Veronica and Odyssey, both six, didn’t get to know their grandparents.
So when their first grade teacher at an Harlem elementary school introduced an activity to learn about their ancestors, the two girls knew immediately who to choose.
Taking turns giggling in a P.S. 125 hallway this fall, they wondered about their grandparents’ lives: where were you born, what is it like? How did you fall in love?
The pair are two of close to one million students being introduced to the nation’s first K-12 Black studies curriculum, rolled out across New York City’s public schools this academic year after a pilot at 120 schools.
Rather than relegating Black history to one month, one self-selected elective course, or one passionate educator, the curricula exposes young people year-round to the stories, lived experiences, and contributions of Black people across the world.
After a concerted push from advocates, educators, and the City Council, schools across New York City, where one in five students are Black, are expanding lessons at each grade level.
“We’re here to tell the truth and to teach the truth,” former New York City Schools Chancellor chancellor David Banks said earlier this year. “Black history is American history. Period. Full stop.”
Its unveiling comes at a pivotal moment in American history, as states like Georgia, Florida, and Texas look to limit the inclusion of Black history in the classroom, attempting to dismiss it as teaching kids race or to hate the country that subjected Black families to violence for centuries.
But the words students and educators used in association with New York’s Black studies were consistently positive: joyous, exciting, fun, engaging. For the first time, students are seeing themselves and their perspective of the world in the material.
The ancestry lesson at P.S. 125, for instance, built upon a book students had read by Jacqueline Woodson, Show Way, which explains how one person descends from generations of others, and how quilts were one way Black families catalogued that history.
“They really thought about what their ancestors would be like during that time. Not ‘what do you do’ but ‘what are you like? What’s it like back where you were?’ ” said their teacher Sera Mugeta. “They really enjoyed that.”
“It feels really good,” she added, smiling, to be able to bring in the “specific parts of African American history and Black history that are not highlighted in history books and in history classes otherwise.”
After three years of development, the guides and reading lists that comprise Black Studies as the Study of the World are now available as a public resource intended to be a model for schools nationwide.
Developed by a coalition of six organizations, including the City Council’s Black, Latino Asian caucuses, United Way, and Columbia Teacher College’s Black Educator Research Center, “our hope is that it will provide an opportunity to affirm the racial identity of Black children, which I don’t think is happening in a lot of places,” said Sonya Douglass, founding director of Columbia’s BERC.
Teaching Black history allows students “to be able to better understand and celebrate and appreciate the contributions of individuals who came before,” Douglass added.
The work was in part inspired by, “the movement of social justice and reform during the COVID-19 Pandemic and civil unrest of this time,” the coalition said in a press release.
Without the representation, students start to question,“ ‘Oh, why am I not as valuable in the same way?’ ” said P.S. 125 principal Yael Leopold.
Now eighth graders, for instance, can do a three day lesson on investigative journalism, protest, and resistance to lynching as they learn about Ida B. Wells. The lesson plan starts with prompting small group discussions on her famed quote: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
One Brooklyn high school teacher told Douglass a group of black boys, the subset most disproportionately experiencing the youth mental health crisis, used to skip class to play basketball regularly.
After incorporating a few lessons, she saw higher attendance and engagement, an overall “desire to be in class and see what was going to be taught the next day.” It is bringing back a curiosity and “joy of learning that I think unfortunately doesn’t exist for far too many Black students.”
The impact is being felt by young people and educators across the city.
In Queen’s District 28, one eighth grade teacher said, “students were more engaged than ever and even those who usually do not participate had a lot to share and make connections to today.”
A fifth grade teacher in the same district said, “my Haitian students were delighted and were very active in the activity, they had a great sense of pride. Some of my parents offered to come to class to speak about Haiti.”
The impact is unsurprising to scholars familiar with identity development and school engagement: research has long shown students perform better when they feel their experiences are acknowledged in the classroom.
“It is important for us to be able to have that type of education in order to create the type of country that I think many Americans would like to see going forward,” Douglass said, “which is inclusive and diverse.”
Schools across District 5, one of a few New York City districts that’ve been vocal in their commitment to integrating the lessons at each grade, have found ways to incorporate the contributions of Black leaders, visionaries and families for years.
Home to the Harlem Renaissance, the area’s schools like P.S. 125 have been “unapologetic,” said Leopold, in incorporating world histories by default, reflecting the families they serve better than pre-existing social studies curricula.
“What made it an easy transition for us is we were doing so much of that work already that it didn’t feel like an add-on,” she added. “…Our teachers and our educators were yearning for more.”
The school already adopts monthly themes like Black joy and liberation. They introduce their elementary schoolers to jazz, gospel choir, and African drumming.
“We’re trying to build all of our children to be advocates and agents for social change,” Leopold said. “That will only happen if they have the opportunity to be exposed to those things – all children.”
The culture of change trickles down into small decisions, like ensuring the skintones of cartoon hands to use for classroom posters used for counting or storytelling aren’t always white by default.
And at the end of each lesson plan in the city’s curriculum, a question prompts educators to reflect on their own biases: “how will you maintain high expectations for all students?”
Through monthly professional development sessions at their school and separate offerings through BERC, educators like Sera and kindergarten teachers Michelle Allen have become more confident in both the subject matter and how to facilitate the classroom conversations in ways that are developmentally appropriate.
“It’s something I wish I had as a kid,” said Assistant Principal Daniel Calvert. “I wish I had the tools and the license as a teacher to figure out how to apply things that matter to me, as an educator and as a person, into my teaching.”
Allen, for instance, starts first by introducing, what is Africa? Breaking down what students already have heard or think they know about a place, showing them maps and how maps can be distorted, is a helpful starting point before they go deeper into particular cultures or traditions.
One family, from Eritrea, after witnessing the activities happening throughout the school asked if they could come in and do a tea ceremony for the students.
“In that way, respecting the families’ cultures creates a stronger community that maybe had the Black curriculum not been here, it might have not fostered that same thing,” said Allen. “It does give you something to lean back on.”
The work is being noticed in other parts of the country. California’s Long Beach School District is now in talks with BERC to develop a summer program. Columbia University’s Gordon Institute has received half a million dollars to work on what will ultimately be a Latino curriculum. And the City Council recently freed up $750,000 in additional funding for educators’ training.
“The heavy lift is really going to be the training and professional development because this is content and information that I would say a majority of educators have not had access to because it’s not required in our K-12 education system,” Douglass said.
For now, in Harlem, the rollout feels like an honoring — of the place, its people, and the work of its educators.
“The best part has been it feels like we’re rebuilding trust with the community that really had been in some ways lied to and bamboozled for many generations in terms of public education,” principal Leopold said, adding that Black studies is, “allowing our children to find joy in their learning and in themselves.”