By Elizabeth Sagarin
Schools are presenting history in a more integrated fashion these days. Even though this is Black History Month, no longer are women's history and black history relegated to getting attention only during a single month of the school year. They, as well as the histories of the many cultures that make up America, now have permanent residence in the year-round curriculum, according to educators from Oceanside, Island Park and Baldwin.
We don't treat black history as a token subject, said Dr. Linda Bruno, assistant superintendent of curriculum for Oceanside schools.
Andrea Labrescu, the lead social studies teacher in Oceanside, elaborated. Women and blacks have always made history. It is more desirable to incorporate their history into the regular curriculum, she said. By designating a month, there is a danger for history to become compartmentalized. Then we think we only have to pay attention for one month.
Another change happening locally and in public schools statewide is the increasing use of documents to understand history. Children are reading letters from slaves, looking at posters advertising the sale of slaves and studying diaries of women from the past rather than relying solely on a text book that often told a history that favored whites. It's not only about Dick and Jane anymore, said Michael Roccaforte, director of technology, curriculum and instructional support at Baldwin Schools.
By using documents, children are forced to use critical thinking in their understanding of a time period, according to the state Education Department and local educators.
Lebrescu likens historians to detectives. In her elementary-school classes, she teaches a lesson on understanding from a book about seven blind mice who have to figure out the identity of an object. Only the mouse who explores the entire object is able to correctly recognize it as an elephant. Augmenting historical lesson plans with documents enables children to identify the truth, she said.
For Roccaforte, the crowning legacy of the civil rights movement is that it reminds us that there is more than one perspective from which the world should be viewed. Those reminders are far-reaching, he said. He believes that today's more compassionate view of the world is due in large part to the struggles black people have endured to achieve equality.
The importance of a more inclusive conception of history is obvious to these educators. Children need to understand that we all have the same goals. We are more alike than different, said Gloria Maffetone, the principal at F.X. Hegarty Elementary School in Island Park.
In lieu of the new approaches to teaching history, educators acknowledge the significance of such months. Until curricula adequately represents the true multicultural nature of American society and history then there is certainly, always, a place for programs, like black and women's history, that try to address the gaps in history, Labrescu said.
