Bringing Local History to the Classroom

A lot of the history of the United States '" slavery, the industrialization of the South, the Jim Crow era '" happened right here in Durham. Yet few public school teachers know about Stagville Plantation, the black Hayti business district, or the Piedmont blues music of Blind Boy Fuller.

Education officials in the Durham Public Schools hope to remedy that thanks to its first social studies grant, which includes teacher training at Duke and N.C. Central Universities.

"I grew up here in Durham and there was a lot of black history I didn't know," said Alan Teasley, the Durham system's executive director for grants administration. " I didn't know Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr. visited St. Joseph's (A.M.E.) Church. I didn't know that Durham was called the black Wall Street. I didn't know there were slave houses at Stagville. It was just not part of my heritage as a white person."

The $885,000 federal professional development grant will focus on ways to help 70 local teachers learn to use Durham history to convey larger messages about U.S. history. Many partners will participate, including the Duke Center for Documentary Studies' "Behind the Veil" project, Duke Library, Duke University faculty, the Digital Durham project, as well as the Durham Public Library, staff from local historic sites and professors at N.C. Central University.

Educators also hope to make history more relevant to students at the same time. While Durham student participation on the advanced placement exam in U.S. History has risen over the past three years by about 15 percent, the percentage of passing scores has increased only 1.6 percent. There is also about a 25 percentage point gap between the number of white and black students with passing on those tests. "Clearly we're not engaging our African-American students, " Teasley said.

Part of the problem is that Durham schools have had to focus so much on math and literacy training, Teasley said. Other areas, such as history and science need attention, too, he said, which is why Duke's help in attracting science and math resources means so much.

Duke has helped the school system and the seven partner schools in the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership attract hundreds of thousands of dollars in science and history grants. In this case, Trudi Abel, a cultural historian and senior fellow at the Center for Teaching, Learning and Writing, assisted in writing the grant, Teasley said.

Abel had already piloted the use of technology and Durham history in an eighth-grade class at the Durham School of the Arts '" a Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership school.

"We used it as evidence of what was possible," Teasley said.

Abel also recruited nine Duke professors to help train public school teachers. She asked David Ferriero, Duke's university librarian, to facilitate the training of teachers by providing ready access to manuscript documents as well as seminar rooms and the library computer training room for summer and year-round training workshops.

Abel will also share materials from her "Digital Durham" web site with the public school teachers. "I'm a big believer in the philosophy of getting students to use primary source materials," she said.