At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline and Vanessa recorded the podcast together live in the P & T Knitwear podcast studio on the Lower East Side of New York City, which was super fun.  Sparked by the recent controversy around the College Board’s modification of its Advanced Placement African American Studies course, seemingly in response to criticism from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that it would violate recently- passed Florida laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory, we talked about how history is taught, the lenses it’s taught through, and the lenses we’d LIKE to see it taught through, honing in on what we’d like to see history curricula look like going forward (hint: it shouldn’t be lecture based…) We talked through what specifically has been removed from the new AP curriculum and our feelings about things like SHOULD African American Studies be taught separately from regular history or should there be more emphasis on infusing more African American studies into ALL the APs.  We shared concerns about what qualifications teachers will need to teach African American Studies–and what that means in terms of which schools will ACTUALLY teach it? We shared concerns about how to cover the vast swaths of history expected, which leads to teaching to the test rather than to teaching for depth. We also voiced concerns about the removal of contemporary issues from the AP curricula, as well as removing secondary scholars like bell hooks who provide insight about the systemic undergirding of these issues, and our sense of the agenda behind that being to make racism and disparities seem like they are in the past and that we’ve moved beyond these forces as a nation.This plays into our larger concern about the trend of trying to wrap up history with a neat little bow, making us miss the shades of gray and the modern relevance—which is a problem more broadly in school. The point should be to make us think more deeply, not to erase the nuances. More broadly, we grappled with the question of whether politics and history are inextricable, particularly in trying to separate historical injustices from what’s happening today.  We feel that it does a disservice to history to try to separate the two, and that it does a disservice to students to not teach them that there are some problems that we haven’t yet solved. The point of school should be to make us independent, capable thinkers–therefore ingraining facts rather than challenging us to use content to think about important issues misses the mark. We did acknowledge that despite the critical lens we are sharing in response to recent revisions, we celebrate the critical need for an African American Studies AP course and applaud the College Board’s attempts to address this need. Thank you for listening!

Ver todos los episodios