Teaching a Movement: Young People Re-membering Civil Rights a Half Century Later
There we sat: four miles and sixty years away from the nexus of the student-led African-American Civil Rights Movement with fourteen preservice Social Studies teachers enrolled in my Human Geography course. The undergraduate and masters students in my course had similar ambitions to Diane Nash, Marion Barry, and C.T. Vivian, the Fisk University and American Baptist College students of the late 1950s. They had come from all over the country seeking inspiration and critical experiences for becoming better citizens, effective and passionate teachers, and more confident agents of change within their home and teaching communities. Based on their ongoing observations of new and lingering injustices in public school classrooms, the most striking similarity between the Civil Rights activists of Nashville and my Vanderbilt University students was the need for action.
Unfortunately, action is often leached out of teaching practice. In the typical university and secondary education classroom, inert bodies sit, heads moving back and forth between the lecturer and a projection screen or white board. To move beyond this paradigm of instruction, my students and I left the classroom, the chairs, and the overhead projector and re-enacted historical examples of action – or student-led movements – on Nashville’s Church and Commerce Streets, in our downtown Walgreens, in front of neighborhood churches, and on the steps of City Hall.
In an effort to enact a concept central to human geography – that human activity and space co-constitute each other – we placed ourselves through a geocache activity at the Greyhound Bus Station (now the “old” Convention Center) to recreate the Freedom Rides, at the Walgreens lunch counter (now a Walgreens photo center) to reimagine the sit-ins, and walked along the route of the Silent March (now a major artery connecting two sides of town) to feel the solidarity sensed between citizens as they walked “three abreast” after the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s home. This activity, and others like it, became fondly known by my students as “learning on the move” activities in which their minds were engaged through the movement of their bodies within familiar, relevant places of human activity and history. These movements and ruminations in place helped students “imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (Massey, 2005; p. 9).
Why was it important for me as an instructor to engage my students’ minds and bodies in real and relevant spaces throughout the city to learn about concepts like human mobility and representational infrastructure? These course design decisions stemmed from my belief that authentic teaching and learning are situated (e.g., Cole & Engestrom, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991) in particular places, embodied (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Hall & Nemirovsky, 2011), and distributed (e.g., Wertsch, 1998) across tools, spaces, time, and people. From this stance on teaching and learning, remaining in the university classroom to learn about central human geography concepts through the context of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, just would not do.
Rather, my theoretical stance that authentic teaching and learning are situated, prompted me to construct a geocache and mapping activity throughout the downtown Nashville area that was once used strategically by college students in the late 1950s to undermine institutional racism. From this activity, my students learned that public spaces are not neutral, but can have radically different meanings for individuals. Places as seemingly benign as public parks and water fountains suddenly came into view as highly contested and political environments, especially when given historical context.
Instead of asking my students to remain static at desks, my theoretical stance that authentic teaching and learning are embodied supported my decision to ask these young people to re-enact the Silent March, a lunch counter sit-in, and a department store boycott in the locations where they once occurred. Being physically vulnerable, visible, and connected to their compatriots and to the built environment taught these Human Geography students (through feeling)that same-aged university students had voluntarily put their physical well-being in harm’s way in an effort to create a systemic change for the common good through desegregation.
Rather than relying only on the “traditional” modalities of classroom learning (e.g., reading, listening, and writing), my theoretical stance about distributed teaching and learning engaged young people in navigating through the city streets with historical maps and GPS devices. They were required to interact with one another and other citizens to complete tasks and construct information about past events. This exercise modeled for pre-service teachers that various ways of doing can lead to knowing, and that their own students might learn more deeply if various modalities of teaching and experience are leveraged through thoughtful instructional design.
Looking back, I am nostalgic about the community of learning that coalesced in that Human Geography course. Pre-service teachers of various backgrounds and opinions came together to not only re-construct a past civil rights movement, but to contemplate one of their own in school and community settings. For some, these movements would involve using space strategically to build meaning and relevance in places that were not built for young people. For others, these movements would involve situating the classroom within the lives of students rather than retrofitting students’ lives in the classroom (Nespor, 1997) through their instructional methods. For all of them, however, these movements were based on principals embodied by other “non-traditional” students like Diane Nash and Marion Barry. These movements involved taking place for a better, more equitable future.
References:
Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.
Cole, M., & Engeström, Y. (1993). A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, (pp. 1–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hägerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers in Regional Science, 24(1), 6–21.
Hall, R., & Nemirovsky, R. (2011). Introduction to the special issue: Modalities of body engagement in mathematical activity and learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 1-9.
Hutchins, E. (2010). Enaction, imagination, and insight. In Stewart, J.R., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E.A.
(Eds.), Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science (pp. 425-450). Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Nespor, J. (1997). Tangled up in school: Politics, space, bodies and signs in the educational process. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.