As race relations in the United States continue to rise to the forefront of political rhetoric, Fort Vancouver High School will begin offering a class exploring African-American history in the country next year.
The yearlong course for juniors and seniors, which will fulfill a required United States history class, explores the nation’s history through the lens of the “African American Experience,” as the class is titled. The class covers the same lengthy time period of pre-colonial time through modern history, like a more traditional history course, but taught through the African-American lens. Units have titles like “slavery in America,” “Jim Crow and economic slavery,” “the black power movement and the advent of mainstream black culture,” and “poverty and the war on drugs.”
Rachel Jarnagin, a social studies teacher who will teach next year’s class, described the course as a broad look exploring the disenfranchisement of black Americans over the course of history, as well as places where black culture has flourished, in many cases as a response to those struggles.
“I really want to focus on the complexity of blackness in America,” Jarnagin said. “The complexity and the long history of race in America. On all sides, the good, the bad, the ambiguous.”
The class appears to be the first of its kind in Clark County, if not the entire state. The Vancouver Public Schools school board approved the curriculum at a meeting earlier this year.
Ethnic studies courses, and more specific courses on individual ethnic groups, remain rare across the country, though Washington began requiring schools to incorporate Native American history in their curriculum in 2015.
“I think that we’re at a point in our history in America where we need to and where we can start broadening our historiography, and broadening our understanding of our common story through these multiple experiences,” Jarnagin said.
‘Fuller picture’
The Seattle King County NAACP has urged Seattle Public Schools to integrate ethnic studies into classes at every school, according to a Seattle Times report in January. The NAACP chapter’s proposed policy, if approved, could make ethnic studies a mandatory graduation requirement by 2020.
Portland Public Schools will begin offering ethnic studies in all its high schools by 2018 after the school board unanimously approved the plan last May, according to The Oregonian. In 2005, Philadelphia began requiring its ninth graders to take African-American history classes as a prerequisite for graduation, according to a New York Times story published that year.
Lee Micklin is a librarian at Cleveland High School in Seattle, and the former chair of the BlackPast.org Teacher Advisory Board. BlackPast.org features thousands of articles, lesson plans and other reference materials on African-American history, and purports to be the largest collection of its kind in the United States.
The first push for ethnic studies classes came following the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Rights Movement through 1950s and 1970s, Micklin said, who has been a educator for more than 25 years.
“Everyone was clamoring for departments on identities,” she said.
That desire appears to have come full circle, as schools explore how to teach more diverse student populations, lessen the opportunity gaps between white students and students of color, and give a “fuller picture” of the world’s history — setting aside the typically Eurocentric history courses that are a mainstay in American high schools.
“History has traditionally been told by the viewpoint of the victors,” she said.
And there’s reason to believe these classes could do exactly what Micklin describes. A Stanford study found that participating in ethnic studies classes can boost attendance and reduce the risk of dropping out.
At Fort Vancouver High School, 54.6 percent of students identify as nonwhite. That makes it a more diverse school than the district average, where 40.2 percent of students identify as nonwhite.
Allison Darke, curriculum associate principal at the school, said the class builds on Fort Vancouver High School’s Center for International Studies, a schoolwide magnet program with a curriculum featuring expanded language offerings and international studies classes.
“This is our identity,” Darke said. “This is us. We have such a wonderfully diverse community.”
‘Ignored’ U.S. history
The class will also allow the school to build partnerships within the local black community. Bridgette Fahnbulleh, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, said the chapter will provide history and literature about local African-American families. The chapter published a book called “First Families of Vancouver’s African American Community,” featuring stories about black families in the area.
“We are happy to hear about the black history class starting next fall at Fort Vancouver and hope other schools will follow their example,” Fahnbulleh said by email.
Jarnagin called African American history one of the most “accessible” and simultaneously “most ignored histories” in the United States. Jarnagin said this could be the first step to additional history courses focused on specific ethnic groups.
“This is a gateway,” she said. “Ideally, we would offer women’s history, Native American history, Chicano history.”
As of Friday, 80 students had expressed interest in the class. Darke said the school will likely offer at least two sections of the class.
