The AP® African American Studies course brings together critical lenses from multiple disciplines and asks students to build a context for college-level academic study. Students will encounter the rich complexities of African societies prior to European encounters and trace the evolution of global diasporic identities and cultural connections through twentieth century independence movements and into the digital present. They will have a chance to investigate the artistic traditions, political strategies, and intellectual trends that have shaped African American representation, conflict, and advancement across regions and eras. Students will use the methods and evaluation tools developed by leading scholars to question data, media, and other sources that capture the Black experience at the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnic identity.
In order to face this moment and rise to its challenges, we have to prepare our students. Throughout the last two centuries, Black writers, creators, and thinkers have pointed to the critical importance of African American histories and communities to an understanding of American identity. When we neglect to incorporate these stories and theoretical concepts, or reduce them to where they can be seamlessly integrated into the mainstream, we fail to see how those seams, those complexities, those moments are what constitute the fabric of American democracy, at its weakest and strongest points. The AP® African American Studies course is the preparation our students need to build the competencies that will be required in their futures.
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Learn more and register for 2024-2025 student courses offered at the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse. All of us in the independent school community redoubled our DEIB efforts during and after the summer of 2020. We did the same in the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse. Now, four years in, we can clearly see the results of our efforts.
One of our core competencies, embedded in each one of our courses, is to expand each student’s worldview. This means honoring identity, building belonging, and providing an accurate perspective of the complexity and diversity in our world. We measure this in our quarterly student surveys. After significant DEIB work with our faculty and in our courses, the number of students who expanded their worldview in an Academic Program course has skyrocketed to 97% this spring, up from 63% at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. How did we make it happen? We started with our expectations for teachers. During the 2020-2021 school year, the Academic Program asked teachers to identify activities, conversations, and educational experiences that can affirm students’ cultural and racial identities and develop their abilities to connect across cultures. In Summer 2021, we revised our teacher competencies to reflect our expectations. The Academic Program has two levels of standards for teachers: baseline expectations and exemplary implementations. Our standards were–and still are–clear: creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive courses are a baseline expectation, just like course mapping, assessment, and real-world application are. Our standards expect teachers to develop identity awareness by examining how their own views, biases, and values influence their teaching. Teachers must understand the roles of marginalization, oppression, Eurocentrism, and bias in their subjects. Courses are required to incorporate diverse perspectives from BIPOC individuals in their historical explanations, analytical frameworks, and discussions of contemporary events. Throughout, teachers are expected to use inclusive language and imagery, ensuring diverse identities were represented in all media used in the course. We committed to making every course in the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse inclusive and identity-affirming, and we worked to ensure our course content accurately reflected the diversity and complexity of our students and the world around them. And it made a difference. When you make a commitment to change, you also need explicit expectations, coaching, and accountability. We implemented all of these elements. We set clear and measurable standards for our teachers, provided the necessary training and support, and held ourselves accountable to the results. This comprehensive approach has made us better educators. Our courses are more inclusive and enriching, and our students can see the difference. At One Schoolhouse, we recognize observances and holidays that center the voices and experiences of historically excluded peoples in the United States. As an educational organization, we want to lift up the words of others who share our commitment to learning, and amplify LGBTQIA+ and Black voices both in June and throughout the year. To learn more about these newsletters, read our blog post on how and why we acknowledge. Learn about the history of Pride: Pride began as a political commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots and protests–spurred and led by Black and Latinx trans women–in New York City and evolved into a month-long affirmation and celebration of LGBTQIA+ identity.
Recognize LGBTQIA+ Pride in your school and community: Access lesson plans about the history of Pride and LGBTQIA+ history and activism in the U.S. from the Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools initiative. Listen to LGBTQIA+ Voices: Teach for America alum Dwayne J Bensing reflects on his experiences as an out gay middle school science and social studies teacher. Now Legal Director of Delaware’s ACLU chapter, Bensen writes, “I brought my full, authentic self into the classroom. I believe my students benefited. I take pride in that.” Learn about the history of Juneteenth: At the Zinn Education Project, Christopher Wilson, Experience Design Director at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, writes “Very often, Juneteenth is presented as a story of ‘news’ of the Emancipation Proclamation ‘traveling slowly’ to the Deep South and Texas, but it was really a story of power traveling slowly, and of freedom being seized.” Recognize Juneteenth at your school: The National Museum of African American History and Culture provides a framework and resources for teaching elementary-aged children about the context, meaning, and celebration of Juneteenth. One voice: In this photo essay, Elroy "EJ" Johnson, a middle school history teacher in Dallas, documents Juneteenth celebrations and depicts “both Black joy and Black resistance in neighborhoods that have a long history to the Black community in Dallas.” One Schoolhouse designs competency-based courses with the student-teacher relationship as the cornerstone of our personalized pedagogy. Courses are intentionally developed to be learner-driven; they are informed by seminal and emerging constructivist education research and by data gathered within our own living practice. The pedagogical approach is designed backwards from competencies and the lessons are personalized to honor learners’ unique needs and identities,[1] and to pursue dynamic bilingualism.[2] This brief seeks to provide context for how our high school language program is evolving and describe the values that inform our pedagogy. While students have long excelled in our language AP courses, for many years we did not offer full sequence language courses because there was little research to support the efficacy of online language learning at the early levels. The research shows that fewer than 1% of Americans are proficient in the language they studied in traditional classrooms.[3] Not wanting this outcome for One Schoolhouse students, our goal is to inspire deep learning so we strive to ensure that the online learning experience increases the effectiveness of second language acquisition. By 2018, we had honed our approaches to delivering the four traditional language competencies – reading, writing, listening, and speaking – in the online space, and therefore endeavored to build out our Chinese and Latin sequences. To these we have subsequently added American Sign Language, French, and Spanish, and have re-leveled our courses with titles Beginning I/II, Intermediate I/II, Advanced I/II, and AP to minimize placement misalignment when students enter mid-program. The limitations of other online language programs -- namely, the focus on the “Five C’s” -- are mitigated by the centrality of the student-teacher relationship, including interactive sessions where students speak, listen, and translate with their peers and teacher, at One Schoolhouse.[4] J.C. Narcy-Combes’s research on second language learning online shows that “meaningful interaction will trigger learning processes,” which we know to be true anecdotally, and that, with intentional design, students can be taught to learn language effectively online.[5] Carrier et. al. have also shown that educational technologies and online learning are rapidly transforming second language acquisition, and that intentional practice can create a highly effective digital experience.[6] Because One Schoolhouse students have pathway options where they can practice in the target language at their own pace, get feedback from their teacher, interact with peers from around the country or world, and demonstrate their progress through both traditional assessments and creative projects, students have the full complement of research-based learning activities in their online courses that you would expect to find in any independent school language program. We go beyond these practices, however, to ensure that our students’ practical skills and world views shift as a result of having studied language at One Schoolhouse. Our school-wide competencies -- to engage in a diverse and changing world and to gain academic maturity -- are cultivated in uniquely intentional ways in our language sequences. Because language and identity are inextricably connected,[7] One Schoolhouse does not treat reading, writing, speaking, and listening as the sole markers of proficiency.[8] Instead, we employ culturally responsive practices that empower learners to see second language acquisition as part of global citizenship[9] and to leverage their online language course to develop self-management, empathic, and interpersonal skills. We endeavor to develop a lifelong passion for diverse linguistic exploration in our students instead of traditional reductive and mastery-inspired acquisition models. Schools have options for where their students begin their language learning sequence and what their culminating experience is. Our Beginning I courses scaffold online language learning gradually. The design explicitly positions students’ perspectives about the history and influences that the target language has had throughout the world and explores issues facing countries, communities, and peoples speaking the language today. Students learn about regional and dialect differences among native speakers as they practice strategies for navigating new and unfamiliar situations in the target language. Students may enter or continue at the Beginning II level and proceed through AP, wherein the growth of students’ global competence, as well as communication language competence, are emphasized and measured. More global or applied culminating experiences are offered at our highest Advanced level course in each language; these courses go beyond the AP curriculum to dive deeply into practical applications or literature. Like applied linguist Donaldo Macedo, in our Advanced courses, we seek to “confront the hold of colonialism and imperialism that inform and shape the relationship between foreign language education and literary studies by asserting that applied linguistics is just as important a tool… as literature or linguistic theory.”[10] One Schoolhouse students are well prepared to study abroad or in college, communicate in the language within their communities or while traveling, and participate as emerging bilingual members of society. One Schoolhouse language sequences are taught by different teachers at each level so students have the opportunity to learn from and with teachers of diverse backgrounds. Our teachers are trained in both their language and the best pedagogical practices for delivering language online, have studied in both American and international universities, and have independent school experience.
[1] 1. Dedini, C., Rathgeber, B. & Rehel, E. (2024) The Pedagogy of One Schoolhouse.
https://www.oneschoolhouse.org/uploads/7/1/4/7/71479831/the_pedagogy_of_one_schoolhouse.pdf [2] García, Ofelia. (2011) Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century, Oxford: Oxford University Press [3] Brecht, R. (2015) American’s Languages: Challenges and Promise. American Councils for International Education, as cited by Friedman, A. America’s Lacking Language Skills in The Atlantic. [4] Cutshall, S. (2012) More Than a Decade of Standards: Integrating “Communication” in Your Language Instruction. ACTFL: The Language Educator. [5] Bertin, J. C., Grave, P., & Narcy-Combes, J. P. (2010). Second language distance learning and teaching: Theoretical perspectives and didactic ergonomics. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. [6] Carrier, M., Damerow, R. M., & Bailey, K. M. (2017). Digital language learning and teaching: Research, theory, and practice. New York: Routledge. [7] Canagarajah, S. (2021) Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation, Ethnicities. [8] Norton Peirce, B. (1995) Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning. TESOL Quarterly. [9] Byram, Michael & Wagner, Manuela. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals. 51. 10.1111/flan.12319. [10] Macedo, D. (2019) Decolonizing foreign language education: the misteaching of English and other colonial languages. New York: Routledge. Note from the Association: Alison Easterling, Head of Upper School at Noble and Greenough School, and Association for Academic Leaders member, posted a query about summer reading on the Academic-Leaders’ listserv. She got generous feedback from other Association members about what they were reading and then did some research about the titles suggested and posted back to the community. We were so impressed that we asked her to write a blog post for our community and Alison graciously agreed.
Here are some of the most frequently recommended books that stood out across multiple lists:
Other contributions I wanted to include in this post:
As you plan your summer reading, consider picking up one (or more) of these insightful books. They offer valuable perspectives and practical strategies that can enhance your professional growth and positively impact your school community. Happy reading! |
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July 2024
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