Education Week - November 2, 2016 - 11

teachers, including official school tours. Candra Flanagan, the coordinator of student and
teacher initiatives, said the museum's education staff wanted some time to observe what
exhibits crowds would gravitate toward.
Also in 2017, she said, the museum will roll
out more tools for educators, such as previsit
guides, online activities, and other information sources to support classroom learning.
The museum also plans to host one-day thematic workshops for teachers about various
topics in history or history education four to
six times a year.
Meanwhile, many of the stories and collections in the museum are on the museum's
website. Teaching Tolerance, an educational
project of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
has developed a free tool kit for teachers that
compiles some of the available resources they
can bring to their classrooms.
Adrienne van der Valk, the deputy director
of Teaching Tolerance, said the museum's resources are designed to help educators start a
dialogue about race with their students, from
a historical perspective.
"I think they allow you to tell the story of
American history through an African-American
lens," van der Valk said, "particularly if you're
a white teacher-that's not your lens. I think
having a set of robust, vetted tools to bring that
history to the classroom is very important."

Telling a 'Complete Story'
The museum's exhibits add context to the
school curriculum and give educators an opportunity to share a "complete story" of African-American history and culture, she said.
The stories in the museum are those of
resilience, triumph, culture, and identity,
van der Valk said. Upsetting exhibits in the
museum-such as images of lynchings-are

Four 6th graders from KIPP DC's Northeast
Academy- from left, Kalicko Smith, wImani
Poston, Michaela Young, and Makayla
Hall-huddle over an interactive display of
historic photos inside the National Museum
of African American History and Culture.

marked by a red border and a sign warning
visitors of graphic content.
"I think that one of the considerations
that we take with the material is to look at
the humanity that is involved in the story ...
and find the triumph in the story, even if it's
a hard story," the museum's Flanagan said.
"I think sometimes we think that children
can't take in something that's serious or hard
or dark. I think children can take it in. It's a
matter of using age-appropriate language ...
and connecting it to something they can understand," like fairness, justice, and inclusion.
In fact, the museum has an education initiative geared to children from birth to 8. Flanagan said research shows that children as
young as 6 months see differences in people,
making it important for them develop a positive identity early on.
For the past three years, the museum has
offered a workshop for teachers on talking
about race in the classroom. Eighty-two per-

cent of teachers are white, while just over half
of U.S. public school students are nonwhite.
"The conversation about race and racism is
not a conversation that needs to happen just
among African-Americans," Flanagan said.
"We want all teachers to feel involved in this
conversation and not outside of it because
they're not a person of color or they're not
teaching students of color."

Uncomfortable Conversations
Teachers have different comfort levels in
discussing race, Flanagan said. She said some
teachers discuss slavery as an economic institution and ignore the racial aspect. One of the
museum's goals, she said, is to help teachers
become comfortable talking about race in historical ways: "That's the first step to talking
about it in a contemporary way."
During the National Council of Social Studies' annual conference in Washington in De-

cember, the museum plans to offer a session
on discussing race in class.
Lauren Funk, a social studies teacher at
Nashobea Brooks School, a private, all-girls
middle school in Concord, Mass., will attend
that workshop. She said she teaches in an affluent community and tries to work with her
students to acknowledge their privilege-specifically, she said, white privilege.
"I think we have to lean into that discomfort," Funk said, "having our kids actually
know that this matters and these conversations need to be had, but also providing a safe
space to kids who might be marginalized."
Funk said she tries to teach students that
as much progress as has been made with race
in the United States, things are not yet perfect. "[Talking about race] can be challenging
work," she said. "It can feel overwhelming and
isolating as a teacher. I think it's really helpful
to connect with other educators but also get
support from organizations and individuals."
She said the museum exhibits tie into her
spring-semester curriculum: implementing
change in an imperfect democracy, with a
focus on civil rights. Funk is taking her students to visit the museum in January as part of
a trip to the presidential inauguration.
"I think it's probably going to be a hard experience for some of the students, but I also
think it'll be an important one," Funk said. "I
think there will be some disturbing truth in
there, but also some emphasis on the joy in
the [African-American] experience and the
pride in the experience."

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