This topic is very important to me since I grew up in a very white and segregated school district and was not properly taught about segregation in America in public school until I took a honors American history class in sophomore year of high school. Even though the district I grew in was highly segregated, many of my  co-students were completely unaware that their community was segregated and the truly terrifying extent of how segregation impacts America. My co-students were ignorant of segregation due to the fact that they were not properly taught the history of segregation in the United States, so my goal in this project is to provide proper resources to teachers to teach about segregation. 

My first resource discusses how one can teach about segregation to third graders in a culturally sensitive and age appropriate way. The resource points out that it is imperative when teaching a painful topic that involves race that the teacher does not single out individual minority students due to their race. Just because a student is African American does not mean they share the exact same experiences and thought processes as the historical actors you are teaching about. Making a minority student forcibly explain their point of view of segregation might make them feel uncomfortable and ultimately singles the student out from the rest of the student population. The resource also explains the importance of making sure students feel comfortable when learning about segregation, encouraging the teacher to talk privately with an uncomfortable student and reassure them that history is the study of the past to make the present better. The resource ends with a link to two activities teachers can use to assist the teaching about segregation. 

This resource is an interactive database based on civil rights data released by the United States Department of Education. The database allows users to examine various statistics from multiple school districts, such as the percentage of minorities in the student population and percentage of minority students enrolled in an AP course. You can compare these statistics against other school districts, which can help visualize how prevalent segregation is in the US. A good teaching strategy for teachers would be to take their own school district and compare it to less segregated schools, showing the students that this issue directly affects their own community. For teaching about segregation, possibly the best resource on the website is the map on the front page, which maps all the school districts in the US. Messing with the settings, you can change the map to show visually how segregated schools are in the US. This will also provide a useful visual representation of segregation for students, which will make them realize that segregation is a huge current problem in their own country. This database is very complex and has a lot of important information about segregation, so it would also be worthwhile to let students play around with the website on their own.

Not only does the Library of Congress have primary sources about segregation and Jim Crow laws like one would expect, but they also have a guide for teaching about segregation for teachers. The linked page goes over the basic history of enslavement to segregation, which is very helpful to show students as it shows them that racism has been a longstanding problem within the US. The resource’s primary sources are invaluable as well, since it shows students how segregation impacted people in that exact moment in time. A great way to utilize this resource is to show students a primary source and ask questions to make them reflect on how segregation affected people at the time. The way I would utilize this resource in the classroom would be to make groups of students and give each group a primary source and ask them to analyze and discuss the source with some guided questions.

This resource contains a lesson plan about Ruby Bridges, who was the first African American student to attend an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. I believe that this resource will be particularly useful to teach elementary students, as they will be able to relate to Bridges’ status as an elementary school student. The resource focuses on an image (shown right) of Bridges leaving the all-white elementary school she was attending under the protective escort of US marshals. The resource then provides questions to help students analyze what is really going on in the photo. In a lesson plan, I could see questions such as “How would you feel if you needed to be protected to go into school?” and “How would you feel if people were yelling at you because they did not want you to go to school” would be very effective in helping the students really think about the negative impacts of segregation. Another great point the article brings up is the fact that the lesson plan needs to contain information that signifies that segregation is not a dead ideology, and there are numerous examples of white supremacy in the modern day. This is an important concept to introduce to children because if they are only shown segregation from the past, they might conclude that segregation and racism has been completely demolished in our society.

This last resource discusses the complexities of teaching preschoolers racial segregation. The author, a preschool teacher, makes it clear that they believe that teaching about segregation is imperative for young children -- done in an age appropriate way. The author suggests that children are taught about segregation through peaceful civil rights figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Teaching segregation through these peaceful figures will teach children the horrible nature of segregation in America along with the idea that one should protest unfair ideas peacefully like Rosa Parks and MLK. This could be easily implemented into a lesson plan by simply teaching who MLK and Rosa Parks were and the injustices African Americans faced.