Former Nashua high school students Adaeze Okorie and Grace Landry founded their organization New Hampshire for Anti-Racist Education last summer to take action amid the wave of racial justice activism that followed the June killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Okorie, a recent Cornell University graduate and Landry, a student at Drexel University, have a mission to understand and undo the effects of systemic racism in the state’s education system, and want to see more lessons about systemic racism in New Hampshire public school curriculums – something they believe is lacking due to their own experiences as students in the Granite State.
“I didn’t really have any exposure through my education in New Hampshire into understanding the way systemic racism affects our country and the various systems, whether education, economics, health,” Okorie said. “There wasn’t really any acknowledgement about its persistence in our society today. It was put forward as a ‘thing of the past,’ especially up here in the northeast, like that wasn’t really our problem post-slavery – which isn’t the case, as we’ve continued to learn.”
Landry said she realized only after she got to college and began a class devoted to the issue of racism that she realized she had never heard the terms “systemic racism” or “white privilege” used in the classroom. Both Okorie and Landry said they didn’t have a non-white teacher until they got to college.
“To me, the lack of education I received is the root of a lot of problems I see in why people don’t understand what’s going on or are resistant,” Landry said. “Why racism persists is the education system acts like it’s not a problem anymore.”
In New Hampshire, educators and advocates like Okorie and Landry are pushing to update school curriculum to include more history and perspectives of people of color, including local history lessons about Black historic figures and notable events right here in the Granite State.
The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, a nonprofit organization that brings attention to the state’s African-American history, has a curriculum design project underway, in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire and other organizations and educators from around the state. The curriculum, which is being designed for elementary, middle and high school levels, focuses primarily on the content that appears in the 2015 documentary Shadows Fall North, about New Hampshire’s history of involvement with slavery, abolition and segregation.
“This is a curriculum to make known those stories that have been left out of the historical narrative. Black history has been made silenced or invisible and we are trying to correct that,” said Whitney Howarth, associate professor of history at Plymouth State University, who is one of the educators running the project.
UNH students and professors have organized and developed the content, and teachers from area high schools are designing the lessons plans. Topics include the history of the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, the 1964 integration of the Wentworth Hotel in New Castle and local historic figures like author Harriet Wilson, soldier Prince Whipple, Elizabeth Virgil – the first African-American woman to graduate from UNH – and Ona Judge, a woman enslaved by George Washington who later lived out her life in New Hampshire.
In one lesson, designed by Exeter High School social studies teacher Adam Krauss, students are asked to make a list of important dates and historic figures in U.S. history. They are then asked to critically examine who was included and excluded on the list. After this initial hook, the rest of the lesson focuses on the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, building more complete historical narratives through the stories and the voices from the past.
“It gives students the names, the dates, the places, that type of information, and they can then learn to think historically and critically and then make their anti-racist arguments or claims,” said Courtney Marshall, an English teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, who is also working on the project. “It changes the way people see the towns in which they live. I think it’s very easy to talk about people abstractly, but to know the people and the lives they live, I think that’s very powerful.”
The goal is for New Hampshire teachers to adopt the curriculum for use in classrooms, either in its entirety or in parts.
Misty Crompton is a seventh grade social studies teacher at West Running Brook Middle School in Derry, who is currently working on an education equity project, “Promoting Just Schools,” through the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Christa McAuliffe Sabbatical. The project examines curriculum, and how race and culture of students and teachers play out in the classroom.
Crompton, who is also involved in the Black Heritage Trail’s curriculum project, said one barrier to reform is that individual teachers don’t always know how to begin making changes.
“I think people are sometimes afraid to make changes to the curriculum because they already feel so overwhelmed with what to include, when we’re talking about history. ‘How am I going to create particular changes when there are so many standards to cover?’ ” Crompton said. “When you are an anti-racist teacher, you are going to be a little more concerned with de-centering some of the traditional curriculum we’ve used that have traditionally centered on the European, colonial experience and that lens of history, and you are going to have to make particular selections that go beyond that.”
Howarth said part of the work is about reminding everyone that these events are not “Black history,” but the history of all Americans.
Another challenge is that educators have differing levels of comfort and expertise teaching about race, and many haven’t received training in how to do so in an informed way. Howarth said curriculum should be designed while bearing in mind the different racial and ethnic demographics and experiences that may be represented in the classroom.
“As curriculum designers we do have a very strong ethical responsibility to our teachers and to our students. We don’t just create something we think would be good, we are really trying to understand the complexity and the weight of the material we’re creating, and we’re really being sensitive to how we are guiding and instructing the teachers to do the work,” Howarth said.
As advocates, much of Okorie and Landry’s efforts with New Hampshire for Anti-Racist Education has been focused on generating awareness and getting support from politicians and education leaders to encourage curriculum reform at the local level, since much of curriculum creation in New Hampshire is determined by individual school districts. Besides changing lessons and text books, they say hiring more diverse employees and training teachers in how to have conversations about race are an important part of the process.
The two are now in conversation with teachers and administrators from around New Hampshire about how best to advocate and raise awareness for curriculum reform. They plan to do outreach and engagement to empowering students to push for change in their own communities.
“Having support of the people in leadership roles is the way to create change and empower teachers to also adopt existing curriculums,” Landry said. “There’s a lot of existing curriculums and lesson plans out there, it’s just a matter of getting the support and empowerment to then implement them, and the trainings to properly do that.”
Some school districts are already taking on this work independently. The Concord School District is planning to audit its own curriculum beginning in late spring to asses cultural responsiveness, historical accuracy and representation, according to assistant superintendent Donna Palley. The district’s anti-racism advisory committee has a subcommittee dedicated to curriculum, and finding assessments and tools needed to do that work. Palley, who described the process as “curriculum work and professional learning wrapped into one,” said the district will revise its curriculum to fill any gaps the assessment identifies.
The Black Heritage Trail’s curriculum material is currently under review by a panel of advisors, and Howarth says she hopes to have the project wrapped up and available online this summer. Crompton will be leading an outreach effort to find educators who may be interested in teaching this topic and are looking to get involved.
Marshall said she hopes that teaching these parts of New Hampshire history will encourage a new generation of young scholars to take their research even farther.
“If you have kids in fifth grade learning things that other people like me didn’t learn until graduate school, where can they take that knowledge? What kind of new events and new projects could be happening at these schools?” Marshall said. “It’s good modeling too, for younger kids. They see older people, people they respect, being able to talk to them about historical fact, modeling vulnerability, like ‘I didn’t know this and know I know this.’ It’s a wonderful model for students.”