On Teaching Empathy

Long intro to my title:

I’m still trying to figure out a way to make moodle forums useful for classes, and I really just think they are perfect for letting kids digest difficult material at their own pace—while throwing in a dash of competition (the possibility of on-line flame wars, etc.)

In other words, I’m still trying to provide students with opportunities to direct their own learning whilst and at the same time preparing them for the IB exam to come (and they said it couldn’t be done.)

A main skill the history IB will test them is recognizing and accounting for authorial bias.  In a short class time, it’s almost impossible to cover content and have a meta-discussion about document values and limitations, especially if the kids are interesting in talking about the material (which ideally is the best possible result.)

This week, I gave the kids 4 primary sources concerned with Black suffrage during the Reconstruction Era.  Two were positive—by Thaddeus  Stevens and WEB DuBois.  Two were negative—one by a Georgia rice planter and one by Pitchfork Ben Tillman.  

Old one-eyed Pitchfork Ben

Then I asked the kids to give my a statement in answer to the question:  was Black Reconstruction a misguided policy? 

They had to weigh the documents, pull out the evidence, assess the believability of the authors and write their responses into the forum.  Weirdly, one period all claimed it was a failure, one period all claimed it was a success, and one split.  Then I sicced ‘em on each other, one class against the others, and told them to use their own interpretations and evidence in contradiction.

It pretty much followed that authorial bias was taken into account, the anti-suffrage side was discounted immediately in favor of Black suffrage.  Tellingly, the anti-suffrage arguers all claimed they were acting pragmatically.  That is, black suffrage was a bad idea because 

1)  no one should get the right to vote until they prove they can vote intelligently, and that 

2)  it would create problems among Southern Whites and thus make Reconstruction difficult.

After these comments were pretty much laughed out of the park, and for the obvious reasons, I found that the kids had a rousing debate on their own, which I monitored while watching Modern Family.  Our de-briefing today was fun, contentious, and ended with me showing clips from Birth of a Nation, and asking why, if Tillman was so wrong, his version of history won out.

I would like to point out, however, how my mostly non-white kids identified with the Southern White power structure rather than the freedmen for the two reasons above—they didn’t think about bias, and what seems to be “pragmatic” seems so often to be either a lack of empathy or a desire to get in with those making the rules.