Becoming aware of my own lack of knowledge is one of the most profound motivators for me to not only deepen my own understanding, but also to share my excitement for this new learning with students.
Such was the case with learning more about the story of desegregation of schools in Fairfax County, Virginia. As a technology specialist and history nerd, one of my favorite parts of my job is working with fourth graders at the elementary school where I teach, because there are so many opportunities to infuse inquiry learning and technology into the fourth grade Virginia Studies curriculum. Over the past 8 years in my current position, I have built out a year-long blended learning project with 4th graders that I call "History Hunters." It is, essentially, a giant scavenger hunt, to encourage students to learn more from Virginia Historical Highway Markers, both in person and online, and visit historical sites in Virginia, both in person and online.
Our examination of Virginia Historical Markers always raises the question of why some people and events get historical markers and others don't, and I always share with them stories of some notable Virginians who don't yet have a historical marker dedicated to them. One such Virginia hero is Barbara Johns.
For Black History Month in February of 2019, I had had students learn more about Barbara Johns and the Moton School Strike in Farmville, reading them exerpts from The Girl from the Tar Paper School and sharing videos and primary source documents about the history-making Moton School strike.
The students were highly engaged and excited to learn more about this hero from Virginia history. Then came a question I couldn't answer.
I realized that I didn't know the answer to that question. I knew that Jeff Clark, the unofficial historian for Fairfax County Public Schools, was working on writing school histories for every school in Fairfax County, and I was hoping there might be videos that would include archival photos of conditions at some of the segregated high schools in Fairfax County. So I watched this "Schools of Yesteryear" video written and produced by Jeff to learn more:
I was utterly astonished to discover that there was no FCPS school for any Black students above 7th grade until 1954. And then the narrator of the video said, "However, it wasn't until 1965 that the two school systems became one." I couldn't wait to share this information with students, and I was immediately eager to learn more.
When I met with 4th graders the following week and shared what I had learned in my initial research, they shared my astonishment and outrage at the injustice here in our own county. To allow students to explore the topic further in their own direction of interest, I designed a student-centered inquiry choice board as a Hyperdoc, inviting students to learn more about Barbara Johns and the Moton School Strike in Farmville, Virginia, Massive Resistance, and segregated education in Fairfax County.
I had students use a Tic-Tac-Toe choice board, with the Virginia Historical Marker about the Robert Russa Moton school strike in 1951 in the middle, so everyone had to start with that basic knowledge. They then could choose to go in a direction of their choice, learning more about segregated education in Fairfax County Public Schools or learning more about Barbara Johns, the leader of the Moton School Strike, by choosing two more boxes on the board that included links to videos, radio broadcasts, and articles about these subjects. Some of the options included using Google Maps to map the distance from their houses to Luther Jackson High School, to get an understanding of the hardship of having only one high school open to students of one race.
Since the students had some basic background about the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, they were immediately struck by wondering why it took Fairfax County Schools until 1965 to desegregate. And I realized that I didn't have any real answers beyond Massive Resistance, but even that didn't explain why it took from 1960 to 1965 in FCPS. Not only did I have no kid-friendly resources to share with students, I didn't even have those answers myself.
That hunger for more information and the hope to build it into curated primary and secondary sources for student examination is the impetus for this inquiry project.
As part of my work toward a Master of Education degree in School Librarianship at Longwood University, I had an opportunity to design an inquiry project on any topic of my choosing. This Web site, built as part of this assignment, is a work in progress that I hope can serve as a resource for those who, like me, wish to learn and understand more, and for classroom teachers and students who may wish to dig into primary and secondary sources on the topic.
This research has led me to learn so much about local Virginia heroes who don't yet have historical markers, such as John D. Read of Falls Church; E. B. Henderson, the former head of the Fairfax NAACP, Allison Brown of the Fairfax Human Services Committee, and the names of the first students to desegregate Fairfax Schools and those involved in pivotal litigation to move foward the Fairfax County desegregation process. I can't wait to share some of their stories with Fairfax County students.
Many thanks to Professor Carl Harvey of Longwood University and Jeff Clark of Fairfax County Public Schools for their guidance during and enthusiasm for this subject.