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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
Teaching Civil Rights in Modern Classrooms
Join us on Talking Texas History as we sit down with Whitney Blankenship. Whitney takes us through her career in history education. We delve into the differences between teaching in public schools and universities, tackling important issues like the complexities of teaching civil rights history and the impact of technology on education.
See her book, Teaching the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1948–1976, Peter Lang, 2018.
https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Struggle-19481976-Critical-American-ebook/dp/B07J6ST5HT?ref_=ast_author_dp
Also, visit the website for more information: https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/
This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. I'm Scott Sosbe and I'm Gene Preuss, and this is Talking Texas History. Welcome to another episode of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Preuss.
Speaker 1:I am Scott Sosman.
Speaker 2:Scott, we're going to do kind of like a what is your life? Gene Preuss couple of episodes.
Speaker 1:Nobody wants to know what your life is like.
Speaker 2:That's true. But we're going to go back and talk to some old friends. I say old in that they've I've known them for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they might not want it, they might not want you to say old friends.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:How about?
Speaker 2:longtime friends. Well, longtime friends, longtime professional acquaintances who are still in the historical profession and have contributed, have changed, have made contributions because heaven knows you and I have not.
Speaker 1:I was about to say are we supposed to make contributions? I don't think that's in my job description. If it is, I missed that somewhere.
Speaker 2:And today we're going to go back to a person that I met at what used to be called Southwest Texas State University. Now it's Texas State, san Marcos, and that is Whitney Blankenship. Whitney, welcome to Talking Texas History.
Speaker 1:Welcome, Whitney.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me Want to know a little bit about you. Not everybody may know who you are, so tell us about Whitney Blankenship. Who are you and how did you get interested in history?
Speaker 3:Okay, I grew up in a very small town, Livingston, Texas. That's about an hour north of Houston, Texas, that's about an hour north of Houston and then moved to Central Texas for college, where I have been since I was 18, for the most part and that's also where I met my husband, Lloyd Blankenship. I spent about 17 years teaching in the Landon District at Landon High School, teaching social studies, primarily history, but I also taught AP psychology, IB psychology and geography, world geography and the AP human geography. After that. We've been there for almost 30 years but we went to Rhode Island for about six years, which was my first tenure track appointment, and I taught at Rhode Island College in both the history departments as well as in the educational studies department. So I sent across two worlds there.
Speaker 3:We came back about six years ago to be closer to family you know aging parents and all. So we wanted to come back and settle back in pretty much where we left from, which was South Austin. We currently live in South Austin and I teach at San Antonio College. And how I got interested in history I can't really remember a time when I didn't like history, but there were a couple of books that kind of brought me to one of them, Of course, the Little House series, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book series.
Speaker 3:yeah, arlington's wilder and I did, uh, you know, by the second grade I had I was halfway through the series um, I just devoured them, uh. And then, third grade, I went to public library and went to, uh, check out a book and the book I got was A Child's History of the World that was published in 1924. So you know, some really progressive stuff going on in there, but I absolutely adored it and it was just so interesting to see how things were different and it changed over time and that just kind of stuck with me. And I've had other interests over the years, music in particular but history is kind of the thing that's always been there for me and and and I've kind of followed it out as I, as I moved up in to my career.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I forgot you were from Livingston. I've always think every time I drive through Livingston, cause I'll drive here. I'm in Houston now and, driving up to see Scott go to the East Texas historical association in Nacogdoches, go through Livingston quite a bit. Alabama Cushota Indian reservation is there and I kept saying I know somebody who's from here and thank you for reminding me.
Speaker 1:There you go Deep in deep East Texas.
Speaker 3:It's slightly bigger than when I was there, when I lived there, but not by much.
Speaker 2:They've improved the highway, they've improved 69.
Speaker 1:So Wendy you talked about you went to Texas State. There you were at Texas State at the same time that Gene was there. I'm sure you were miles ahead of him as a student. And then you also got degrees at UT and obviously history was your first love and you got degrees, that. But you don't teach history now. You've moved into something else and you've gone into curriculum and instruction and that educational side. So tell us how you transition to that. How did you make that transition?
Speaker 3:and that educational side. So tell us how you transitioned to that. How'd you make that transition? In large part there's a lot of different things. It was that kind of all came together about the same time. My undergrad was actually in applied sociology, with a very large history minor that was originally a double major. But I found out two weeks before graduation that I would have to take either one more history class or one more sociology class to get the double major. So history has this really large minor now, and then I got my MA in history a couple of years later started that piece. Ironically, when I started out I didn't major. My major was not thinking about teaching. My mother was a teacher. I knew what that involved. I wasn't really gung-ho about the idea of going into the classroom, but after spending some time as a graduate instructor right at the end of my master's, I realized how much I enjoyed teaching, and so I did go back after my master's and got my teaching certificate, and so that was kind of the beginning of that transformation.
Speaker 2:Well, St Marcus was great for that, because there was so much emphasis, it seemed like to me, on teaching and preparing teachers.
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely, definitely. I worked really Trace Ettinger-Gray was there when we shared an influenced me as well in that area. Then once I I think the big transfer occurred after I'd been in Atlanta about 12 years, 15 years, I was a finalist for the H-E-B Excellent in Educations Awards for, I think, the-year 10 to 15-year category, and I'd also been working doing professional development for the district, for social studies and some local conferences and things like that. So both of them really got me to thinking about. You know, both of them really got me to thinking about how I enjoyed working with teachers and helping translate the content of history into teachable moments I guess is the best way to put it for classroom teachers. And there wasn't a whole lot of it was just based on my experience at that point.
Speaker 3:So after that, about 2015, 2005, excuse me, 2005, I began started thinking about going back to school and going back to grad school and it basically broke down to which program was going to. Let me go part time so I could continue teaching full time? No way to. I could just stop at that point. And so I looked at the history program at UT and then also looked at the curriculum instruction and they had a brand new program that was specializing in social studies education and I could do the part-time doctorate with the teaching. So that's really where it kind of a little bit of practical and a little bit of my own experiences kind of led me to move from one to the other. But the nice thing about the C&I is that I still do a lot of work in curriculum history and school history for my research, both in my technology research and in my World War II, cold War era research. So it has been kind of the best of both worlds over time as I've moved into it and I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I think that's interesting because and I think, very useful information, because I think students sometimes think well, you know, you decided when you were an undergraduate you wanted to be a history professor and it's just something you stuck with and for a lot of us, you know, it's kind of opportunistic right Things, doors open, ideas come in. You know new opportunities, maybe directions change and that's what affects our career paths, our educational. You know paths, paths. Who did you write your thesis under at san marcos?
Speaker 3:uh, dr little uh it was an 18th century, um, social, intellectual, uh, on the great awakening, I looked at how the two sides, the old lights and new lights, were, um, how they went about arguing over their differences within that and and the how and the wording that they used and where they were pulling that information, where they were pulling those ideas from.
Speaker 2:So kind of culture wars of that period. Well, you know that's really a good transition, and you know how do you get, how do you reach out to students. You're talking about translating history into teachable moments. You know how does teaching in public school or grade school different from colleges and universities?
Speaker 3:And strange enough there are. There's a lot of overlap and a lot of it deals with where in that process you are. Right now I am teaching primarily freshman survey classes and some dual credit classes, which do have high school students in them, and so and I think one of the things that's really stayed consistent over the time is level of support, whether that be first generation students or older students coming back into the academic atmosphere or people just coming into college, and they all the sports may look different, but they all need that, some sort of kind of scaffolding to help them get into it, get back into it, organize their time whether and learn to self-advocate. All of that is, as a part of, I think, some teaching that has pretty much stayed the same. The topics may be a little bit different, what they need help with may be different depending on group or their age or where they are in their life. So, in all in all, I think that that's stayed the same. Of course, the biggest things that have been very different is in the teaching.
Speaker 3:I have a lot more freedom at the college, university level to design my courses the way I want to and around themes that I think are important for them to understand the trajectory of US history. And I'm certainly much more critical than I. Probably I was attempted to be critical for my high school students but you know there were obviously limits with the culture wars out there to what I could do, and so I learned to kind of negotiate that. But having not having an intercourse exam that they have to pass or a list of names and dates and people that the state wants me to cover is very free, and there's also not the tedium that comes with just planning for a daily class, which is really where we're at.
Speaker 3:And the other big difference is time With my college students.
Speaker 3:I see them twice a week, so in a 16-week course I may see them around 30 days, about a month's worth of instruction, which is very different from high school where I'm on a block schedule.
Speaker 3:I see them for a much longer time every other day, but the time period is actually longer than the hour and 15 minutes I get with my college students, so I have a lot more time to figure out where they're having issues. We can go back, we can review, we can reteach as needed, whereas in my university class my college classes it's always been about I've got a limited amount of time, I can do some reteaching, but not a whole lot, because we need to move forward. That's something that I've had to really think about as I design my courses and do that most about teaching thematically where I can. It allows me to go dig deeper and to run some common themes in each of the areas as we go through, but also give us some time to dig deeply there without getting into all this other stuff that's going on as well. I hope that made sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it made perfect sense. You know, that's one of the biggest challenges I think we have, particularly in teaching these college courses. I can't imagine what it must be in public schools that you figure, I think I've probably been doing this for over a decade where I feel like I really finally figured out the basic fundamental of what I need to do in a classroom to get it across. And I teach. Sfa has a huge component of training classroom teachers. We have, you know, former teachers college and so we have a lot of them come through here and teaching Texas history. My whole class are people that are preparing to go be public school teachers and always kind of struggle what is it that they need to know to come out of here? And it's got to be some sort of a balance which kind of gives us this idea.
Speaker 1:You have, you're part of a project and you've edited a work for Peter Long Publishers as part of their teaching critical themes in American history, and what kind of work that must be. And yours that you did, the volume you edited was Teaching the Struggle for Civil Rights 1948 to 1976. Tell us about that book. What's in it, what's the thing, and then how'd you get it? I mean, that's quite a project to get involved in. How'd you get involved in that?
Speaker 3:to that um, the, the series and the book itself. But the series is designed to get at um, all the books in the series have a kind of a content section and a pedagogical section, and so what to teach, what to teach and how to teach it. Basically, um, it is, is and it's based around the social studies inquiry design process, so it has students asking questions and using sources to create arguments or to answer those questions, and then to the ultimate pinnacle is for them to then take that information, apply it to real world decisions that are going on and to take action within their own communities around similar types of issues. So this particular book we broke the civil rights period up into two, this first half, which I did, and then the second half, which starts with 1977 to the present, which came out a couple of years ago, and my ideas at the time that I came across the call for the series.
Speaker 3:One of the things I noticed they were looking for someone to do this early civil rights period and I had been working at that point with a book put out by Teaching for Change. That's putting the movement back into civil rights history, and I think I also had seen it through Zen Ed as well. Both had done kind of highlights on it and I was in the process of revisiting how I was teaching the civil rights movement at the time. And so this, as I was, and I'd been playing around with some things from the putting movement back in to civil rights with them on the classroom, so I thought this would be a good time to a way to kind of bring in my own experiences with what I've done in the classroom, as well as to call on other scholars to give their input.
Speaker 3:And so when I saw the call, I put in a proposal and was very surprised when they offered it to me and that was in 2016. I spent most of 2016, 2017 working on it and we ended up and that was also right before I went up for tenure, so it was very well timed. But in general, it's all that it all kind of came together at the same time. It was kind of that perfect storm where everything I was in a place where I was getting ready to move and rethink how I was teaching it and was already kind of in that process and now had the opportunity to share what I had learned and what from not only my own experiences, but from others as well. So that was really kind of all came together in the long run.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating. You know, every time when a survey course, if I teach the civil rights, I always say, you know I'm given this short shrift. I mean, here it is one of you know, maybe I do two lectures from this fantastic movement and how do I get this across? And one thing I always worry about it's almost like the way we teach it. Students are on okay, we get to the oh, it's chronologically, and we get here to the 1950s, oh, let's talk about the civil rights movement. Well, of course, if you're african-american, civil rights movement has been ongoing since the nation was founded. And then there's also the whole thing. How to pedagogically, how do you? What do you emphasize? You can't do everything. How is it the g to cross? I think it's fine. I have to. I have not seen I. I've heard of it, the book now. Now I have to find out about it. I think I can. That's just fascinating.
Speaker 3:These types of things come about uh, yeah, all of you just on the other side, all of uh, if you go to teach civil rightsorg, um, that is the companion website to it and it has all you have to do is register and you can get all of the ancillary lessons. It's now and it's like it's second edition, maybe third, I'm not sure so, but they're constantly updating. But there are some standards, standard stuff that I've been doing?
Speaker 1:Is it? Is it somewhat where I mean it's applicable? I'm sure to say us in our university classes, but is it also for public school teachers?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, it's designed for public school teachers.
Speaker 1:OK, now, with what's going on and such, do you worry about pushback from particularly certain elements of a certain state's government, yes and no.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of it is very much about. There will probably be some areas where it would be controversial. So, for instance, in my book one of the chapters is on civil rights movement within sports and it has come from a very critical perspective and some of my reviewers who were also in the classroom were a little skeptical about maybe possibly using that that one, because it is it's very much as done by chris bucey um, who has been working in this area. He now actually is out of um academia, is actually working with, I believe, the the either US Soccer, I think, the US Soccer Association, where he is doing DEI for them. So it's very, very critical in that sense.
Speaker 3:But a lot of it is also you know that's not going to fit for, be good for everybody, but there's a lot of it's about expanding the narrative beyond Rosa Parks, beyond Martin Luther King Jr, and getting into people like Septima Clark, looking at how Claudette Colvin and how the movement had to make a decision. But who's going to be the face of this? It wasn't just Rosa Parks decided that she was going to do this. There's a whole movement behind it. A lot of that where it expands upon people that maybe folks haven't heard of, or maybe they've heard of them, but they don't know a lot about them.
Speaker 3:But it really allows you to see a lot of crossover between the various movements, whether it be gay rights, women's movement, gay rights women's movement as well as the Chicano movement later on, at the same time that this is all going on and that there's a lot of crossover, and so that's one of the reasons why one of the of of ways to get at these other stories that are part of civil rights history, um, and I think those there's nothing particularly controversial about them, um, but it does go get away from that very kind of, very quick. We've got Brown v Board, we've got Rose Parks and the March on Washington, and then all of a sudden, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and done civil rights movement. We've done it, we finished, and you don't hear much about it after that.
Speaker 1:Right, right. It's just like this episodic stuff that happens how we do it in the classroom and it doesn't. You don't the nuances? Yeah, it's always frustrated me. I always leave when I do that I didn't do. This is the one thing I didn't do very well. I didn't convey this as well as I should have, so it's a difficult thing to get into.
Speaker 2:In the classroom. How do students react? I mean thing to get into in the classroom. How do students react? I mean, whenever you're talking about a broader civil rights movement, because you know, we kind of grew up thinking, okay, civil rights, martin, luther, king, rosa parks and if you're bringing in, uh, other people, you're saying that, look, it goes back. You know at least the modern civil rights movement to post right after World War II, even in World War II. And if you're including, well, let's not just talk about African-Americans and civil rights, but let's talk about the Chicano movement, let's talk about AIM, let's talk about Stonewall, if you're doing that, how do students react whenever you're expanding and changing the story for them?
Speaker 3:almost universally, and this goes back for until when I first started teaching, I'm going to say in the late 2000s when I first started teaching IB history and we did a, and one of their topics is very is kind of a deep dive into civil rights. But universally what tends to come out over the years is why didn't we learn this before? Why, especially when they get to be juniors and seniors younger students not quite as much, they don't have as much experience, but the older students very much why did I learn this in high school? Why did I learn this in? You learn this in eighth grade when we were doing this or whatever, and they're almost mad about it. In some cases they feel like they have been deceived in a little way, that things were not as straightforward as they were allowed to think that they were. One of the biggest ones I can remember is I had my juniors I think they were reading and one of the chapters from James Lowen's Lies. My Teacher Told Me and it was on class from James Lowen's Lies. My Teacher Told Me and it was on class and this whole discussion on this.
Speaker 3:I was doing my research on discussion boards, so they did a lot of forums and this whole discussion came out about why they'd never been. They'd always been told that America was a classless system of sorts, that we don't have classes that are, and I think they're in that sense. They'd always been told that America was a classless system of source. We don't have classes that are, and I think they're in that sense. They're kind of equating it to say like Great Britain, where it's very structured, but they're also. They're like. I've never thought about this. I've never had nobody ever mentioned anything like this.
Speaker 3:For me they were. They were just horribly enraged about it and talked about it for weeks afterwards and that was pretty intense. But it's usually not quite that intense, but almost entirely. Every time I get any kind of feedback on different units that we do or different topics that we do, different units that we do or different topics that we do, it is you know you, you went beyond what I've learned before. I did not know this I. Why didn't I know this? How can I? What? What else did they not teach me? I think it's a part of that in there, but they, they generally respond very well to it. Even those that may not agree with my interpretation are. They do respond well to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, but you know what students are much more welcoming is the right word, maybe not the right word, but they're much more open to receiving something that they hadn't probably ever seen before, and their parents are, and it's really. It's really eye opening, because that's. I get that reaction all the time. What I didn't know that? How come I wasn't taught that, which, I guess, is a good segue for someone to ask you. We've all been doing this for a long time longer than we want to think about doing it but you're unique and that you've got to do this on a lot of levels. You were in a public school setting, two-year school setting, four-year school setting. You've been back and forth in discipline, so you're a perfect person to ask this to, I think. Okay, how has teaching history changed since you first started doing this? What is different and what are the challenges? Are there more challenges now than there used to be?
Speaker 3:I think in some ways, of course, the big change is tech just across the board, and not so much. Tech has become a huge distraction. We see that in all of the a lot of the what's wrong with teaching, what's wrong with schools, kind of critiques. Kids are glued to their phones or they think why do I have to learn that when I can just go look it up on the internet? And to some extent they have a point. So I think what has changed in that sense is that it's less about specific content although that's still important as it is about getting them to critically think about the sources that they're using. Who said it, why they were doing, what their motives were that type of thing, what their motives were that type of thing and where they're getting that information from and then using that to construct arguments and understanding that you can't just look at one source. You need to look at multiple sources to kind of figure out what's going on. So I think that's a large part of what has shifted, and I think particularly even as early as the 80s and 90s, when things really began to shift in history education, lecturing the stage on the stage and more working towards having students grapple with primary sources, secondary sources and the arguments that are being made and coming to the drawing their own conclusions and being able to justify those conclusions, than just being able to regurgitate whatever I said in a lecture in an essay form. So I think that's the biggest one. I think also there is particularly at the classroom level, at the public school level.
Speaker 3:Tech has, on the one hand, opened up the grading process.
Speaker 3:I mean, of course, when I went through school I knew what I had, either because I kept up with my grades myself, or when the report card came out, oh okay, I got a bna or whatever um now with. And I remember I was teaching when the first online grade books came out and everybody was, you know, kind of worried about it and how this would play out. In one way, it's a very good thing because it allows parents and students to keep up with their grades themselves. They can look at it anytime. I'm not having to field a phone call or answer an email about you know what the grades are or how a student is doing. On the flip side of that, you have, especially over the last 10, 15 years, you've got more helicopter parents. You've got students who are so focused on getting into college, that they are very GPA-ric and it's all about the grade, not the learning. So you end up dealing more with that great anxiety related around that no one wants to see anymore yeah, yeah, no one wants C.
Speaker 3:Everybody wants an A or B at the very least, but they don't really connect that with you know, with the actual learning process. This is a reflection of what you know or what you can do, I think what kind of couples with that is, and I've seen this growing. By the time I started in the late 90s, early 2000s, we started seeing in the classrooms more and more students who were coming in with modifications for ADHD To some extent, for anxiety, not as much. Autism has gone up. Knowledge, um, autism has has gone up. Now, whether those were always present and we just didn't recognize it or not, uh, and we're just now more, uh, open to recognizing it. Uh, that has that has changed. What goes on in the classroom, uh, and since covid, I've seen it get even worse because the levels of anxiety it like shot up.
Speaker 3:I watched I had sophomores. I was actually because the levels of anxiety like shot up. I watched I had sophomores. I was actually in the back of the classroom during COVID and was at the day year it started, in 2020, I had sophomores and these were kids who were. They were fun and they were curious and we were always.
Speaker 3:You know, I loved teaching them or working in class. They were always into what we were doing and then over the course of that spring, the following year I didn't have them as juniors but when I got them the year after as seniors these same kids had lost all the joy in learning. They had closed down. There was not the chatter I mean they would come in, sit down, maybe do the work, maybe not. But that, along with the levels of anxiety that they were feeling just in general, just changed that personality of the class. I think I'm seeing a little it's starting to kind of that group of kiddos is now moving far enough up that the newest students I'm seeing at San Antonio College now. It's still there but it's not at the same level. I think we're coming out on the other side at this point. But that's certainly the increase in anxiety and the modifications and just trying to keep those folks in a place where they can succeed and be successful in the class has become much more difficult.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a lot of information, whitney. I mean some of the things.
Speaker 1:I hadn't even thought about in putting them together.
Speaker 1:But you know, yeah, all challenges we have to face, I mean there are challenges that are coming on. I disagree with them. Those are that's. You know, it's this weird thing. It's not weird. But as we move more from and you're right teaching, history has changed a whole lot, and particularly in this, we want them to critically think, we want them to make decisions for themselves, we want them to come to some conclusions from examining sources and stuff. But that scares a lot of people and particularly, it scares a lot of people in power that we're actually asking students to do that, and I think that's the crux of what's going on to a lot of things, because they don't want I mean this sounds trite, but they don't want people thinking for themselves, they don't want people coming back.
Speaker 3:I would agree with that. I think a lot of what we're seeing, the pushback we're seeing particularly towards history education, comes from that we need to have this positive, progressive narrative narrative and because otherwise it just makes it just depresses everybody, rather than seeing it as a way to show students, uh, how other folks have empowered themselves over the years. They too can make a contribution. Um, that I think that difference is. It has become more and more clear Now. The History Awards, of course, have been going on since the progressive education that began in the 1930s and Harold Love series that people just went ballistic over because it was doing things like asking students to make decisions and to engage with sources and everything. So it's nothing new, it's just this is the latest iteration of it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's the news cycle. It's what's coming along. Yeah, the news cycle.
Speaker 2:So, whitney, our last question that we like to ask everyone is what do you know?
Speaker 3:All right. So I've been thinking about it and I think what I know is that the secret to a successful marriage is having separate comforters that might be, right, you do not have to struggle over. You know, and it was always me freezing to death because my husband was curled up like a burrito Whitney.
Speaker 1:Thanks, this has been very good. It's one of our better ones I can tell already.
Speaker 3:Thank you all for having me, and I've enjoyed talking about it.
