our lunch discussion, let's look at the sampler from Eyes II to further the conversation and the points that were just being raised. So, [inaudible]. Move your chairs around and do whatever so that you can watch the television.

People walking down Fifth Avenue shouting, "No justice. No peace." How do you begin to understand all of that even with any problems you may have in discussing that, but understanding that it's part of the continuation? How do you understand even the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, sometimes called the Black Panther Party in Alabama, as a continuation of that movement? Does it only have to be people sitting on, on stools at a, at a lunch counter and taking the blows of what it means to be nonviolent philosophically or tactically? So, there's that concern. And how you begin to interpret that to a classroom and to your own colleagues. The second piece is reflected in the movement. I mean in the music. And it's something that we struggle with as we were making it, which is that these take, take the power. Which is what you saw in that Atlanta segment. "People Get Ready," which you'll see in the fifth hour. That there were, these became the new freedom songs. And we had to struggle with some people who said, No, you know, it's not the same thing. It's not 'We Shall Overcome.' It's not even 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.' It was. That when we were doing what we were doing at Howard or wherever we were, "People Get Ready, There's a Train A-Comin" was the same thing for us as "We Shall Overcome." And so, it's how you begin to, to reinterpret that. But let me not-if people want to talk about that a little bit. I just saw a hand somewhere.

Yeah, I had thrown my hand up when you were talking about the music in the piece cause it seemed to me that some of that music was, was not of the same time period.

Yes, it was. Yeah, it's interesting. Always. Because one of the things that we always had to be in Eyes was of that time, which is a problem when you're doing interviews because people always want to talk. Particularly when we were doing this, Mandela was still in jail, and it was amazing how many people would refer back to it's just like South African apartheid. And you would say, No, you can't talk about that here. You have to stay in time. All of the songs were of that time. They never happened before the time of the particular incident that they are in. Yeah. Which was a problem because sometimes we'd want to use something else and somebody'd say, No, it came afterward. Yeah?

That intrigues me, how much effort did you really spend to make sure that were not telling that as a 1990 story? That you really were telling it as a story that, without imposing our political interpretations today, our reactions to the Reagan years. How much energy went into that?

A lot because it's very hard. I mean, again, when you have something like a, the Stewart case up here, which was also coming out at that time, or police brutality, or something. It was very hard, and it was really a prodigious effort on the part of all the producers. And you might wanna mention that, ask that question again at the producer's panel this evening. It was very hard to keep people in time, but it was a very conscious effort. And particularly also with advisors coming in and saying, No, they would not have. That would not have been thought of at that point. Although, when I think about it, it didn't even get to that. Most of the time, it was internally that we understood, No, you cannot reflect that in that segment cause it just wasn't there then. Yes?

As you talked about Eyes II and the, the events in the, in the second series as a continuation of the earlier struggles, is it possible, and this may be a question for other people too, is it possible to teach using Eyes II without having first gone through Eyes I?

That's interesting. Do people want to respond to that?

I don't think so.

You think so? Oh, you don't think so.

I, I don't think so.

Why?

Many of the students, I think we brought this up in one of our small discussions that-I teach high school, most people weren't even born after '65 that were teaching. So, they don't have the visual sense, the visual sense of what happened. I mean we, we're living in a time now that you can put on a tape, and you could show people visuals. It's not like a ancient history where you have to pick up a book and then have someone interpret what someone else, some other historian has written about the period. They can look at it. They can make their own interpretation. And, and without that, you can't put on Eyes II. And I, I, I don't know. I don't see Eyes II getting the same respectability, the same national acclaim, and the same push that Eyes I did. And I think that you really got to support Eyes II with Eyes I.

We're going to come back to you but yes, you had your hand up.

I disagree. I think that's almost like saying to me, You cannot teach history unless it's on the continuum. And I think that that's not true. Our tradition as a people has been teach our history based on the lesson we were trying to impart to our children at that time. Bring your oral history. You bring the perspective of the other people that were alive and imbibed by that era. My children, and I'm talking about kindergarteners to third graders now, rallied for Eyes II without ever having seen Eyes I. Because when Eyes I hit the screen, they weren't even a gleam in somebody's eye.

OK, can, can I follow up on that?

And, and I think that part of what that was was the fact that it became an interactive lesson for them to go home and say, Mommy, we have to watch this tonight. Or, Daddy, we have to talk about this tonight because I have to be ready tomorrow. And many of those parents came to school before those segments to talk about their roles. Part of that was because I was here and had all the knowledge and the background of what was coming those months before. So, I could put that in place. But even without that, for the other classrooms that didn't have it, we did what we could to begin setting that up. And what it did was act as a springboard or a catalyst for them to begin looking back and searching out the information that they needed to put it back into a perspective or back on the continuum for them. I mean we had a physical timeline in that school building where people went home and asked. And when they came back, they stuck up there with glue, or tape, or whatever they had discovered for a month, two months, three months until that timeline had more on there to represent history than people had not even thought about or seen in looking at One or Two.

I, I, I tend to agree. In, in that continuum though, sometimes we don't have a real concept of what was going on at that same period of time. I mean we can talk about _Eyes on The Prize_. We can look at it from the Black experience, from the civil rights experience, but not all the time do we think about what else was going on in the forties, or in the fifties, or in the sixties at the same time people were doing, you know, marching and all that.

Yeah, that's such a good question because part of what I'm struggling with too, as you develop curriculums for teachers, how do you teach-how do you use both Eyes I and Eyes II? In the context of history, I think there's got to be connections between Two. But I think that if you, if you understand that the information contained in both of those series is such a wealth of, of, of information and resources to use that you would wanna think more clearly, not just about history but the impact of, of segments of that on what it is you wanna get across. For example, if you're trying to deal with the issue of racism. To take Two, which is so much, so very close to home, especially in, in Massachusetts, and take it out of the context of history, which is so very far away from home and easier to understand, but talks about where were you, and what did you do, and what was your contribution? It doesn't need necessarily historical context. I think the challenge is to figure out what is it we want to teach to whom. To take what this has to offer and talk about a wide variety of options. People learn better when you can challenge them with a wide variety of options and talk about no one way to look at history or no one way to educate yourself or your kids. But rather, to use the resources to ask the questions, to find the answers, and then to figure out how do I change myself? That's what education is about. How do I, how do I become a more learned child, a more learned teacher, a more learned adult? How do I change my behavior to do things differently? That's what's so great about these tapes because it isn't just history that's being taught here. And the closer you get to home, the better it is for its use, I think.

I'll come back to [unintelligible] Dan?

I think that the more you have the kids aware of history, the better. But I, I agree that you can definitely teach any one of these segments without that and make good use of it. I mean, Eyes I would be more effective if kids know something about slavery, colonization, reconstruction, Jim Crowe laws. How things got the way they are in this country. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do Eyes I if the kids haven't had that background.

Yeah, but kids may, if you started out with Eyes II, isn't it interesting that if there's material in Eyes II that spurs on that question, then you can go back-

Absolutely.

-to Eyes I without assuming-

That's great.

-that it's the chronological-you know, let me start with that and then move all the way through.

Right, start where they are now.

So, you've got that resource to just, you know, open up lots of doors.

I mean you raised this sort of pedagogical question, do we have to teach chronologically, or can we teach thematically? And we could spend, you know, the whole four days doing this. And I think that, you know, any point of entry works given that you have the framing questions that I think people are throwing around. But I think it's interesting that Gerald, you know, started going backwards. You know he talked about the pre-conditions first. And I know for me that was really elucidating. Doesn't mean that you necessarily start there with kids but it sure is important that we have that grounding in history. And I don't think for a moment that you wan to underestimate the importance of the history and think that, that that isn't what's really key for students to understand. That's what's so powerful about this. It is history. Whether or not you choose to approach it that way. You know you wanna talk about it from sociological perspective or this, but you don't want to ignore that this is something that happened and is happening. And I guess the question I would look at is how do you frame it? And that, that way you can fill in your, your holes.

Well, I taught it as a college course to about forty seniors, generally second semester seniors. Most of whom had taken a first semester on the civil rights era with a lot of emphasis on the Kennedys. So, this was their last semester. And they worked very hard. They saw both _Eyes on the Prize_ I and II. And you and Jack Mendelsohn were guest speakers so they, they got a good opportunity to study the history. To study it academically. To study that era academically. Now the other side of it, I'm talking just about this age group anyway, they came out very depressed. They were extremely depressed. They did excellent work. As a matter of fact, I've asked the one if anyone is interested, to bring some sampling in of their journals and the work that they did. Because indeed, it was very hard for them to distinguish between the kinds of racism that they did see in the sixties and the things that they are seeing now, and particularly the Black students. They also, to, sort of, dovetailed into a question that was asked, many of them come from families that have quote "made it" into this freedom part. And they're still finding that it had not shielded them from overt racism, and, so that, that, it, you know, that there are still that kind of questions, those kinds of things to be answered. The dissipation also when this happened, which we discussed at the last session, was what has happened to a lot of that energy? Deliberately, we think, is it has been drained off and to think like, you know, well, Shall we kill minks for mink coats? or, you know, animal rights. And we went around the room actually, and there were only maybe a third of the class were actively involved in anything one might very loosely call civil rights. And yet, they were, you might just generally, I, kinda, take issue with Harding on his idea of, that this civil rights, what happened in the sixties has kinda spilled out to all of these, these things in Europe. I'm not sure what we got what-the wall coming down in Berlin-those people got. I'm not sure we got the same dividends. These students also heard, and hear, at an ordinary liberal college things such as, well, Black Studies programs or affirmative action programs are the result of quote "White liberal guilt" despite the fact that, that these people know about the _Eyes on the Prize_ , so their students are still aware of those and aware of the fact that this is a part of their history. They know it happened. They know that the historical people now, that the facts are still there. They haven't changed at all. So it's not a how-to course. There's no doubt about it. It's not a how to do course at all.

Yes?

I've used Eyes I and Eyes II both with graduate students at Simmons College and with ninth graders in an inner city. And for me, I'm always learning history. And I tell students that the more they learn about history, the more they realize they don't know. And that what's really important are the questions that we all ask. And so, I have them begin any unit that we do, and I. try to frame my teachers, my future teachers, to do the same thing, how to ask questions. I think that's probably one of the worst things that teachers do. Social Studies teachers in particular really don't think about what the compelling questions are. And it's possible. I agree with Linda. If the teacher has a background and is constantly viewing herself as a learner, it's possible then to present a thematic history, and be able to fill in the gaps, be able to help kids raise questions, and understand how really complicated all these issues are. They are so complex that the rest of my lifetime won't be enough to begin to understand a whole lot of these things.

I think-let me just pick up on something, because it's something that we had to deal with more so in the making of Eyes II than in Eyes I, which was that within the country and even within the African American community, there was no consensus about most of this stuff.

Yeah, that's what you see, and that's what's so powerful in the film.

Exactly.

That's right.

So that when, and it was unfortunate, we tried to, even with the Panthers, get somebody from the Black community in Oakland to say, Look when they came out with those guns, we were scared to death, you know. And we thought this was the wrong way and de-de-de. You get a sense of that with Nancy Jefferson who says, We thought that they were going about it the wrong way. But there were a lot of people, and I would count myself in that. I mean I had come out of the SNCC piece, which was if you have a, pro-that to say that you were going to take up guns was an endangerment to the community. Not necessarily that you shouldn't do it, but that you should not talk about it because the community was not yet ready for it and was not yet ready for the repercussions that that would bring back on it. So that, but then I would talk to, and I think I mentioned this at the November conference, Callie Crossley, who was the producer on Eyes I, now her thing was she's sitting-she's younger than I am-she's sitting, and is at that point where the Panthers came out maybe nine-nineteen, twenty years old. She's up at Wellesley College. And she said, You know when I saw the Panthers finally standing up as Black men, not getting beat over the head, not you know, covering themselves, standing up, it was a, it was a pride thing with me. It was, we are finally reacting, we're finally-Now part of that was the way that nonviolence was interpreted, which can also be, you ch-there's a way to see that also as standing up. But, that at least to see, and I say Black men because it was different, that manhood piece was very important. It was important with Malcolm. It was important with the Panthers. And it's, I mean for Black women, that's always the, the contradictions, you know, how you deal with that. But, that that way was very important to see the Panthers in that light. And again, that was, that was the problem that we had. How do you make sure that people see the confusions, the confusion that folks felt during that time as well? And about Malcolm. I mean when Sonia talks about it, it was true. When we saw Malcolm, there was a sense that we shouldn't be saying that, you know. And it wasn't just among the parents. It was among some of the younger people too, particularly in the South. And people who were even just tactically nonviolent, like SNCC who didn't believe in it philosophically but who thought, Well, this, it'll at least keep us, some of us, from getting killed. That to see Malcolm was almost like, Well, it may be endangering some of what we're talking about. It was what you saw reflected in SNCC staff meetings and you'll see it at the producer's panel a piece from the, from 204, which is about Kings' last year. The sense that the staff was always arguing about tactics. Always arguing about strategies. There was never a consensus. I mean SNCC meetings would go into four, five o'clock in the morning because we were. I mean part, part of it was that we were basically renegades and anarchists. [laughter] You know, but, and we were young, you know. And so, we were really struggling with a lot of that stuff. And because. Hm? Say what?

I said it sounds like NATO.

Yes, that's right. That's right, yes. And always, but I mean, part of what we had during the movement was we were always grounded in the community so that when you came out with something that might be wild or crazy, the community might say to you, No, you ain't tryin that here. You know. That's a little too far. You were always, there was always a sense that there was something that you were connected to beyond your quote "wild eyed radicalism" you know, that said no, i'ts just, we're not ready for that yet. And maybe that's really a bad idea. So, anyway, just to get out that sense that, yeah, there was no consensus and that's real important to understand.

It's, it's too bad that you didn't have a record of that because it seems to be ten times as valuable as the way that we'll hold one another to yesterday and rally around a dead horse. When we are clearly in the majority in major cities in the United States. And for instance, in my class, I teach at Latin Academy, it's an exam school, I get the cream of the Boston school system. And I, I feel that we don't live in time. We live in great moments. And some of these were brought back to me by this experience. And this is, that's the first time I've seen it. And because there were a lot of things that I had terrible fights about at the time. The, and these would be pushed under when they were the real issues and the White community would have at that point, no choice but to rally around one side or the other if the real-like the issue of feminism, which had been brought up here. And it still troubles me far more and it troubled me then because I was reared by my mother not my father. And it was my mother who traveled and my mother who was educated. And the same quarrel I had with August Wilson when he wrote, you know, _Ma Rainey's Black Bottom_. He's talking out of his own real experience and he's talking out of, out of a woman who made him possible while his daddy ran off. And, and he, his concern with, there are other ways of surviving besides the confrontational one that Ma Rainey would get you killed. And that misplaced rage that could only turn like a tortured snake on this, you know, on his buddy in the band in Ma _Rainey's Black Bottom_. And, and, and ultimately, the real issues I'm rallying around now, because Boston always offers you a, a...it's, it's the best place in the world to live if you want to have real things going on all the time. I've got the Stewart case when we picked that up. Every year, we have a debate on the. on the natural superiority of women, which I accepted years and years ago even though my ex-wife said, Comes the revolution, we're not gonna take any prisoners.

Let me just take one last question. Yeah?

This question is about images, I guess, that in my mind and in _Eyes on the Prize_ I, the poster image or image in my mind and I certainly seen it on the cover of some of the books that that go along with Eyes, _Eyes on the Prize I_ of of a, the march and, and the group of adults. Just a group of adults and children marching along the road. And on the poster, for _Eyes on the Prize II_, my image of that poster behind you is of a child in distress. And as we've been talking about and certainly, looking up, like eyes on the prize, but still, there's a distressed look on that child's face. And as we've all been, sort of, talking-my mind wanders like this, forgive me-but talking, I've been listening and absorbing and thinking about those two images, and I wonder if there is, if there is some underlying significance to the choice in the promotional literature. Because knowing the images and you guys being image makers have a great deal to say. And I may just be interpreting the second poster differently. But this first one is strength, and we're together, and we're marching, and cooperative, and we've been talking about that. And the second one seems to be, there is a single focus and there's some distress in the single focus.

I think, you pick up on something interesting. I mean let me just back up also. The first series also has the flag, and the second series doesn't. And that was because, and there were those who wanted to put the flag in the second series as well. There were those who said, and luckily won out, who said that, no, because Black people in the second series are not fighting necessarily for inclusion in the country as it was then. That they really are fighting for power. Empowerment of the community. And so, what you see with the young person is, for me it's not so much distress, it's really looking forward and not quite knowing what that future is. But we did know it had to be a young person because it, it was the youth who would hopefully be that next generation that would continue the struggle. And so, yeah, you do see-you're right. I mean, I'm glad you brought up the difference between the po-because it represents the difference in those two series. Yeah.

I think we'll have to stop right now in terms of going down to our restaurant. The van is here for those people who need a ride down. And the van at quarter of two will be coming back up for those who need a ride up. So, I would suggest that most of us go ahead and walk down. It really is a nice walk down. It's coming up that's the problem. Meet back here at two o'clock. We'll continue the conversation.

[reads] -the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools. "We'll do it even though the vast majority of the people of Little Rock are not in favor of integration as a principle." said the superintendent of schools. Three years later, the plan for gradual desegregation began. "The Black schools will stay in place," said the superintendent, "while we see what happens with the first group, nine in number, integrating the White central high school." Listen now to the voices of the change agents.

[reads] I am Melba Pattillo Beals. It was a kind of curiosity not an overwhelming desire to go to this school, and integrate it, and change history. Oh, no. There was none of that. I just thought it would be fun to go to this school I ride by every day. I want to know what's in there. I don't necessarily want to be with those people. I assumed that being with those people would be no different than being with people I was already with.

[reads] I'm Elizabeth Eckford. Superintendent Blossom told our parents not to come with us this morning. He said that he wouldn't be able to protect the children if they came. The night before I was so excited, I couldn't sleep. Before I left home in the morning, mother called us into the living room to have a word of prayer. When I got to the school, I saw a large crowd of people standing across the street from, from the soldiers guarding Central High. As I walked on, the crowd suddenly got quiet. All I could hear was the shuffling of their feet. Then someone shouted, "Here she comes. Get ready." I moved away from the cry, crowd on the sidewalk and into the street. "If the mob came at me," I thought, "I could then cross back over so the guards could protect me." The crowd moved closer. And then they began to follow me, calling me names. I still wasn't afraid. Just a little bit nervous. I wondered whether I could make it to the center entrance to-a block away. It was the longest block I ever walked in my whole life. Even so, I still wasn't too scared because all the time I kept thinking that the guards would protect me. When I got up to the guard, he didn't move. When I tried to squeeze past, he raised his bayonet. And then the other guards moved in, and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look, and I was very frightened. I could hear the crowd yelling, "Lynch her! Lynch her!" I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob. Some-someone who maybe could help. I looked in the face of an old woman. It seemed to be a kind face but then I looked at her again. She spat on me. Someone hollered, "Drag her over to this tree. Let's take care of that nigger." Just then a White man put his arm around me and patted my shoulder. He raised my chin and said, "Don't let them see you cry."

[reads] I'm Governor Orval Faubus. I'm Governor Orval Faubus. I don't think anyone can fully understand the complexities of the situation that existed in Arkansas and many places in the nation at that time. But I can say that at the beginning of the Little Rock crisis in Arkansas in 1957, I was on excellent terms with all the citizens of the state. And my relations with Black citizens were especially good. I had placed leading Black citizens on the Democratic State Central Committee for the somewhat-for the first time. My staff meetings were integrated. And this was somewhat unprecedented. We were in the process of equalizing salaries of Blacks and Whites in state government, which hadn't been done. And in the public schools throughout the state. And I was known as the most understanding man in the history of the state in relation to programs that benefited the poor people. Many, many of the Black people understood when I explained to them that my objective in the Little Rock crisis was to prevent violence and death in the disorders that became imminent. I knew of small well-organized groups, armed to the teeth with repeating rifles and other firearms, determined to halt by extreme means, if necessary, the entry of the Black students into the school. Now one group, and I have personal knowledge of this, and I can even name some of the individuals, unloaded their weapons at a town a short distance east of Little Rock when they learned that the National Guard had been placed on duty. A well-armed group could have left many dead and wounded people. Now who was in most danger if such occurred? Well, the Blacks themselves would be in most danger.

[reads] I'm James Hicks, a newsman. The three of us Black reporters traveled by car to Central High. We were there on a mall in front of the school when the word got out to the crowd that the niggers are in the school and so they said to us, "Did you decoy? Did you lead those people in? You come out here as a decoy and let them other people go into the side of the building?" So, I said, "Hell." Like that. And the rest of us said this was ridiculous. But now there was a mob all around us. We were outnumbered. I guessed about five hundred to one. And so they started getting real smart and whatnot. And pretty soon, this one man, he was a one-armed man, he put his arm around my neck and the others started attacking me. But I was able to look up and see that whereas I was being held and my clothes torn off, Alex Wilson was being attacked by somebody who had a brick in his hand. Instead of throwing the brick, because he was too close and didn't want to, I guess, he hit Wilson upside the head with this brick. I mean a full brick. He picked it up and slapped Wilson just like that. Wilson was more than six feet tall and an ex-Marine, but he went down like a tree. Newsom, he was mauled. I was mauled. One thing that I remember was that when I bent over, because I was in pain, a man was circling to see me if he could get me underneath. I mean I'm bent double, and he was trying to kick me in the stomach, in the groin. We started running but there was hardly any place to run to because they were surrounding us. We saw the FBI, who did nothing. But we finally ran away and got down to the Black section of Little Rock.

[reads] It was a long struggle to integrate the Little Rock high school. Standoffs, negotiation, President Eisenhower intervening, federalizing the National Guard, choosing the 101st Airborne Division because he had known the men and their capabilities during World War II.

[reads] The troops were wonderful. They didn't baby us, but they were there. So, for the first time, I began to feel like there is this slight buffer-zone between me and this hell on the other side of the wall. They couldn't be with us everywhere. They couldn't be with us, for example, in the ladies' bathroom. They couldn't be with us in the gym. We'll be showering in gym, and someone would turn your shower into scalding. You'd be walking out to the volleyball court, and someone would break a bottle and trip you on the bottle. I have scars on my knee from that. After a while, I started saying to myself, "Am I less than human? Why did they do this to me? What's wrong with me?" And so, you go through stages even as a child. First, you are in pain. Then you're angry. Then you try to fight back. And then you just don't care. You just, you can't care. You hope you do die. You hope that there's an end. And then you just mellow out and you just realize that survival is day to day, and you start to grasp your own spirit. You start to grasp the depths of the human spirit and you start to understand your own ability to cope no matter what. That is the greatest lesson I learned.

[reads] I'm Thelma Wair. Most of the faculty were helpful but there were a few that weren't. My homeroom teacher was kinda strange. She just did little strange things. I remember that when we were absent, we'd have to go to the office and get a re-admittance slip. When I would come in to give her my re-admittance slip, she wouldn't take it so I would just put it down on her desk. And then she would sign it, and put it in the book, and slide it back across to me. Now that was really strange. I guess she had to do something to show her class that she wasn't particularly happy about me being in there. So, she just did little strange things. Subtle things. Subtle as a ton of bricks.

[reads] That first year, one Black student, the one who entered in his senior year, Ernest Green, he graduated. Orval Faubus came and closed up all the public high schools in Little Rock from September 1958 through August 1959 when the Supreme Court ruled the closing unconstitutional. The American public watched and listened to the happenings on television and radio, and read about them in the print media. In December 1958 Orval Faubus was named one of the ten most admired men in the world. A story and voices of our American past. Is it really a story of our present too?

We want you to stick with the mood that's been created by the reading. You have a small card that gives you a color and a number. You'll be working with three other people taking this reading, this method. You'll be working together for a half an hour, and you're asked to address three questions that we are going to post here on the blackboard. When we have a chance to look at the-after we have a chance to look at the questions, I will ask everybody who has pink to go to that corner. Everybody who has blue to go to that corner. Everybody who has orange to go here. And you will look for three other people who have the same color and number as yourself. If, you may wish to go outside on the front lawn. Some of you may want to stay here. There's a courtyard with benches. There's another room upstairs we can show you to. But you'll be working with three other people. You're in groups of four, to look at the mood that's been created, what you have just heard. How do you help 1990s students? How do you help people in workshops understand, connect with the people who are in this reading? Do you try to define fear? Lynching? How do you address the name calling? Do you talk about courage? How do you help students understand systems? What's change like? This will be posted for you to come back and look at it. Basic question. The story of Little Rock told by people who are part of the workshop part of the classroom. What do you the educator do with it? We will ask you to come back at ten past, so you have forty minutes. One person will report back from the group what's process you used and what happened. Yes?

How do you get one of those little tags?

OK, sure. Anybody who didn't get a tag, come up here afterwards. So, you have forty minutes, and you will do a report back. If you didn't get a tag, right here.

-that determination. And you know, often, they aren't even cognizant of the fact that it's happening to, to assess.

And you're forcing them to question themselves, you know. It's like with feminism. That whole issue and, and are you really oppressed because you're a woman? Well, first, you have to look at yourself and your life and you have to question yourself. And then you've got to question your mother, and your mother. And that's tough to do. So, I think we ask a lot of kids, cause we're not questioning ourselves. And I think the bottom line, that's what we have to do too as teachers.

Yeah, and you know, and I think it's important especially if you are junior high school or high school person where you are responsible for teaching one subject area. Now, you have the additional responsibility of connecting with the teachers who teach those same children so that there is a, a relationship when they leave your classroom, and they go to art. There's something that can be transferred. And when they leave art and go to math, they can transfer skills. So, you're talking about preparing in such a way that there's an integration of the skills across the subject areas. Otherwise, if it's done in isolation, I don't care how much you do, it's not gonna be retained.

It's pigeon holing. Cubby hole.

They need to see how they can directly apply what they've learned in your room in someone else's room. And what they learned in that person's room, applied to your room, and so forth so that you're really talking about developing a relationship with the teachers. And, and that's difficult because people say, Oh, this is my prep, I don't have time for this. So, you even have to go another route that's not, you know, directly involved with the children initially.

It seems to me we got a couple of pretty good answers to the first question.

Maybe we can take the second.

OK?

The connections and in both, in both senses that you were talking about. The connections with the kids own lives.

So, what did we say for the students to get them to connect? Now we did a lot of talking.

And that's all right. That's, that's another thing.

Oh, what did we say?

What you were talking about with the-

We said it's direct exposure.

Their own experiences.

Right.

Connect with their own experience.

Exposure.

And the way to do that is to bring up contemporary issues that mirror these so-called, I guess, ancient history, to some of them.

Draw on their own experiences. Experiences. We gotta develop some critical thinking, I guess.

Because I have unusual reservation-

-certain life experiences.

Right, from, from.

But that's a lot, and she's talking in these allegories. She's not really defining it.

And taking your point that that doesn't mean they know more just because they're twenty-one by twelve. But I think a certain number of life experiences will give them some clue to better understanding what it is you're talking about.

Those of us who know what lynching is, know what she's talking about, but I don't think that-

So that if you're presenting and asking the group who feel, place themselves in 1950. From the year 1990, if they're 12 years old, you, sorta, have to do it in almost in an elemental context of giving them an A, B, C, and D more or less. And they can take those by their limited life experience-

I had the experience of just having a _Life Magazine_ issue on, on twenty-five years of civil rights or something.

I don't see any difference.

You don't see the difference? You don't know what to?

Because I don't know what the personalized method is.

Well, well, I was just trying to identify what he had discussed.

I think the personalizing method is you have the, the learner starts with understanding what it would, what it's like to live in that situation. How does it impact on me as an individual. How did it impact on-

You mean in the discussion.

Right. How did it impact on people living in that?

Discussion of his personal experiences.

And then what issues echoed from those personal experiences?

OK. Things have to be made clear to me.

I think where we, yeah, I think what it is, is, is also because I teach college students and I've dealt with high school students. But college students, the same thing. I use, I have a glossary of terms, which are not just terms like SDLC and so forth. But I have names like Paul Robeson and Malcolm X-

Sure.

-Marcus Garvey, you know, and all of those because they don't know them either. And so, when you, it's, sort of, like bringing both of it together in the sense of saying that it is personal because now at a college level, you are an adult. And by certain terminology, you're an adult, and you can, you may be feeling that you can't put yourself like as a student going into high school. But if you can't recognize yourself being a student, you can surely recognize yourself in the capacity of thinking yourself an adult to being one of the others on the outside. So, both of those participants are there. That fifteen-year-old child and the people who were jeering. So, you deal with it from the personal on either one of those wherever you place yourself as a child or the adult. And also, from an intellectual point of view of clarifying pejorative terminology that you accept a certain term, you know, such as the, the, the militant. The word militant meaning someone who's angry. And I had a student told me that's what Malcolm X means, militant. He was wanting to overthrow the US government by violent means. And I'm saying, well, they also said that John Brown was a militant as well.

What do you call Olly North?

Olly North. Right.

John Brown was militant. [laughs]

Yes, he was.

So was Olly North.

So was Olly North. Absolutely.

Right, and they were all. But the term militancy relative to the subject of civil rights becomes someone who is a threat to the way life is lived here. And if you are White, militant is something for you to be fearful of that person. If you are Black, militant may be that, and many other things as well, depending on which side of how you feel. Whatever that is, the objective is, should be achieved.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

That's right.

I think we can move to the second question.

I want to give one last point on the adult thing and then we can move on.

We're getting into it anyway.

Because people are adults, we cannot assume that they really know more than the twelve-year-old because there are loads of adults who are saying they knew nothing about their history. And there are times when we have to remember that their history was not dealt with at all while they were in elementary, secondary school.

I don't mind the course being remedial.

It's not necessarily remedial.

I however will not teach a therapeutic course. Or, or a course that has to deal with a matter of. I know, I want students who take _Eyes on the Prize_ for credit to take it as seriously, as seriously work of studying. This is my feeling. It may not be everybody's feeling but it is mine. And that means that they are seriously questioning, studying. They must remember dates. They must understand why. If they leave the course unconvinced, at least they'll have the facts straight.

Yeah, well, that-

And you see, a lot of this is not the popular approach of a lot of people. A lot of people expect people to be seeing the _Eyes on the Prize_ that that will convert them. I don't see it as a conversion course. I take it much too seriously.

Yeah, it's, it's not a sermon. That's for sure.

Yes, if we don't move onto number two, we won't even finish.

I think we've kind of gotten at number two. It's how do you define fear? It gets back to, do you define it in at an intellectual level? Do you define it on an emotional level?

Fear?

Yeah, fear.

Who's afraid?

Fear. Lynching.

Who, who's afraid?

And what are they afraid of?

What do you mean? That Eyes would frighten somebody?

No.

The question is-

Oh, oh, OK.

The question here. The second question is-

-do you try to define fear?

[reads] Do you try to define fear? What is lynching? And how do, how do you address name calling and her issues?

That, that's interesting. It goes back to-I teach art, African American art history and African art history. And the question that was raised about the poster for Eyes II. I, we will talk about works and such through the course and my quizzes are always in the form of a question that they have to give a narrative response to. And almost invariably-and I have a population of twenty-six students, and out of that, I would have roughly twenty-three or twenty-four or twenty-two that are White and the other small number of Black, or Latin, or Asian-and the responses by and large always are that if the image-

-adults, church adults, to grasp the notion that personal regeneration will not progress politics. And we really have to understand the way the systems work. And that you really have to mobilize to change things. And it seems to me that's one of the keys to understanding the Freedom Movement, that there were certain systems that were attacked. There were apartheid systems that were attacked. One had to do with voting. Registering and voting. That, we can, on a one-to-one basis, reading the gospel to have better attitudes toward one another wouldn't have ever changed the voting patterns. That had to be attacked politically you had to be willing to get political. And sometimes with themselves, there [sound missing] One of the reasons Blacks and modern liberal took so long to really understand that, is the problem of understanding and accepting the fact that politics-

This could circle back to the-

It's a moral purpose, but it has to be ex-

So that then they could get back and talk about change as part of the questioning piece in this role-play.

The political systems involve power, and they involved-

Oh, see? The different types of courage. I like that.

So, let's look at the school system, OK? So, ask the kid in the school system who has power over him, and they'll look at the obvious stuff. And then who do they have power over? And they'll look at the obvious stuff and then we can get them to look at their relationships with their friends. If they're on a team, their relationships with the other people on the team and the coaches and stuff like that. Is that what you mean. No?

I remember watching that on TV. At that time, I was nine years old, and I remember asking myself, Would I be in that crowd if I were living in Little Rock? And I was ashamed to say that my answer is I probably would be out there because of the consequences of not being out there.

Yes.

And hoping that it would never happen in my hometown, so I'd never have to make that decision.

I, I had, I had White friends from South Boston who were intimidated. I mean literally, intimidated I couldn't go to their house because for lunch because of the intimidation. Yeah you're right about the [unintelligible]. Although, you know, I think what you said though, would bring about quite a he-healthy discussion. Because I think at first, an unsophisticated cast would say yeah there was courage on both sides. You know whoever facilitated would get, have 'em examine that.

You see when you look at the courage from being the, the the mob person, if you are being able to articulate the kind of courage it takes to be that, then are you not doing it in a manner you're saying your personal self as you say how you, give me an example of fear. And it always comes from personal, even though we may defect to the third parties, it's still personal. That's because we are looking at it on the positive side. Do we also want to have the same attributes on the negative side?

You know as you talk about the other type of courage, I'm tempted to ask you would you ever think of asking children if when a bully, the way a bully behaves, if that is courage on the part of the bully.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So, you get them to define that type of courage too.

Yeah, there's courage across the board but you have to evaluate what you want.

As the end result of that type of courage.

From that courage. From that courageous stuff.

And the impact it has.

We got into this in defining the courage of Martin Luther King when he talked about being passive. Or about talking about Gandhi. I mean, you know, it is just automatically assumed that he was passive because he didn't want to fight. He was passive because he was a strategist. On occasion, it was decided by the class over time of which the only way you can succeed is by not actively fighting. That is a strategy and it's on occasion, a very brave strategy. And so, to de-to define courage is interesting.

Let me respond to question three, by responding to that by saying that that, to me, is the connecting piece.

I can't hear you.

That's the connecting piece between starting with the personal, the young kids, high school students, and moving it to a relational framework where you begin to put issues in relationship to other issues. That may come from a, from a gut level understanding. But you've got the move [unintelligible] and moving beyond the relational kinds of reaction to begin to look at the underlying issues. And that's what we begin to teach in-

[sighs]

What is a system? The system is the sheriff department and the FBI that would stand by and allow a mob to go crazy. That sometimes is a system that's broken down. A system that works is a system, a system of justice that works as a system where this wouldn't happen. So, that you can begin to define the word, the term "system" and the concepts of system layered on top of the personal where you're moving it to the higher level, levels of issues.

I guess the last part of it, what is change and what it looks like, would be easy to do by using these frames because they can see what happened then and what is happening now. And they can see the change there. And children would be able to identify change through that visual.

What is the process of getting to kids who say that nothing has changed?

Right.

Which is interesting.

So, then we're going to have to get them to identify what is change? Is it change just for the individual or is it change for a total group, for a society? That's when you can move right into it.

'Cause then I think you end up with that interchangeable thing, which is, is it change or is it different?

Or is it?

Different.

I see.

And see, because that which may appear to be change maybe has not changed. It's just different. It's in a different guise now from what it was before. In the sense that past what was the problem with that.

Yes, but there, but there are some changes.

Yes, there are some changes.

There obviously has changed to something that isn't obvious.

But you can't change anything unless you change the system. So. You see? Now I get, but you also, you get into, at least in the academic world, then you get on into the point of that when you change something then you can't go away and leave it by itself, unattended.

Right.

When you can negotiate for change, one has to stand right by [unintelligible] and watch it forever.

Oh, yeah.

But you also have to [unintelligible] without change in the system. The question is very interrelated.

Yes.

It's very interrelated.

It changes tomorrow with us.

So, what is a system? If you change the system and you put in people, no matter what color, and the laws are exactly the same, then you, then you still have the same thousand problems.

What do you want to say?

I don't know how you record it. [laughs]

Huh?

I didn't know how you report back what we're discussing.

What it feels like to have people saying and doing those kinds of things to you and what you get out of that? Positive and negative. The second part there, one question that we came up with is in talking about fear and, and courage, we got on the, the topic of how young African American males deal with those things. And, and I know in my own situation I was, I was suggesting that we, that we ask students to bring up examples from their own lives of, of feeling fear and, and either themselves acting courageously, or seeing friends, or, or other people act courageously. And then talk about those situations. And then that led us to, to wondering how it would work in a classroom where there were quite a few or, or some young African American males and, and how they deal with, with those feelings themselves and, and amongst their peers. And wanted the group to maybe spend some time discussing that or, or come up with some ideas of how we might approach that. Because I think that those are real loaded feelings for, for teenagers these days in general. We talked about lynching and defining. A little bit about some exercises we've done in the classroom around name calling. And, and wondered how well those work. But one example we had was putting up all the terrible names that you could ever think of calling somebody or being called up on the board. And categorizing them into whether those are racial, gender related, sexual terms, or what. And to get some discussion about what does that make you? How do you feel when you're called that name? What are you trying to get the other person to feel when you use the name? And try to get them more conscious about, about the names that they throw around in the classroom and outside the classroom. So, that's as far as we got.

OK. I just put up in a brief way. Would others like to respond, add to it, or ask for clarification?

I have one question. Do you teach a course like this?

Do I teach a course like this?

Yeah.

I teach Social Studies, yes.

And the name calling. Do you have Blacks in the course?

Yes.

How do they respond to the name calling part of this?

They, they throw up their names too. I've done it in the sense of, we've done it around racial and ethnic related name calling because my African American students use names in relationship to people from other cultures. Calling other people names. And so, we just are trying to get them to be aware of how the names make them feel so that they can project that a little bit on, on the people that they're calling.

Does anybody else have name calling?

We didn't have it in our group. But the name calling issue. I worked in a school where my students were all African American or Latino. And it's all of my students called one another nigger. This, I don't like. So, I said to them, Why do you do this? And they said, It's all right if we do it but it's not all right if you do it.

It's not.

So, I said, Well, I accept that, but I have a question. How come you don't hear Jews call each other kike? How come you don't hear Latinos call each other spic? And they stopped. And I said, Why? And finally, we got to the issue. And so at least in front of me, they don't do it. And I don't know why they don't do it, but they began to see that what they were really doing was accepting the pejorative name of the oppressor and, sort of, internalizing the way that I thought was not appropriate. I may be wrong, but it just seemed to me that it really wasn't. So, I don't even like to get into making lists and stuff because it somehow validates it for me and makes it OK. And I don't want to validate that.

OK, Lyda, and then Lurline, and then way back.

The technique of what you described is not an unusual technique. I've seen it in graduate schools. I've seen it in race relations. And at a personal, very personal level, I'm always affronted by the visuals involved in, in parents sanctioning, of even the words. It's a very controversial for me because I've had debate with others who teach, as I teach, in race relations and who are probably more expertise-have more expertise or less expertise. But I think we ought to consider that that technique in and of itself may or may not be valid. I don't, I don't feel it's very valid because I think, I think supporting-the debate is well, kids say it anyway and they're gonna say it. And let's bring it out in the open and let's discuss it. But the, the validation of it, and the visualizing of it, and the discussion around well, you do it. And what does it really mean? How does that work out? And then we put it aside and we move onto other business does something that I think that people need to examine. I've seen repercussions afterwards of a good race relations course where people walk out there as adults, as furious as can be with the leaders especially if those leaders were White.

Yes.

As furious as can be with those people involved in that process. Now if I as an adult who can articulate it, me or others. Not necessarily me. I've just seen people do it. Can articulate that fury, I often wonder what does it do? What messages are incidentally left over with kids who cannot articulate it well what those leftover feelings are like? Because remember now, we've got these names that I don't even use. And if I hear somebody use it, I don't want them to use it in front of me. All over the board. We've got kids saying it. And what does all of this mean to you? We've got kids talking about horrible experiences when they've been called names. We've got kids saying, "It's OK if we call each other that but you can't call it." But there are White kids involved in that discussion as well with Black kids involved. And we've got us for whatever, wherever we are at our point in life trying to facilitate this process. And then we erase the board, and everybody walks out of the door. So, I just, from somebody who's seen it done and participated in it, just think that maybe we ought to consider it when we use it. I wouldn't use it.

That makes sense. I, I'm curious about other ways of approaching it then. Other exercises if people have suggestions.

You mean the name calling?

Say don't do it.

Don't do it.

Yeah, well that was a good suggestion.

Just tell them don't do it.

What's that?

I just give direct orders. Don't do it.

Don't do it. Well, they don't do it in the classroom. They do it-

Wait, wait, wait. You all started without us.

You're going to get some more help.

This isn't just directed at you.

I had an interesting experience with one of the, with a couple of the students who said that they went home and found parents making-they didn't, they didn't use the words, but they made oral reports about parents using racial slurs, so that they removed it from themselves.

I'm going to be very brief. We felt that we would have to deal with the issue of name calling directly. That it was not right. And the kids, adults, whoever need to know it's not right. We deal with it directly. But some of the methods we thought we could use was through activities like StarPower and the game called Labeling. And the game called Labeling, each person has a name on his or her forehead. Does everyone know that game?

Yeah.

Otherwise, I won't go through it.

I don't.

I don't.

All right. Each person has a label on his/her forehead. And you, the person, don't know what the label says. And everyone in the group has to treat you based on what is written on your forehead. That way everyone has the experience of being treated a certain way because of a name, because of a stereotype. And we find that when people had that type of experience, it's easy for us to get into discussions afterwards on the impact of name calling and what it does to your self-esteem and your self-confidence.

Way in the back and the one in front of them.

Our group discussed one approach and that was to identify what the name, what the name-the cause for the incident. And once the cause is defined, we find out asking that person who called the other person that name, Do you like-would you like to be called that name? What is it? Then it broadens into a discussion of, Well, usually, they'll say because he provoked me. Then does that action validate your action because you responded in anger? So, oftentimes, what happens is that they find they wouldn't like that to happen to them. So, the basic method is identifying what the name is, the cause. And the same approach can be used in terms of defining courage. Wait.

What she's trying to do is explain what we call roundtable discussion. The two kids come with a conflict. It's a conflict resolution strategy. What was the cause of the incident? You called him this name. He didn't like it. Why did you call him that name? Well, I was mad. He kicked me. Took the basketball. Whatever it was. All right. Is it appropriate for you to take this action? Does it accomplish what you initially intended to do? Did you only want to hurt their feelings, or did you want the ball back? Did you want to hurt their ankle like they hurt yours? Or did you want to hurt their feelings? What is it that you're looking for? Set the goal. And let's figure out what was appropriate or what other strategy was more appropriate for reaching that goal. So that you're building them a strategy for responsible response to a negative situation in which they can be empowered to take an action, to make choices and an action that is more effective at accomplishing their goal. And what I find is that after doing this a few times, the children will sit down, and you don't need to go sit down with them. They work it out on their own. And we have, I guess, over, I took, it took us a school year, a nine-month period, to stop the name calling and, you know, slandering of one another within an entire school. Once they learn the process and it was hard in the beginning because it meant that an adult always had to be there to keep everybody calm. But once the process is established, they help each other. And you can see them clustering in the yard. And whenever you see them clustered. You know they're going through resolution. [background chatter begins] They're going to the table to discuss whatever the problem was. And if they can't, then they come and they say, We need you at this discussion. We need the conference. And we take it to the next level so that they've designed a hierarchy for themselves. And it seems to work well because then they have the opportunity to interact with each other to get off their chest what bothered them. And to resolve the issue of why we don't call names at the same time.

OK, there are two over here. And then we'll move to this side.

What Bill has done in Lincoln-Sudbury, they have a policy against verbal abuse of another student by which students are punished with suspension at the first offense. He's added to that sexual harassment. And what he did was he brought around a petition for students to sign supporting this anti-sexual harassment policy. And students have gotten quite involved in that.

Who did this? The principal, you said?

Bill, here.

What I tried to do was find a way to approach this issue indirectly. And I find that the one kind of verbal harassment that is not really challenged by school authorities, in fact, it's so pervasive that it's accepted as common sense almost, not a prejudice, is homophobic statements that you'll hear from kids shouting down the hallway, You fag. Or, the expression last year was if something was really gay, it means that it's really stupid. And when you try to call this to kids' attention, the kid goes, I'm not being prejudiced. You don't understand, that just means it's stupid. And the, the circulation of the petition in this civil rights unit, I try to find, sort of parallel issues to what we're studying and to have them become involved possibly in social change without them knowing it immediately. But the purpose of the petition is really to open up that discussion and not do it along Black, White lines, which is so emotionally charged and difficult for Black students when there are only two or three of them in a room. I try to find kind of a third issue removed from, from, you know racial groups, a parallel issue. So, in fact, not only did it serve as a way to open up the discussion about name calling but in fact, kids ended up signing the petition. The school amended its policy and added this to verbal harassment. So, they also got a sense of what it was like to join together and win something.

OK, good.

I'd like to return and respond to question number one. Our committee spent quite a bit of time on that particular question. When we discussed it, we talked about the need for students and faculty to be actively engaged in a particular topic or issue. And that the teacher or the educator's role is, is all encompassing. We said that the teacher must draw on prior knowledge or experience. You must move the children from the known to the unknown. That you must create parallel experiences. You must have high expectations and you must be goal oriented as an educator. You must develop critical thinking skills, which means we must educate our children and not train them.

That's right.

We must teach them to think and not memorize. We said there must be an integration of skills and various disciplines. You can't teach a particular topic in isolation. You must meet with the faculty so that if you're teaching a particular subject, it can be applied in English, Social Studies, Science, and so forth, so that the children not only retain the information, but they begin to see the purpose of the information. We said that you must utilize resources, include guest speakers, have class trips, and there should be parental support and involvement. Case in point. I'm from New York City. And in 1986, I believe, we had a case known as the Howard Beach Trial where Michael Griffith was killed because he was in Howard Beach. And the contention was he was in the wrong neighborhood. He lost his life. His stepfather almost lost his life. And what I did with my children was we began to just look at the articles. I started to move from the known to-so that the children could share their experiences in a particular situation like this. And many of the children could not identify a situation that they had experienced, or a relative, or friend had. So, I began to bring in clippings and articles from the newspaper. And we began to read and follow the case from its inception to the end. We went to the court. We got up at six o'clock in the morning. We went to the court room and observed the proceedings. We came back. I had guest speakers come in and so forth. We monitored the media because if you look at the Emmett Till case, which is what we did when we came back, we examined and analyzed in order to compare and contrast the Emmett Till case to Howard Beach. We monitored the media. [coughs] Excuse me. We talked about propaganda techniques prior to going to the trial. And we compared the role of the Black press during the Emmett Till trial to the Black press in the Howard Beach trial. And all of these things were so beneficial that even now, the children are coming back and saying how much they had retained. But it's important that you actively involve the children.

An educational experience.

It cannot be taught from a distance. You have to get those kids in there and involved so that they can begin to analyze, and think critically, and begin to make connections for themselves.

While she's on one, then I might as go to one. We, we said a lot of what she said. Particularly that phrase working from the known to the unknown. And we came up with, with the fact that you cannot use just one way, one method to deal with issues. You've got to have alternative things so that if you're standing in front of the class and you find one method doesn't work, right on your feet, you've got to be able to switch right away and deal with another method so as to reach all persons. One method, and I might have to ask Joseph to describe it, was the personalized method. Another one was the issues method. And there was a third method, which I might have to ask Amanda to explain. I would explain the issues method and ask the other two people to describe theirs. The issues method was where, get children to identify current issues that are going on. They can get that information from media, from oral histories, from anything. From the paper, from magazines, from just general discussions. Then relate it to issues of the fifties. Then we need to have a list of the issues in the fifties and a list current, and look at the same and the different ones. Those that are same. Those that are different. What is different? Get children to identify the different ones and we might perhaps have to share with them. Get them to get into books. Get videos. Whatever. So as to find out why are the things different or why were they different then? Then we will move onto, are there some things that are happening today that though they are different, they have the same effect? Because that is important. Are the effect, the effects the same as what was happening then and now? Are they bats, and they, what are the two things we used? The bats and the bricks the same as they were then. And if the fact that children are searching for information is going to get them by far more involved in comparing the two eras and working from what is happening around them is gonna inspire them more to go back than to just start from what happened in the past. Because then they have nothing with which to, to relate it. We need to deal with vocabulary development, which is an important thing. We tend to be talking to children and using words that had slightly different meanings then than they have now. And we need to be able to identify what are the differences in the meanings now. And Joe, would you like to describe your personalized method?

Just quickly, what that, that method basically asks the students to put themselves in the position of the person living in 1950. And assuming what it would be like to be one of those nine girls. Or what would it be like to be one of the people in the crowd? Or what would it be like to be the reporter? Again, to use that to raise the issues from the 1950s and then compare those issues. So really, it just starts with the individual and moves to the issues approach quickly. Because I think it-a mistake that we make with personalizing sometimes is we leave it with the brickbats, and the horror. And we want to drop that. Not drop it, but put it all in the context and move beyond that. It's just simply a way of linking first to the individual. Particularly with middle grades and secondary kids, I think you have to do that.

OK.

Since we're on number one, and as I listen to this last, this last two groups in fact, we, we spent a lot of time on number one. And we talked a lot about, you've given us a lot of [unintelligible] so I don't want to repeat they said. But we talked a lot about what both of those groups talked about with some modest adaptation. And let me try to articulate how we adapted it. We seemed to call ours a personalized methodology, but I think it probably is inclusive of issues in some of the other things. The, the only thing that, that I think would be important to add, we felt, we-one, we focused in, we took the Little Rock 1957 case as a, as a case study for our method. And we knew that you could have a lot of methods to teach many things. But we thought we'd try to focus ourselves. So, in doing that, we, we felt that each teacher or any leader's responsibility, and leader, and educator in the classroom's responsibility would be to assess for themselves before trying to help the students to understand it. What were some of the key issues that the method could then use? And we identified in our approach the fact that we, we needed to create a climate first off, in our classroom where the students who just arrived that day would, would go through a process where they would identify each of them. Throughout that morning, identify an experience that, that they, they went through this process. Excitement. Expectation. Anticipation. Disappointment. Fear. And shock. Because we identified as the teacher but that's what, sort of, happened at Little Rock. Then we moved to, after we had gotten that on, gotten the children to understand their own experience in that context and what that meant for them, we brought the case study. The historical perspective of Little Rock into the discussion and then had them discuss that. Then just show them the tape because, again, we're bringing Eyes into it. Show them the tape of the segment from Little Rock. Have them discuss the reaction to the tape because discussing reactions is an outward kind of, some can even hide behind it, an outward experience. And it can be somewhat intellectualized, and you can phil-philosophize. And then the next stage, they had to then put themselves in Little Rock at that time based on all of their knowledge. And it's a step fashion methodology. Putting themselves in the place and discussing critically speaking both points of view. They didn't have to decide or take a point of view, but they had to dis-discuss how the Little Rock Nine felt as well as how the White students felt. And, and, and trying to balance, so to speak, if imparting knowledge, and I think it does, involves balancing our understanding. And then the fifth, with the teacher during this, wouldn't necessarily have to be involved with this, would move you to if you wanted to, make a judgement on, on the knowledge that you just explored through your own experience, from the historical context, through your life, through the film, and, and, and that has some benefits to get to the judgmental stage too, because then you choose a side. Obviously, you choose am I on that side or am I on that side? And we, to, kind of wrap up, we used that method-methodology, in fact, in the next two questions as well. Obviously exploring it in a different way, but believing that that is a simplistic foundation but yet an effective foundation for teaching. And I do teach in middle school, and I do use this in my, my government course. And I think it works all the way through, the whole spectrum of, of kindergarten all the way up, you just do different things. But to use that as a, as a, as a backdrop. You can shift, as you say if you need to, but that the children come to it as an active participant in history. And I think as, as a history teacher, I think that's always, I feel that's a challenge. And it's certainly a challenge to teaching any subject is to make it alive and make it a part of their existence so that they then internalize it. And that's what intention's about. So.

Amanda had a third method for our group. The college method, we, sort of, labeled it.

Yup. It isn't exactly a method. But I did have some comments because the lady from New York, New York is a, sort of, hit most of my points because she talked very much about making this kind of a presentation. A thorough educational experience. The importance of the fact that it's not just a feelings, a "How I feel" course. We have to fight every day on most campuses across the country in Black studies what is known as being considered gut courses. And if these courses are going to be permanent, going to be taken seriously, then the courses are going to have to be respected. And part of that respect has to be that they are serious, educational presentations on the part of the, of the faculty and on how they evaluate the learning experience. I think the methodologies that are mentioned here are fine but I'm not hearing enough about how those experiences are going to be evaluated. How are you going to say, unless you're running club work? How at the end are you going to know that you made any kind of success? This is very serious. I have nightmares about Black Studies becoming dead courses. There was a time. We've moved a little bit out of this on my college. But there was a time when they called them jock courses because they used to throw, throw the athletes in them. And you, and you went through the process. You asked them how they felt about other ethnic groups and you talked about all the same kinds of things. But as far as them taking them as seriously as they took their other courses, they did not. And I think I would like you very much to bear in mind that we do want to see these courses permanent. We want to see them respected. And if any kind of change is going to happen, then we're going to address the fact that our students are going to come out able to take exams, write papers, and have some way of demonstrating that they've gone through a process. Not a feel-good situation. That's, sort of, what I wrote on this.

On question one, we talked about creating.

I want to-hold a minute.

OK.

I'd like to, because we do have something else to do this afternoon, to find out, to hear from you now about of the three sections, what was the most troublesome? For any group.

Our group spent the most time on two because we had a lot of problems with that. We tried to find out how we would help kids understand that their fears are very, very real and very similar to the kinds of fears expressed by Elizabeth Eckford and other people in that group. And in line with what you were saying, we asked students to do a lot of writing in the process of developing this curriculum for a lot of reflection and a lot of writing in journals. So, we told them that this particular day, we were going to ask them to think about and write about a time when they were really afraid and possibly, hopefully, showed courage in that fear. And we would talk about our own experiences and then give them some time to think and some time to reflect. And then we would certainly expect all of this happen in a democratic classroom. I mean we would certainly not expect traditional kinds of classroom settings where kids did nothing but read textbooks and answer questions at the end. And where the discussions always have correct answers to the questions that the teachers ask. Guess what's on the teacher's mind, kind of thing. But really have that kind of atmosphere already established. So, the kids have now talked about when they were afraid. Talked about, written about the-their fears. And sometimes when they showed courage. And the teacher shared hers and all that. Then getting back to these people, we would then ask them to frame questions for the reporter and ask the reporter to stay in that role and respond to the questions about how he felt in that situation so that they were then really reflecting. Doing some reflective thinking. The thing that we had the most trouble with was we felt it very, very important for the kids to understand what lynching was. We didn't know if we wanted to play Billy Holiday "Strange Fruit" or read from Maya Angelou, or Ida B. Wells, or Lillian Smith, or show pictures. I mean what do you do? And Russell and Judy shared experiences that they had when they first were confronted with what lynching was and how they felt about it. And, and you can't leave kids, sort of, hanging with some of those feelings of rage and fear. And we had a real lot of trouble with that and thought it was extremely important. We agree with the name calling. We do not. I mean I, I personally never liked Archie Bunker. And we feel that Sergeant Johnson and his "Civil Rights, Civil Wrongs" piece that he does in the Boston Public Schools and wherever he wanted to would be the way that we would deal with the name calling issue because we don't want it to be a thing that, that lets kids think that it's OK.

All right, Tessil?

Or that it's funny.

Our group got into, we were less specific to the Little Rock case in a couple of the questions. In the name calling situation, we looked at it from the point of view of the, of when we were younger. We would be calling it ranking or the dozens. And it may be when, in the fifties when there was a whole name calling thing, there was a piece where if someone talked about your mother, it was almost like tantamount to gonna kick-kill someone. And that's not necessarily true now. In the nineties where, I mean you know, you could talk about someone's mother and then you would, you know, get into a fight. But if they talked about you, you could pretty much have the courage to take whatever they said about you in terms of the "sticks and stones may break my bones" type rap. But in the nineties, you're looking at kids where you talk about their mother, that's OK. You can talk about their mother. You can talk about their sister. You can talk about anything that has to do with their family and it's OK with them. But if you talk about them, then it's a big dig. Ki-and we looked at it a little bit from another sense of that the sense of humor where what we may find problematic in terms of name calling from, say, a teenager's point of view, they don't take as seriously. And there was another thing, I think, that we talked about in terms of courage and strength. Kids aren't really that courageous when it comes to name calling because OK, kids nowadays carry guns. They will, they will kill you because you looked at them the wrong way. And that, that says a whole thing about their sense of strength and their ability of, you know, to look at themselves. The other thing we're looking at was the word lynch. And we compared the word lynching. We paralleled that with the world Holocaust where now if you use the word Holocaust, it's, it's, it's specific to the Jewish plight. And a lot of times when you use the word lynch, you can always see a Black man or a woman at the end of a knotted rope. But it doesn't necessarily have to mean that. You can look at it in the broader sense where it's cutting off control of economics, or cutting off control of your politics, detach from an education, services, opportunities, and that was just another way we were looking at that.

We also talked about lynching not being strictly a physical thing. That it also could be a mental thing where, whereby people, as you said, economically or socially are lynched as a way, a statement is made by, by the oppressor to the oppressed that you cannot do certain things. That if you do, you will be punished in a certain way. It's not just a physical thing.

I wo-I also think that as a moral thing too, you know. Like, you can just bottom out on the people who you should support or whatever. And that's, kind of, the moral image, you know.

One thing that was brought out was how lynching, how personal values versus collective values and what do you do with that? When you're confronted, you draw that out in terms of a moral issue. And then what role did your moral value play in dictating your views of rights. And I think to make this link the most difficult question for us was number three. Because two is the morals discussion and three is the application. So, one way we saw of bringing that to the classroom was to create a system in the classroom, specifically in our group, K through three, so, but it, it can be broadened to other classrooms as well. To try the system that's defined, see if it works and then evaluate. Compare it to the local system and perhaps take a field trip to the mayor's office or whatever, and which is what actually happened with one of our teachers. An incident came up where their, this class took a field trip and saw a man rummaging through garbage. A student laughed. Pretty soon, a number of students were laughing. [cut] -can do? What should be done? So then, that's what sparked a field trip.

With the, with the issue of fear, we thought that the question asked, do you try to define fear? And we started off by saying, No, we wouldn't try to define. We would get the children to define it via their own stories. Story telling is becoming quite a fashionable thing all over now. And so, we'd get each child to tell a short story about their own personal fear. Then we would move into what is the dic-what does the dictionary say about fear? Because very often we don't get the kids to use that book at all. And then-

-then we would compare what was their personal view of fear with what the dictionary has to say about fear. Then we would try to relate it to how did those first Black children feel? Do you think that the feelings they had then was fear? And how would you compare your sense of fear with what they must have had? And we moved on into the lynching and then asked them to see if they could identify if there is lynching done in a different form today. We moved on into courage. And we asked them again. We would use the same method of courage but then we wanted them to look at three different types of courage. The courage of the victim. The courage of the victimizer. And the courage of the person who withdraws. Because we felt that there was a certain amount of courage in that. And we spent most of the time on the first question. We ran through the second question fast. And the third one, you were calling everybody in the room, so we said change. In order to change the system, in order to work with that, you need to change the system to get permanent change. In order to change a system, you must first understand it. And if Napoleon wants, he could expand on that a little because he was talking at that time.

No, I wanted to-I think it's self-explanatory. If, you know, to make change you have to understand what it is that you're trying to change. And some. Which does not mean you join it. It just means you understand it and you move from there.

We talked about also what is change and the appearance of change. For instance, we talked about the situation in Romania where the people there felt that they got rid of Ceausescu that it would change. Now that Iliescu is in office, they don't feel that much has changed. In, in our movement here in America as Black people, change to us was being allowed to sit at a lunch counter. Being allowed to, to vote, right. But essentially and fundamentally, how much has really changed over the years? So, there is the appearance of change but has the institution itself really changed?

We, we looked at change differently. We looked at change as the difference between what we respected, believed in, trusted, related to, and what kids today accept and, and relate to in terms of, a lot of the things that we looked at as being positive, the bureaucracy, church, the kids nowadays look at it as being bad. It's like what, what we thought was on the top, now kids are looking at it as being on the bottom. And they don't, they don't have the same viewpoint or value systems that we had. And they, that's pretty much where the change is happening now where we will be coaching certain types of value systems at them, they'll look at you and say, "Hey, that's nothing."

May I ask a question before we move? I'm listening to the tone of the discussion around lynching. So, people talk about lynching as in a, sort of, historic perspective like it happened in the olden days and it hasn't happened in modern history. Am I to gather that no one has heard of any lynchings recently?

No, that's not how we.

That's not how we're even saying it.

I'm wondering because the discussion-

He was saying lynching is cutting off a lifeline.

I heard people talking about Howard Beach, you know.

I'm, I'm just curious because I know that I heard many of the groups speak about the other forms of lynching and making the parallels. But I was concerned that maybe we weren't aware that they were still happening.

So, we talk about the drug, the drug use today and how folks are getting killed off the streets.

Yeah, we took it, took it beyond just the physical rope and a tree to the whole.

That's what she's saying that she's hearing.

She's hearing that that no one believes that there's still rope and trees going on.

We talk about it too much.

I mean it's happening. And that's why I'm raising the issue because I would also not like for us to go around thinking that we have to draw it further into another analogy of lynching because the actual traditional sense of lynching, a form of lynching, no longer exists because it does.

Oh, yeah.

And it happens.

It happens.

And I think that we also have to be prepared to deal with that. You know that that's a reality. That's the ultimate reality for many children. That they may go someplace and be lynched

Do you, can you help us with an example, an incident saying what happened?

Less than two years ago, there was a lynching in California. Two lynchings less than a few weeks apart. And it was hushed up pretty quickly because no one wanted to believe that that happened in a very prominent, you know, Black, lackadaisical, laid back, what do they call it, progressive urban, suburban environment. It, it's a frightening experience and children are still discussing it today because they won't go to those towns or to those areas.

Where did it happen?

In California. Concord. Right across the hill from Berk-you know, beautiful laid-back Berkeley. And there was almost no reaction. It took, you know, the prod of, I don't know what, to get people to discuss it.

It was, it was really bold because it was a, it's like a train station, like a BART station. You know, right there in a public area. They didn't take it behind anywhere, OK. It was in a tr-it's a depot where everybody knew about it. So they, you know, that kind of mentality. It was just bold and brazen. They didn't take this person to-

The hushing up says that most people here know about it didn't know about it, so it was a very effective hush up.

Well also, in Boston, a kid, well, at first, they said it was gang related in Boston of a Mattapan. There was a kid who, a male, Black male, who was raped. They called it West Indian style killing because supposedly the kid, when they looked at the background what really happens. The kid had raped a, a man's daughter. And they said that the father, the adults, of the West Indian family, this was their style of execution. And they found him in, like, the wooded area of a residential area of Mattapan. This was about two years ago, right? A year ago. Two years ago. He was hanged and, did they do something to his genitals or something?

Tied him to a tree.

Yeah, tied to a tree and all of that.

Go ahead.

If you look at the penal system nationally and internationally, the nonconformists who are inmates are often found dead. They claim it's suicide but when investigations are conducted, if they are conducted, we find that those inmates have been lynched. So, we don't even have to look at isolated situations. It's happening more often than we realize.

Well, just recently, you know, hearing you talk about the penal system. And there was a young man who recently committed suicide about two or three weeks ago here in the Boston area. It was something, some crime he did but it was, like, it was, it was not self-forgiving. So, he was supposed to go to trial the next morning. When they went to his cell, it was a White male, and he was found dead.

[unintelligible] drunk, I believe.

We could look to El Salvador and Guatemala and see tens of thousands of people who have been lynched by what we call death squads, which isn't too much different than the role that the Klan played in the 1800s or in South Africa. We could also look at incidents of gay bashing that take place all over the country and which are, are largely condoned by the communities and oftentimes by the police departments.

I think we probably, I don't know why, but somehow, we took for granted that of course these physical lynchings were still occurring. Of course, I live in the South, so I, certainly take for granted that it's still true without condoning it. But, so, our discussion focused a little bit around what we'd want our students to know and really fully understand about lynchings after we got past the physical harm, and the fear, and even some of the psychological lynchings that occur. And we talked about it from the standpoint of the loss of power and that those who are doing the lynching, the power that they feel they have by doing the lynching. And in, in fact, we focused on some of, in your examples I hear it. Of how they left signs of the lynching as they did in the past but even in current day lynchings, that it was important to the people doing the lynching to leave the signs as symbols of their power. That, and as signs of look out, you know. We're in charge. Let's remember who's in charge. Those doing the lynching. We're in charge. And these are the symbols of our power and that it was certainly still going on without knowing any specific examples until now. But that the children needed to understand beyond the fear issue that it was an empowerment issue as well as obviously in the person lynched is dead. But beyond that, that it had a great deal to do with loss of power on the part of the person being lynched and those doing the lynching. A sense that they were very powerful to be able to do this.

Also, there's, there's visual lynching and nonvisual lynching. There's subtle lynching and not so subtle lynching. So, we were trying to touch on all the bases.

Go ahead, John.

What we found in our group is we started talking about lynching. It went back to fear, and what came out of that was the sacrifice came out of it. Courage came out of it in terms of, during the movement, people were risking their lives, risking being lynched, and relating that to the fact of, of the modern day for the kids that in order to do something to, to affect change, you might be afraid. Because it's natural for us to fear different things. But sometimes, you have to go the distance with something within that fear and hopefully people will support you. So, we started talking about fear and with a sense of past and present in terms of the kids because it's natural to fear things. And to make them get an understanding that in order to affect change, you will have to sacrifice, and it will take courage.

I'd like to go back to the name calling just because it seems to me, we didn't bring that to closure for me. And that's also a power play, that's also a way of keeping people in line. And when I call my students on it, their reaction is, Oh, I'm only kidding. She knows she I didn't mean it. He knows I didn't mean it. And I was fascinated by the comment you made about sexual harassment being added to the group. Because I found, in the high school my daughter attends, the high school where I teach, that whoa, a girl dumps a boy, all that boy has to do is call her a ho and that's it. Now, that is power. That's power and it has-and I think it's, it's serious and I don't think we can just say, Well, kids don't mean it the way. I mean, I think that they do. And I think it hurts. And even if maybe they are not aware of the hurt or don't consciously intend to hurt, themselves, what they have inflicted can be pretty damaging.

You're thinking-

Correct, when you talk about that power, empowerment that, that kids take, I think it comes from the fact that they have so little to, to, to tie into and hold onto in their own lives that to be able to call someone a faggot. I mean, we looked at the difference that, that teachers and parents were playing at a time when, OK, you would never say something back to your teacher when you were, when we were young, OK. There was always that veil of protection around the teacher. That you would never think of cussing your teacher out. But now, the kids will look at, some kids. I keep using this generic all kids term, but they'll, they have no problem calling you whatever they want to call you. And, and in some cases, in some systems, you don't have the support of the administration on that kind of level where, you know, you've been called a faggot and you know all you can do is hold onto your malehood and just say, Well, I'm not. You know. [laughs]

I think empowering the victim's really a big part of this. I mean in terms of when you're dealing with name calling, having the person who was called the name be able to confront that. And also, I think it's true that a lot of times, kids, they have this power but they're not always aware. They know they, they get an effect but they're not always intending to hurt as much as they wind up hurting. And that for the, the one doing the name calling, they have to know that it hurts. And they have to see that. And they have to hear it from the victim, and the victim has to be able to look 'em in the eye and say, "That hurt me and that's not OK. And it's got to stop."

Yeah, but-

Could I ask you a question about the student who, who call students, call teachers any kind of names? Do you think that that the student would respect the teacher more if the student, if the teacher did not allow this or that? What happens when that, what happens when they're challenged?

In my personal situation, I ignore it and challenge them in my own way depending on what the situation is. In the building that I teach in.

Are you in Boston?

Boston.

High school?

High school.

Which one?

Madison Park.

OK, right.

Madison Park is not a high school that has what you would call disciplinary structure so that the victim-

I cannot, I work-

I'm trying to be nice. I have to work there. But the people that work in that building do know that when you have a situation where the kids are in control, they will leave the building when they want to leave the building. They will walk. They will, you know, do whatever they want to do. I mean the fact that they not only talk to themselves that way but have the power within themselves to feel that they can talk to an adult that way. I was impressed over he-the folks over here. They have a whole system. You know, they have a committee that deals with these kinds of things. I never heard of that before, you know.

Well, I talk to kids. I talk to kids a lot and I think, and this does not have to be your situation, but this is just a matter. We're just discussing things here. But I do hear a certain amount of admiration for that tough teacher that won't let them get away with that.

That's right.

And I'm wondering. I'm just, sorta, wondering am I, what's happening here?

Can we-

It's systemic. For instance, what he's talking about, when he says there is no discipline structure in place there, that's really true. In the school I work in, a kid doesn't get away with that stuff at all.

I'd like to leave it at that.

I know I'm playing the heavy. But we would like to move on. We're not going to be able to, in this form in particular, you know, really complete-but we, we did raise a lot of issues in terms of looking at what it is we do in our classrooms and the issues that do come up. And we did have an exchange of information. And this will continue. We need to move into another piece. Thank you.

And what I'm suggesting that we do right now is, we have invited two vendors, two booksellers, minority vendors to display their wares for you. Things that are for sale, books, materials. So, what I'd like to say, we will have a thirty minute break. You will wander around to the door that you came in and you will find over there all sorts of goodies for sale. So, thirty minute break. Please go visit the booksellers and come back. And we'll try to cool the room down a little bit while you're gone. [cut] For this space. Held that this room would be air conditioned for this conference. I just spoke with her, and it has been through all levels within Tufts. And they are issuing us a formal apology for the fact that it is not air conditioned and added that we will not be getting [unintelligible] We have two options. One, trust the weather. Whereby the weather report this morning was saying that it would be back to at least what, like, it was yesterday.[cut] The question becomes the noise level because we were having-

I'd like to extend a thank you to Loretta for having me come to be a part of the conference because if I hadn't got to do what I'm going to do for the next thirty minutes, I wouldn't have gotten here at all. And I'm going to learn a great deal or I am learning a great deal about this. My role as I understand what I was asked to do is to talk about what we are trying to do in North Carolina with the _Eyes on the Prize_ materials. You have at your place already, a handout that will do a lot of what we were gonna talk about. In anticipating the need to put this in a North Carolina context. I went ahead and put a few things down that are self-explanatory, but they really raise some significant issues that for us in North Carolina, at least, is an important reality. That's not necessarily an important reality anywhere else in the nation. _Eyes on the Prize_, I have not completely put in this context so there are a couple of things that I'd like to add to the North Carolina context. But as you can see from here, we have 138 school districts, which is different from a lot of states where you have literally hundreds of school districts in a state. We have 138 and the numbers are decreasing every day. The ultimate goal is to have one hundred school districts in the state that would fit the one hundred counties within the state. So, we have this move in North Carolina that's been going on since 1932 to centralize more and more at the local level, the school districts and at the state level since 1932, we've had a system where at least sixty-six percent of a local budget is state dollars from the state general fund. Not property tax but from the general income tax fund, which means then that our state tends to be more centralized in its approach to education. We have, for example, statewide goals and objectives for each course, kindergarten through 12th grade. That over the years has tended to get to be more and more prescriptive in terms of goals and objectives. Local school systems have all the flexibility in the world to teach within those goals and objectives and identifying materials. But the move along with the accountability side of the picture has been to centralize what we are trying to do or what we're doing. We have in place as of in the last two years, an end of course test for every required subject in the state. That means that the last two days, for the last two days of a class for a student taking a required course in US History, typically taught at the 11th grade, is he's taking or she's taking a final exam that every other kid in North Carolina is taking. That end of course test has tended to have a definite effect on how US History is taught. And that makes sense as we're trying to look at how we're using Eye-the _Eyes on the Prize_ materials. What it's done is, one, say that US History is important not only for graduation but we're going to be holding the local school system accountable for how well you teach US History as measured by how much US History is learned by those kids. That's the good news. The bad news is the kind of test that's in place right now, tends to be an advanced version of Trivial Pursuit. It was written by classroom teachers. A committee of classroom teachers. It was developed through a test development process that was extremely rigorous. All kinds of psychometric data was used to decide what were good items and what were bad items. But the end result has been, because of the format that we're using, a single stem with four forced choices, is that we miss the opportunity to get at the whys of history. It's mostly the whats and the whens. We're in the process of restructuring the type of end of course test that we have. And that'll, when we get the new format, we'll be able to move to a higher-level testing techniques but we still have that end of course test with us. We will not be able to shake it for a very long time because, like many other parts of the nation, we're moving toward accountability. Being able to show to the public exactly what we're doing. So, that's a part of the North Carolina context. In addition to that, statewide textbooks. When I mentioned here that the textbooks were similar, I can guarantee you that eighty percent of the textbooks, the US History textbooks that are used in North Carolina are exactly the same. Todd and Curti's _Rise of the American Nation_, which is now _The Triumph of the American Nation_. It was done during the Regan years. Captures at least fifty percent of the state market. Todd and Curti does the poorest job of any of the textbooks regarding the minority issues or anything that's social. It does a good job of presenting the wars and great political leaders' view of history. It was the textbook that I used as a student back in 19 whatever. And it's. it's only been revised sixteen times since then, I think. But it's the same book with just more names, and facts, and dates, and that kind of thing added. So, what we find happening then is that across the state instruction and, tends to look a lot the same. Local curriculum work, local rationale building is not taking place because there's no compelling need to do that when you have the big white book with goals, and objectives, and that kind of thing already in place. The good news is that we have in place across the state a safety net of goals and objectives and material that's being attended to. The bad news is there's not a whole lot of local ownership in taking that much further. Unless you have in place local leadership that's really attuned to Social Studies education and attuned to moving Social Studies education beyond the minimum and trying to get to the maximum. The last piece that, that's on the sheet that I would like to address is staff development dollars. Until the last three years, most of the staff development funds in Social Studies were centered in the Department of Public Instruction. We had a tremendous budget that we could go out to a local school system and say to that school system, "Wouldn't you like to have a three-day workshop on _Eyes on the Prize_ and it's not going to cost you anything?" "Sure, we'll do an _Eye on the Prize_ [sic] workshop." And we'll let you have those teachers, particularly in the summer if you want to pay a stipend. If you want to put 'em up in a dorm and bring 'em in. Similar to what we're doing here. That's fine because it's not going to cost the local school system anything. There was not a lot of buy in and not a lot of follow up at the local level because they really didn't have any ownership in doing this unless the superintendent or the principal bought into it. What's happened over the last several years though, is we are moving more toward shifting the money to the local system. The local central office has taken that same amount of money and shifted it to the building level where the principals are spending it as they see fit. What it's done to staff development in North Carolina is fragment. And it's, it's tended to be now that if Social Studies gets a part of the money, it's going to have to show-Social Studies leaders, whether we're at regional level, state level, or whatever-we're going to have to convince the principal that it's wise to spend his money on Social Studies. As I indicate here, we've, we're finding more and more that money is being spent to raise test scores, to teach teachers how to do a better job of raising test scores, how to do a better job of meeting whatever the latest state mandate is. And it's not really tied to any systematic well-thought-out local plan. So, when we bring in something like _Eye on the Prize_ [sic], then we are, we are operating within a state that has a statewide dissemination network there that can quickly get the word out to folks. But then we have the other side of that coin which says now that the word's out, use your local funds to make this happen. And within those local funds, getting access to teachers, getting access to the resources to do the kind of intensive s-staff development that's going on here, it's not happening. It's not happening at the local level and it's not happening at the state level. So, our alternative is to find a grant that would allow us to get some external funding that we could bring in as, as kind of, a matching. We'll spend a dollar from the grant, you spend one dollar from your local staff development. Tie it in. Put fifty cent here, fifty cent here, and we'll have a pot of money that we can do this kind of institute. It's that kind of, of approach that we're having to take. So, we're in the process of changing. And as I, as I've noted here, we are definitely on the backside. We are definitely moving away from the state centralization and away. We're moving away from our state centralized system and that more of the resources are flowing to the local level. But we are keeping, the state legislature, is keeping the accountability piece at the state level. Those systems that have kids who can score well on standardized tests, the California Achievement Test, I think, the end of course test in US History. Those systems get a lot of flexibility. Those systems where you have a large number of kids who do not do well, then there's provisions to have a lot more prescription as to how those people conduct their day-to-day operation. We got sixteen school systems that were identified as the bottom sixteen in the state that tend to be predominantly Black, predominantly low income. Those systems are getting lots of resources but they're also having to, the superintendent's having to sit through a ten-day session on how to run an effective school. And believe me, that's galling to the average superintendent to have somebody come in and tell them how he or she is to run their school system because test scores dip.

-in its original form, that is before the Bill of Rights were added. The, the most famous of the Federalist papers and the fourth requirement is that we teach about the contribution that, that minorities have made to the development of the US Constitution. OK, so that's an important act. Teachers are going to jail if they don't teach Federalist Papers number ten in our state.

If any of you know John Patrick from Indiana University, he's done some work in our state to help us move in the direction of, of doing a better job with the Federalist Papers. We have another organization that is definitely dying to help us. Boston University, John Silverman has folks who have been to our state several times with an offer to come in and teach us about the Federalist Papers. And they'll only charge us twenty or thirty thousand dollars of our tax money to do that.

And our state, our state superintendent is listening. Stedman. Donald Stedman, who is a large textile manufacturer in the state, funds Boston University's operation to the tune of several thousand dollars, so he's interested in having Silverman come in. And we've been artfully trying to tell.

Silver, Silver.

Silver. That we really don't want him, and we really don't want his folks, but we would like to have that money. [laughs]

Because we could do a lot better with it than having these people from Boston University come in. We don't like folks with Boston accents telling us how to run-nah. [laughs] Particularly Silver. Because he comes in, the whole attitude when the group first came in was, We're here to save the southern state.

Outside agitators.

Right, outside agitators. [laughs]

OK, takeaway to save us from, from ignorance. In addition to the North Carolina context, I'd like to point out that the Babcock Foundation funded and, Reverend Mendelsohn, you could tell us a lot more about the Babcock Foundation. But evidently, that organization made a contribution to the development of _Eyes on the Prize_. And part of what we got out of that was each of the eight regional centers, and I should point out that I'm one of eight regional consultants that works with staff development and curriculum development in Social Studies. I'm located in the southeastern corner of the state. Each of the eight centers got eight sets of the tapes, eight sets of the books, and the audio cassette tapes, and, and all of this free. And we're making these available to school systems on a loan basis. So, the materials are there. That's, that's part of the good news is that we have this rich source of materials. The kinds of considerations, though, that we have to begin to get to, and those are the questions that I've listed at the bottom, is that North Carolina has to figure out a way to get those materials into the classrooms and have them effectively used. And I've got some concerns about that. Not that I don't think that we need to deal with _Eye on the Prize_[sic]. We do. But I have some concerns similar to the concerns that I would have in teaching about the Holocaust or teaching about any number of sensitive topics. I'll give you an example. In the most recent grant that we had in the state was a grant to do workshops in the area of the Holocaust. We had materials that were written specifically geared to the North Carolina curriculum, on the Holocaust. Went in and did a series of workshops around the state in one-day kind of things, and there's no way that you can comprehend the Holocaust experience in a one-day workshop. But we had a scholar, and we had a Holocaust survivor, and we had educators come together and try to figure out how they could use the Holocaust experience in the classroom. What we found, what I found happening, which was very disturbing to me, was that the teachers liked to focus on the horror of the Holocaust and that's not the whole story. The horror of the gas chambers, if you leave it there, you have kids sitting on the edge of their seats wanting more because that's a lot like Indiana Jones. It's a lotta like, it's blood, guts, and gore. What you want is to have the kids move beyond that and begin to put it in terms of large issues that we have to grapple with. You cannot do that for teachers and change the mindset of teachers and change the mindset of administrators who are dealing with it, with that in a one-day workshop. We have to have the kind of intensive experience that you have here. And the time is not there in the curriculum. The time is not there in, and, and the resources are not there to do that kind of job in North Carolina yet. And we're working toward that. My, my goal when I leave here is to go back and try to find corporate funding to begin to put a network of teachers together who, in North Carolina, can come and do this kind of thing next summer. And might want to draw on some of you people as facilitators and as resource people in that kind of conference. And we'll have it somewhere where it's well air conditioned because you couldn't do this in North Carolina without air conditioning. And the North Carolina part of the story too is something big. We have the Greensboro citizens. We have all kinds of people who are now able and willing to serve as resource people to help us. But the kinds of questions I'd like for us to attend to that really is now you're part of this, is some key questions that I'm raising as an administrator, quote "bureaucrat" and educator as I begin to think about this, is how can we avoid some of the pitfalls and traps that we, that we encounter when we deal with these. Oh, by the way, before I leave the Holocaust story, I'd like to point out that I have a superintendent in my district who is anti-staff development. He does not want his teachers out for anything. He believes that time on task means that you stay in the class and if you leave a class when kids are there, you're committing a cardinal sin. He's Jewish. The Holocaust workshop came along, he mandated all of his US History teachers be there. He turned out the resources. They had coffee. They had doughnuts. For the first time, he rented a banquet hall. And it was done because he had a personal interest in it. And that's, it was almost tragic.

Hope you have him on the film.

Hm?

Hope you him on film.

Well, I've got him on film and, and what we did when we had him there was, I said, we talked about the fact that you really got to do this again and again and again and again if you want to have the impact on teaching about controversial issues. And since the topics, you can't make it such a specific or topic specific. And I hope to hit him again with Eye of the Prize [sic] and get him to think beyond having teachers go to a one-day workshop and think that that's going to make a difference because they've got a little bit of information. If you begin to change the thinking processes and attitudes, then you can begin to get at some of those, those real concerns.

Do you have any more of those handouts?

Yes, they were put on the table. I have one left here, and I, but-

Let me just see that.

OK, the potential would then, the potential for us and the barriers that we have to deal with. We have to go around several institutional barriers, which I've outlined at the top for you. But also, we have to get at the attitude. So, I'm beginning to make those, those kinds of distinctions. Then the third. I'd like the look at the third aspect and that's putting the _Eye on the Prize_ [sic] on the educational agenda. As we do that, I'd like for you to focus on the questions in part two. That, getting back to the point that I, as, really as an educator, a Social Studies educator who is concerned about what's happening in the classrooms. The first question that I think it important for us to deal with, is how can we teach about the struggle for the civil rights, the struggle for civil rights, social justice, and equal economic opportunity in Social Studies classrooms in an intellectually honest manner when pressure groups of various ideological sorts demand instruction favorable to their viewpoint. That's billed on an article that I'd recommend to you written by a person that is provocative and don't necessarily agree with everything she says. But she really caused me to stop and think. That's Diane Ravitch, "Diversity in Democracy." And she raises the idea that when we are dealing with multicultural education, we need to do that. We must do that. We must open our classrooms to multicultural experiences. But at the same time, we do not need to open our classrooms to a particular ideological bent. We've got to balance the two. We've got to be careful whose story we're telling and how we're telling their stories. In fact, she goes on and makes a compelling statement that we need to allow the participants from the, the individuals from the past to tell their own story without telling them through our ideological filters. And that gets at some of the things that I've heard us saying today. Whose voice? How do you tell that voice? What I see in the _Eyes on the Prize_ materials that's particularly useful for us in North Carolina is that they have definitely attempted to not filter those voices but present them as they are. It would not be useful material if those, well, it would be useful. But it'd be useful in a different sense. If you have told it second person. But the fact that you allow a lot of the stories to tell, to be told themselves. So, we might want to spend some time thinking about this and the other questions. Yes, sir.

I have a question there, when we raise that point. For example, I find, find it unusual that conservatives and neoconservatives make this particular point at least in terms of quote, unquote "objectivity," in terms of a multicultural setting when at the same time when, when groups are excluded, particularly on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, that was never a concern. At least in terms of our inclusion. I just find it, I just find it unusual that all of a sudden, we have to hear the need for objectivity in terms of how we're dealing with questions that go beyond how they would define cultural pluralism.

You are absolutely right. And that's why as, I find myself agreeing with Diane Ravitch. And that's unusual for me because there's a lot that I don't agree. I think she's right to that extent that we need to be objective. We need to always be objective. But I do become suspect when she and William Bennett have that as part of their political agenda. What we have to deal with at a state level is when people come to us, Donald Stedman want us to teach the original Constitution. That was the intent of the bill that he ramrodded through the state legislature is that we teach that the US Constitution is one entity and then the Bill of Rights was added later and that there is a definite philosophical difference between the original intent and what was added two years later, OK. And he has an ideological bent in what we're having to say to, to the good money source is we cannot take your money if you're going to tie our hands as to what we do in the classroom. We cannot sell the kids of North Carolina for a mess of porridge. And it's made him a little bit angry. And he keeps coming back to Silver and saying, "Well, Silver will fund it, you know." But what we're saying now is that if school systems are willing to contract with those big money sources, and have them come in, and do that kind of thing, then we can't stop it. But we are advising local school systems not to sell out for the sake of getting a little bit more money from a corporation to put a conservative cast on constitutional studies. Because if you study the Constitution of the United States, you're going to study the Bill of Rights. You can't separate the two documents, OK. Question, or concern.

That's OK. This question about how do we, your first question and so on, and I'm just thinking about what you said. I, I really, even this term, a curriculum of inclusion, is kinda silly because start before the Constitution. Start with the Declaration of Independence. And you don't have to have a particular ideological bent to point out to students the three paragraphs removed and ask them why. Is that an inclusion or is, is? What ideological bent is that? Presenting a primary document and asking what happened to it. And so, this question of how do you do that, you go back to primary documents. That's all. And you throw these textbooks out in the garbage, which most of them aren't any good. And you go back to primary documents, and you go back to research, and you go back to the library. And that's what education is. It's not reading, because you cannot prevent-you cannot present an objective viewpoint if you're going to buy any textbook published, because every textbook is an editorial viewpoint. And a good way to prove that is to take the textbook that you pointed out that you said went through sixteen revisions and take the first edition and compare it with the sixteenth and look at certain issues and how they're presented. And ask why the viewpoint has changed.

Is there an accident that they changed their title?

Pardon me?

Is it accidental that in the Reagan years they changed the title from _The Rise in the American Nation_ to _The Triumph of the American Nation_?

Well, this is what I would ask students. I think it'd be interesting to go back, for example, to your bookroom and bring out a set of the first edition and the latest edition and compare them. And ask students what it means. That gives it historical perspective, gives point of view. You're using primary documents. You're using all kinds of things.

Absolutely.

I'm very nervous about the fact that it sounds like if, well, just taking this corporate money in this instance. You already know the guy. What's the name of the company? Or the p-

Stedman. It's a textile.

You already know he's got a pretty heavy ideological bent. And at some point, he, you, you're gonna wind up compromising what you're trying to teach.

That's why we're not taking the money.

I know that's the political reality in North Carolina maybe, be different.

That's why we're not taking the money. If we had, if we had capitulated early, he would have funded.

Oh, so you're not taking the money? OK.

No, we're not taking it. Uh uh. We're not going to take it until he agrees that we can choose the scholars and we can make sure that the scholars are balanced and not conservative. He's afraid we're gonna bring in Jane Fondas, I suppose. We don't want to bring in Jane Fondas. We don't want to bring in Jesse Helms. We want to bring in-if we do, we want them on this panel together so they can fight it out. We're not willing to limit the program or censor the program to fit an ideological benefit or bent just to get that money. But it's a battle that we're having to fight politically.

What's scary though is that he might agree and then withdraw the funding at some point later when it, sorta, strengthens his position. If you get something in progress and he says, "Well, let's, I want to alter it or I'm gonna withdraw the funding."

The scary thing is that he might get a bill through cong-through our assembly that would mandate a particular bent. And that could in fact happen in a state system. It could happen in any system, I suppose. Question.

A couple of things because I have a personal vested interest in the North Carolina school system because I have nieces and nephews there.

We were born six miles apart in.

What about accountability, was one of the things that are on my mind as far as the educators are concerned around what do, do the grades and, and as far as kids learning about, you know, civics, etc., in a North Carolina system. What does that look like? Like, what kind of achievements are they? What's happening with the kids?

OK, I can tell you two versions. The first, lots of teachers are playing it safe. As a lot of teachers in the United States and a lot of places. We tend to play it safe because mom and dads are gonna be on our backs if we don't agree with them. There are a lot of reasons for Social Studies teachers to play it safe. It's tough to teach Social Studies. Much tougher than you'd-teaching calculus is a piece of cake. If you know calculus, you can teach calculus and no one's gonna bomb your house. No one's gonna threaten your life for the way you teach, teach calculus. But if you're a good Social Studies teacher, you are going to create problems for yourself. You can create problems for all f-all kinds of folks who don't want to be uncomfortable. So, yeah, that, we have a lot of people playing it safe. We have a required course in North Carolina called the economic legal and political systems in action. That's generally taken by ninth grade students. My daughter just went through that course. Her assessment to me, they had-Social Studies is bad, but this stuff is the worst of the worst. You know, it's hit an all-time low. Same school. A different teacher teaching that course. The assessment is, this is the best thing we've ever had because we were, we've got police officers coming in the classroom as resource people. We've got all kinds of exciting things happening. What my daughter got was the powers of the president are one, two, three. It was civics revisited and economics theory revisited. It was all dry, dull facts and he played it safe. The other teacher had someone come in who had committed a crime as a teenager. And he talked about what it was like to go through the juvenile system. He's a thirty-five-year-old businessman now. Quite, quote, "successful." But went astray of the law and talked about how he got himself back. That other teacher wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole because the kids wouldn't, would be rude and noisy and this kind of thing. So, the idea is that it really depends on the teacher. It depends on what's being done with the course. Again, every kid in North Carolina will learn something about the economic system, about the legal system, and about the political system as required by the course. But what they learn different- will, varies widely with the teacher.

OK, what kinda, what kinda measuring tool do you use? I mean you spoke about the California Achievement Tests.

We're getting ready. In fact, we're developing right now, scary thought, but we're developing right now, items that will be field tested, that were field tested this spring that will be a statewide policy next year and go into full implementation at statewide test to measure that course.

Who is the statewide test written by? Who's writing the test?

It's being written by four teachers who were hired as item writers. They're each writing several items. Those will be field tested. And once they're field tested and pass the test, the psychometric standards that are used and they will become part of the test bank. And we'll use them for the next five years.

Can you make the parents proactive, you know, to help you with some of these issues that you're talking about?

Yeah, you can. If you, if you're inclined as a school system to want to do that. School systems generally, are conservative institutions and aren't inclined to have people even knowing what's going on, much less helping them make a change. And in North Carolina, we have very few school systems that are willing to risk. As I suppose that's true in many, many places. Yeah, OK.

Hi. I would like to know where in North Carolina are some examples of where _Eyes on the Prize_ has been used and some of the things that are.

We're using _Eyes on the Prize_ now. I've got two school systems that are looking at multicultural education. Two of the largest school systems and they are using them in classrooms on an experimental basis to see what works and what doesn't work. What we have planned for next summer, and I hope I can turn this into a regional institute rather than just those two systems because they're at both ends of my district, or my region, is we're looking toward the kind of experience here that will help enable those teachers to use those resources. What we're finding is that the teachers are saying, the ones who are piloting it, are seeing it as extra, separate, and apart from the course. And they're teaching US History. And somehow, Eye-_Eyes on the Prize_ is seen as something extra to do, which is, kinda strange. So, we want to move that thinking to help them understand that this is in fact central. So, we've got two places. We have in the western part of the state, a university, Appalachian State University that's using it with pre-service teachers. Before I came, I did a census of the state trying to find out what's going on. In the Charlotte area, we have a lot of, we have a lot of teachers who are using the materials in their classrooms without any kind of introduction. They're using them. The horror story I want to tell you though is having the tape shown Monday through Friday. A coach gets a new shipment of materials in and it's, I'm sorry if you're coaches. This is what happened. We had a new economic series. A teacher came to the workshop and got a set of materials for his system. Took it back and on Monday, he showed the first three programs. And on Tuesday, he showed the second and the third. So, we have a few cases where the materials are being shown without any kind of work. Luckily, the materials were so provocative that they don't do that. And it requires a lot of work. So, we had that happening. In the Wilmington area at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, which is the home of the Wilmington Ten, which you may be familiar with, there's a lot of that sentiment, that's a lot of the materials are being used there by the university with their students. So, we do have some successes. A lot of successes with the materials, where you have individual teachers who are willing to use it and they are prepared and trained to use that kind of thing. What we got to, now that-is to break that institutional barrier, to get the marginal teacher, who is a good solid teacher but not a risk taker, to get them to the point where that they, they are comfortable using these materials. The bottom group, the non-risk takers and the ignorant, we don't want them to touch. There's no way we can touch that bunch, but we do want to expand the number of teachers who are comfortable using this kind of thing. And I think there's a set of skills handling controversial issues that is a part of what we wanna do here. That's what we tried to incorporate in, in the Holocaust workshop. And really underscoring all of this, the goal that I'm working toward is a series of regional academies where we have strong teachers come together as a support group in the area of Social Studies and the other content areas to, to see that their role as Social Studies educators really is to be-

-I think, ideal. And we don't have to worry about those people. They're prepared to teach in a democratic society. But what do we do with the seventy-five percent of the teachers who are set on indoctrination as their approach to education? Science, it doesn't matter. I think it does, because I think there's some issues tied to that. But math you can be an, you can be a, a doctrinaire individual in a math class, you're not going to do the damage. What we have to worry about is those who teach history and who teach government who now all of a sudden are going to have to be democrats with a small D. And we're having the re-educate these people to think positively about democracy. And as he described the kind of teacher who was teaching, I began to see these kind of folks that I've, I've taught with over the years. The person who comes in with their story, and they spend all the time telling their story to kids, having to memorize their story. Regurgitate the facts about their story in an essay or in a multiple-choice format and it begins to sound like a lot of folks who teach Social Studies in, in North Carolina. Those people with a particular mindset and they're gonna tell their experience whatever their experience happens to be. And they discount their students' story. And I think the challenge for us is to have, is to find ways that we can have the students tell their own story and help them put it in a relational framework of issues and concepts that make sense. And that's not an easy job and you certainly can't do it in a one-day workshop or even in an institute of this type. But it's, it's really working into institutionalizing controversial issues when they're dealing with controversial issues and sensitive topics. OK? So, we've got our challenge cut out for us. But that's a challenge that all of you have in your working situations too. I'd love to be able to discuss some of these other questions that I brainstormed. And like to have your reaction to those. But that we can do that over cocktails, if we can go to Cheers. My son asked me when I came, if I was going to Cheers and have a drink. And he says, And I want you to go, and I want you to see if they really are the way they are. I'm afraid my schedule is not going to allow me to go to Cheers, but we can find somewhere. Thank you for, for allowing me to come and do it.

If you want to ask me about Harvey Gant, and whether he has a chance or not, I'd be glad to talk about that too.

I'd like to thank you Joe very much for adding more substance to our, our conversations in the topics we're gonna be wrestling with because we will get back and forth to these same questions over the next couple of, couple of days. Please tell your son that Cheers is, unh-unh.

Not at all that's it's cracked up to be.

It'd be a disappointment.

What he says is, probably that place is a tourist trap. [laughs]

It's a tourist trap plus, which the front doesn't match the inside and all of that. So, that's a whole 'nother story.

Big disappointment.

Yup. Good news is that you're going to an air-conditioned building at 7:30 tonight. You'll be in an air-conditioned building. The bad news is that all the conference bureau has come up with, it's just not satisfactory for what we need. So, they've not been able to come up with an alternative space that would work for us. They ha-are however going to the local discount store tonight and buying six more fans, bringing in electric cords, and we will try to use the fan system to cool us off.

We would accept, we would accept the conference on a boat in Boston Harbor.

I didn't think to ask that. Jazz boat. Go out. Maybe I'll try. Probably, but they're the ones who are doing it. So, we're now going to move down to have our restaurant dinner. 7:30, we're going to be in Eaton 201. Late night tonight, there is a workspace that we have on the first floor just behind, just beyond where the telephones are. There's a VCR in there and we're gonna start-