To launch the lessons, children participated in a “chalk talk,” a routine that allows students to share ideas by placing Post-It notes to respond to questions. Students responded to four questions: 

After initially answering the questions silently, students visited each posted question and looked for patterns in the responses. The answers to the questions were varied, and the discussion was lively! Students were excited to see that they agreed on many of the reasons that people go to school: to learn new things, to prepare for adult life, to learn about themselves, and to learn to get along with others. They also realized that they learn in many places other than school. They learn when playing musical instruments, attending religious gatherings, playing on sports teams, and from family and friends. 

In posing these questions, we wanted students to reflect on the relationship between “school” and “learning.” Who decides what you learn? What do you think it is important for kids to learn? We also wanted them to think about the control they have over their own learning, particularly learning that happens outside of school or in other learning environments. We hoped that by framing the lesson with these questions, we could encourage students to consider how engagement with the wider world is a critical aspect of learning. We used the students’ reflections on their own learning to connect with a study of two ways children and young people participated in the Civil Rights Movement: the Mississippi Freedom Schools and the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama. 

We began by connecting our students’ school experiences to the 1964 Freedom Schools in Mississippi. This lesson was inspired by the episode “Young, Gifted, and Black: Teaching Freedom Summer to K-5 Students”  from the Learning for Justice podcast Teaching Hard History. In the lesson, we used a simplified version of the lesson Exploring the History of Freedom Schools to explore what children learned in the Freedom Schools. Our students were especially interested in how the Freedom Schools encouraged young people to imagine a new structure for society. We had a lively discussion in class using the questions from the sample lesson from the Freedom Schools curriculum. Our students were especially interested in discussing “Mass media—should newspapers, TV, magazines tell the truth? Should that be their basic job?” and “Money—should a few people have a lot of money, should everybody have the same, should everybody have what they need?” These questions not only appealed to students’ understanding of fairness and justice but also allowed them to make connections to our current moment and issues we had discussed previously in our classroom. 

-Colleen Massaquoi