SEED summer staff member Christine Saxman's piece is the next of several posts this month about how various SEED leaders have used SEED methods and principles both to celebrate Black History Month and, broadly, to create a more multiculturally equitable and inclusive curriculum and community.
Christine Saxman
SEED Summer Staff
English Teacher
Deerfield High School
By applying Peggy McIntosh’s Phase Theory to my curriculum and classroom, my work with the SEED program has helped me to question and explore the ways in which Black History Month actually marginalizes Black history. McIntosh's theory provides a way of understanding the various phases of perceiving and re-visioning the curriculum, from exclusive to inclusive, and has also helped me to hold myself accountable to include Black history and literature as fully integrated content in my curriculum.
It has also helped me to hold myself accountable to include Black history and literature as fully integrated content in my curriculum. For example, in an integrated American History and Literature class which I co-teach, Bayard Rustin became a figure important to both our Civil Rights Unit and our American Women and Men unit, which examines LGBTQ history. We were able to examine the depth of Rustin’s contributions to the March on Washington and Civil Rights while understanding that his sexual identity has left him out of many mainstream accounts of that history. Using film and text, we deepened our understanding of Rustin’s contributions and the ways in which our multiple identities intersect, providing many windows and mirrors to our students and asking them to think critically about what stories are told as part of history, which are not, and to question why.