Hey guys, happy Thursday!
I have been doing some hard reflection since the last class, and my reflection hovers around what we don’t learn in school. I remember vividly the paragraph on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotts and how the movement initiated from her actions. I never knew the surrounding history – the year and a half of discontent surrounding the actions of the city and the buses and the threats of boycott. I was left wondering what else I did not learn from major events that surrounded major events.
I have been conducting my own research now, and one topic that has recently come to my mind is voting; I have seen signs go up around my community recently for the state senate vote. I think back on my education and I have to thank Susan B. Anthony for my ability to vote in these elections and all others, but I was curious to see if I was maybe missing some information.
Apparently, there were two suffragist groups fighting for voting rights for women – one was the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA), formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the other was the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA), formed by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (teachinghistory.org). I never learned the names of Lucy Stone or Julia Ward Howe, or Thomas Wentworth Higginson! These two groups also supplied different tactics to earn the right to vote for women. NWSA went straight for petitioning the US House and US Senate to earn the right to vote, whereas the AWSA aimed to get local and city governments to approve the right to vote for women to eventually get support for the nation to earn the right.
Additionally, I learned that the suffrage movement started and ended with Susan B. Anthony – because of her work, white women across the United States had earned the right to vote. While it is true that she was a major figurehead of the suffrage movement, she passed away almost 15 years before the country had added the 19th amendment to the Constitution!
Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment, 1920.
We missed so many other men and women suffragists who worked hard to ensure white women had the right to vote, so why do we only learn about Susan B. Anthony? Why don’t we learn that suffragists held the first picket recorded on White House grounds in 1917, and they conduct this picket for THREE YEARS, six days a week, to earn the right to vote? They were called the ‘Silent Sentinels’ because they would never speak at their picket, they would let their banners speak for them – I mean, how cool is that?
It is so amazing to continue to learn as we move on in our class, our programs, and just in general, but I think should be taken as an important reminder that we may not learn all of the information that we need to get an idea of the whole event. As we become teachers, this will remain important as we try to help our students become historians. Also, I think everyone should take a moment (when (and if!) you have free time) to explore the teachinghistory.org website; it does give great lesson plans, as Drs. Stohr and Bland had said and it has awesome background information and primary sources to look at and learn more information from. All of the images and facts I used tonight originated from teachinghistory.org, and lead me to this website: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage#background
Lexie
Lexie, thanks for your post. I grew up in Rochester, NY. I’ve visited many times the cemetery where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas are buried. Like you, I never learned about other suffragettes. It wasn’t until I saw the HBO film Iron Jawed Angels (2004) that I realized there was so much I didn’t know about the movement for women’s voting rights.
There’s a good clip of the picketing scene here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G811_Ej7LiQ
In general, I can tell you that you will never know everything you are required to teach. You will need to be committed to life-long learning and educating yourself so that you can share the full story of history with your students. Part of this self-education is digging into primary sources to understand that story for yourself.
I’m glad you did some exploring on your own and found such useful resources.
Thank you so much for your post, Lexie! I appreciate that you conducted research on your own to discover certain aspects of this topic that you did not learn in school.
I agree with you that there are certainly many significant events and topics that I didn’t learn in school. Oftentimes, during my K-12 education, I felt as if I was only getting one side of stories while learning history. Additionally, there was rarely a lot of depth used to explain the details of historical figures or events. Our class on Tuesday was very eye-opening for me. Exploring primary sources and learning the truth to the story of Rosa Parks encouraged me to seek truth in history when I teach children. As a teacher, I’m going to ensure that I utilize trustworthy sources and give students a wide range of perspectives on every historical topic we discuss. As for your question, I only remember learning about Susan B. Anthony and her important role in helping women gain the right to vote. I really wish I had the opportunity to learn about the other suffragists in our history during my elementary, middle, and high school eduction. Based on my research, there were more than 50,000 suffragists who all contributed to the fight to give women their right to vote. Students will not be able to learn about every single one of these members, obviously. However, they should be educated about the efforts of a few of these important historical figures, instead of just Susan B. Anthony.
If teachers do their part in learning as much as they can about our nation’s history, students will be more educated and successful in furthering their knowledge in various subjects. It’s OUR job, as students, to be constantly researching and learning.
Hi Lexie and Milton, our last class session gave me several revelations and reading your post this week took me on a journey. Lexie, after reading your post I reflected on how there are quite a few classes of persons who have experienced discrimination, racism, sexism, alienation or annihilation – including the American natives, African Americans, White Women, Jewish persons, Mexican Americans and the LGBTQ+ community. In Richmond’s Unhealed History, chapter 7, we see how the persons in ruling authority instituted laws to achieve their “goal of black disenfranchisement” across several areas (transportation, residential, marriage, education, employment, public assemblies, and public facilities which still haunts the black citizens of Richmond today. (Campbell, 2012, pp. 140-148) Milton, I agree chapters 7-9 were tough reads especially to see the splitting of the Jackson Ward community. One of the worst examples of ‘economic development’ moves was to destroy the thriving Jackson Ward community by razing 4,700 units of housing and replacing them with five housing projects to build interstate 95. (Campbell, 2012, p. 153) I believe it is said best in the epilogue on page 216, “The men who planted the cross at the falls on May 24, 1607 promised justice, but did not give it. Now, more than four hundred years later, we can, if we will, renounce that original heresy and claim for this settlement the integrity that was absent at the beginning.” Beginning with the Millennial generation and going forward, we are seeing a more diverse population of students who will be taught by educators wanting to provide history as a historian giving them as much of the facts as possible. This is necessary because history has already happened, and we cannot change it but we can learn from it so we can all move forward to a more perfect union.
Reference:
Campbell, B. (2018). Richmond’s unhealed history. Richmond, VA: Brandylane
Greetings, Lexie! Thanks for sharing this information about the Women’s Suffrage Movement. The suffragists’ three-year-long, six-days-a-week picket is indeed an impressive demonstration of their dedication and fortitude.
Last class we learned how very incomplete the story of Rosa Parks presented to us in our childhood Social Studies classes was, and in this post, you raise the question: why are we only taught certain facts about the Women’s Suffrage movement in our Social Studies classes, and not given a more in-depth account of the movement? Our teachers certainly intended to imply, and in my presumptuousness I shall assume that you intend to imply also, that students ought to be taught about these matters more in-depth, and given a complete understanding of each subject as historians understand it. However: meaning no disrespect to you personally, of course, I am going to indulge my innate contrarianism and propose that elementary Social Studies teaching absolutely necessitates the simplification of subject matter to the point that anybody who learned the complete story would be baffled and infuriated to see it so reduced!
The example passage about Rosa Parks that we read last class gives an account of her deed that is actually inaccurate; and there can be no justification for that, so similar passages in textbooks ought of course to be replaced with passages that make it clear that the bus boycott was planned by Civil Rights activists beforehand, was only one of many such boycotts across the country, that Rosa Parks was an activist with the NAACP who knew what she was doing, and so on. But the other complaint that many folks in class made was that the passage was so short and simple. Perhaps I am missing something, but I feel the need to ask: what else would you expect from an elementary-level Social Studies textbook? Our students are expected to learn a tremendous amount of general information about people and events across the country and at all points in the last few hundred years; of course the stories they are given are short and simple, because they must share the textbook’s page-space with a vast number of other such stories! This world of whom we are a part is vaster and more diverse than we can possibly comprehend, and an entire graduate-level class could be taught about the life of any one person in history, but the purpose of an elementary class is to give students the most basic basics on which to build their knowledge of more specific topics in the future. So I really think the question “Why do we not learn more about X?” is of little utility. It is because there are so many other things to learn!
…at least, that is what I would say if I took the basic premise of a universal generalized curriculum on which our education system is currently built for granted! And maybe I do; there are many obvious arguments in favor of it, and it is probably here to stay no matter what I think. But here is an alternative proposal. Even as I made the argument that social studies classes cannot go very much in-depth on any one topic in order to teach as many topics as possible, I could not help but realize that I have completely forgotten almost all the generalized information I was taught in my elementary and middle school Social Studies classes! I know so little about most of American history that I cannot speak with confidence about even the most basic facts. Those parts of which I have knowledge are the parts which have sparked my own interest and which I have consequently studied on my own time (mostly American Indian cultures and the lives of Black slaves, though I am still very far from being an authority on either topic). Therefore, maybe it is time for a different method of teaching history, which rather than giving the whole class an overview as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle, which its members are practically guaranteed not to remember, instead allows individual students to direct their own learning to gain a deep understanding of a particular topic. Rather than a society of people who are *almost* completely ignorant about everything in history, we would end up with a society of people who are each highly knowledgeable about a particular thing, but completely ignorant of everything else. I rather like that idea in theory. What do you guys think?
Hi William!
Thanks for your comment, and after reading it I like the stance you took. We have so much to teach students about the history of the US and of the world, how could we possibly teach students – especially those K-3 – the deeper and wider history surrounding historical moments without overwhelming them? It seems that we must teach the text book and get their knowledge wide and shallow, but I think this is when teacher creativity can come in. You loved researching history that you were interested in, so I think that we can introduce researching to the younger students to get them to learn more about a specific topic and introduce to them the needs required to conduct basic research and how to present their research to their peers. Thank you for this comment, I think it will help me and help out our peers as we become teachers!
Hi Lexie!
Thank you so much for your post and for conducting further outside research on women’s suffrage.
This weeks class session was genuinely eye-opening for me. Learning that the “true story” of Rosa Parks we have been taught consecutively throughout out K-12 years was not the full truth left me quite shaken. How many times had I been taught the wrong story? This then prompted the additional question in my mind, how do I make sure to offer my future students a historical curriculum that is accurate, covers a variety of perspectives, and offers credit to those who worked so tirelessly to gain rights all of us deserve.
Until very recently, I was not aware of how many important historical figures and additional aspects of events are left out of our history books. After pondering solutions to this issue, I feel as though research might just be the best answer. Although I know it is quite impossible to teach students about EVERY single person throughout history, as future teachers it is our job to conduct research prior to ensure that our students are being taught the whole picture — not just a snippet.
Hi Lexie! Thank you for your thoughtful post.
I appreciate how you dug deeper into other topics that we all probably did not learn much about in school.
I agree that this weeks class session really made me wonder what else from history I did not learn about. How is it that we really only learned about Rosa Parks and all these years I had no idea that the boycott was planned prior to her? I do not understand how we could leave out such important parts of history, and I worry that if these new SOL’s get accepted, things will only get worse, especially in Virginia. I am faced with the challenge of whether or not I am going to want to work in Virginia if this is the way we are going to be progressing. I do not want to be involved in teaching my own students the wrong story like I was taught. I want my students to know the truth, and know everything that I am learning brand new at 19 that I should have learned about years ago!
After reading the textbook passage in class, I wonder how many social studies textbooks I have read in school that told me the exact same thing. It truly is eye-opening to see how much surface level information and baseline facts we should just be teaching students, instead of the truth. How can we as future teachers make sure they know the whole story? How can we do this especially if the SOL’s are going to change?
I browsed through the website you provided about women’s suffrage. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a name that I did not recognize at all! I feel like it could really take us years to catch up on all of the information that we have missed out on. The two different suffrage groups was also new information to me.
Overall, my worry is just being able to make sure my students are able to learn everything, not just the surface level and facts. What if this is not allowed in Virginia anymore? Are we allowed to go outside of the SOL’s? I am a bit worried about the future of social studies education as it feels like it is going to the wrong direction. I want to make sure my students get the whole picture of the past, and that is a goal that I am going to make sure is achieved.
Hello Lexie!
Thank you so much for your insight and the additional research you did on suffragettes of the time. I found it incredibly insightful and interesting and I definitely want to learn more!
Like you, I did not learn much about voting rights other than Susan B. Anthony. If I’m being completely honest, if someone were to ask me what she did in order to aid the cause, I don’t know that I could answer correctly. My social studies classes in elementary and middle school were very dependent on the teacher even though I went to a public school so it should have been somewhat standardized. I had some teachers that really engaged us with the material and others that had us learn the surface-level stuff. I remember really loving the teachers that engaged with us even though social studies was not my favorite subject. Now, I think history is so interesting, but the way it is often taught makes it a bore to sit through.
Like Halle, I worry about the time constraints and being able to get to the deeper-level stuff in the limited time we have for class. We also talked about the changing SOLs which worried me that even if we do have the time to dig deeper, it wouldn’t be allowed by the state because it would be “too controversial” (News flash for them but history is controversial. That’s what makes it so interesting). I want to make sure my students get the whole of the story, not just the version from textbooks.
Hi Lexi! I appreciated your post a lot, and I am so happy to see you have already started doing your own research on topics that we did not fully learn about throughout our learning experiences in the classroom.
I think that we all will have to continuously push ourselves to learn more about topics we have already been taught about as future educators. As many of us have voiced, this past week’s class opened my eyes to how one sided my learning experiences (concerning history) have been. Seeing that primary sources could be used/interpreted in a false way made me feel like parts of history have been hidden from students, including ourselves. With that being said, it falls on us to educate ourselves on topics we are teaching our students with primary sources and plenty of outside research.
With regards to voting rights, I also learned about Susan B. Anthony being one of the main suffragists. Knowing about how history was taught to me now, I do not believe I was taught the full story about women getting the right to vote at all. Everything covered in classes throughout elementary school and middle school was from a textbook, which as we learned is NOT a primary source. I understand that it is impossible to teach students about every person that was involved in the monumental events of our history, however, I find it ridiculous to frame history to students in an unrealistic way by picking one person to receive credit for what actually took much larger measures of support and advocation. With this in mind, I plan on educating myself further concerning history I have and haven’t learned so that I am able to provide my students with the full and accurate truth behind events in history.
Hi Lexie,
Thank you for your response. It’s always so interesting to uncover history that got skipped in your own education! For me, learning about all of the populations left behind in suffragist and civil rights movements made it obvious how much I missed in my own Social Studies education. My teachers when I was younger never mentioned that the suffragist movement to allow women to vote excluded women of color. I learned about MLK Jr, but not about the other activists that walked alongside him on his mission. There are so many things I’m learning now through my own experiences that I didn’t get to explore and analyze when I was younger.
I hope that when I start my own classroom, I will find a way for my students to explore the many sides of history, as well as the complexity that comes alongside the diverse movements across the world. Although this task seemed daunting before, our class on Primary Sources was the first time I could imagine tackling the mission efficiently. While looking through the police report, affidavits, and other primary sources, I could imagine lessons and activities surrounding the sources that were both engaging and informative.
Thank you again for sharing!
Ashley
Some interesting POC suffragists I found!: https://women.ca.gov/women-of-color-and-the-fight-for-womens-suffrage/
Hi Lexie!
I really enjoyed your post especially the personal research you conducted to contextualize Susan B. Anthony’s part in the women’s suffragist movement into the surrounding historical events happening at the time. I found it interesting that you felt as though there were gaps in the depth of your understandings in relation to historical events and the context to which they happened in. I agree with this point completely when looking back onto my education regarding historical events. Throughout school historical events seemed to be taught from a single narrowed point of view. Due to this I can say I have a surface level knowledge of most events but no real depth in understand about the history of America. Through reflecting on this past week’s class and learning the sequence of events which transpired to spark the Bus Boycotts, it makes me quite skeptical of the other lies I have been told by textbooks about the history of America. My goal is to offer multiple points of view on an event through use of primary sources like we did in class.
Hi Lexie! Thank you so much for taking the time to share the details and excitement about the rabbit hole you dove into head first. I too have gone diving into similar historical-knowledge-gap-holes and it’s a really satisfying feeling to start clicking those puzzle pieces together. You taught me quite a few things that I didn’t know!
To answer your question about whether or not our knowledge matches up? That’s a hard no for me. The sad thing is that I can’t even remember learning about Susan B. Anthony or other suffragists but my educated guess is that I learned a version of events that was similar to yours which lacked the full story. To give my former teachers some credit though, I have to remember and understand the historical context of my school years. Aside from garden variety secondary source class history textbooks and school library books, do you know what they had? Encyclopedias. The penultimate secondary source. Because the internet was not a thing. The reality is that my own teachers were living in an age where there simply was not easy access or any access to primary sources and there were no computers or cell phones or information at one’s fingertips. Research was not easy. In all likelihood, there wouldn’t have been a reason for them to suspect that the suffragist story they were peddling to their own students was any different than the one they themselves had learned. So Lexie, I have to think that your teachers were my age or older and I’m going to have to give them a pass on this one: I’m going to have to assume that they really didn’t know the full story either, about this, or Rosa Parks, or a lot of other things that I’m sure I’ll get mad about later.
The learning process that we experienced in the last class — listing out what we already know (activating prior knowledge) and our lingering questions, engaging in the analysis of primary sources, discussing our question prompts (why might we trust or distrust this source?), and then reflecting on what we learned — is the exact process we can now use to actively engage our own students in some historical myth-busting and truth-seeking. Moving forward, I imagine that we’ll all think more critically about history as we know it, and will use some of the cool websites and other online resources that we’re learning about to structure our student’s learning in a more memorable and meaningful way. I will NEVER forget the true story about Rosa Parks now! Like the writers of any history book, we’re going to have to be selective in choosing what topics we dive deeper into with our students. It’s not going to be easy.
To respond to some of William’s comments, I agree that we do have to be realistic in the knowledge that time is finite and there simply is not enough of it to go deep into every historical person, place, and event. But I do think it’s crucial that we provide that wide-but-shallow overview of important topics because that’s the only way that our students can truly understand historical context and start to make connections. We can encourage their individual interests with assignments and projects where they can select their own topics on which to conduct historical research, just like we’re doing with our multigenre research project.
Thank you Lexie and others for your thoughtful reflections and insights! You’ve awakened the nerd in me and I’m here for it.
Sue Anne RI
Hey Lexie,
Thank you for sharing your research with us!
Like you, I had only ever learned about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in school. I don’t understand why we tend to prioritize some stories while completely ignoring others. I understand that we can’t teach students everything because of time constraints and the prioritization of standardized testing, however the U.S. education system consistently leaves out/alters history that I don’t believe is necessary. For example, when learning about Rosa Parks we all learned the story that’s found in traditional textbooks as evidenced by last class. It was only until this year in my Modern U.S. Social Movements class that I learned the truth about Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. I can completely understand not having the time to go as in depth as we did, but at the same time, I don’t believe that it is right that we were taught falsehoods. During the time we do have for teaching history, we should enrich our students with the truth. Unfortunately, I have had to unlearn a lot of what I was taught in history class, and that was mostly brought on through social media. Thankfully, I have conducted more research outside of what I have seen on social media, but we can’t expect that every student will spend their time conducting additional research. If we teach our students the realities of history in the first place, they won’t have to spend their later years worried about what is the real story.
Hello Lexie,
Thank you for your post, I appreciate you sharing this information to the class. I agree with you in that there is some much information we were not provided in school concerning topics of importance. As a teacher, it is my goal to teach truth and give understanding to our students and allow them to form their own opinions concerning difficult topics. It was interesting learning more about the surrounding history of the Rosa Parks/Montgomery bus boycott incident.
It is interesting seeing the senator vote signs going up around our community, and this is only February. We have had candidates visit our church for the upcoming special election this month for Congress, which is held on February 21. We have so many individuals to thank for our right to vote, as you stated.
You are correct that it is our responsibility to teach our students to become historians and give them the tools needed to be researchers, not only in history class, but in all aspects of their lives. This class has provided information that showed us to do more research, and not to take all information as being correct or complete. This weekend is a great example of information not provided to citizens with the Spy balloon that entered United States Airspace. We have missed so many other individuals that have paved the way for our generation to enjoy the lifestyle that we enjoy. As you stated, Susan B. Anthony, the first picket on White House grounds, and a host of other history not taught in our schools.
Thank you, Lexie, for your post.
Hi Lexie!
I really appreciate this post. I did the same thing after last week’s class by diving into some more topics that I might not have known about. It was naive to think we had learned about all of history throughout our education. I think a comprehensive history lesson would be something that goes way beyond the standards that are in place at the moment.
When we learned about women’s suffrage, I did learn about Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton, and Fredrick Douglas. I did not however remember hearing anything about the second large suffrage movement. I feel as though history for public schools has been so simplified that they only accept the base of the story and nothing further. History should be comprehensive and students should have the time to form their own opinions on what happened. During class last week we were gifted time to discuss and interact with primary documents which allows us each to interpret the data at hand. This is something that we should allow students to work with on regular occasions.
I think as future/active educators, it is our job to fully educate. At appropriate levels, students should be allowed to access primary materials and form questions as well as their own take on what/why these things occurred. Students should be learning about multiple events in history and the planning that took place for many events to occur.