089: Teaching children about issues related to race

Jen:  00:01:44 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners will recall that we've been talking about the Intersection of Race and Parenting for a while now. We opened by talking with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on the topic of White Privilege and Parenting. And then we heard from Dr. Allison Roda on White Privilege in Schools. In our third episode, one of my listeners, Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interviewed Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. And we tried really hard to cover a lot of ground on both what parents can do to overcome structural racism and on how to talk with our children about race. But I was very cognizant of the stones that we left unturned that I really wish we had time to address. Now, I reached out to today's guest because I wanted to better understand his work on how historical figures are depicted in children's literature. And he responded, I should be on your show. Jen: 00:02:31 And after I read his papers, I said, yes, you should. So, Dr. John Bickford is here with us today. I just wanted to mention though that I'm rerecording this introduction because you'll hear in the conversation that we formulated an idea to develop some resources to help parents talk with their children about difficult topics like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. And we actually went ahead and did that. So, each one is a short PDF that walks you through primary sources were these exist on each topic as well as a collection of children's books. You’ll hear Dr. Bickford refer to these as trade books and if it's been awhile since you studied history, then primary sources or things like photographs and posters of slave auctions and audio recordings of former slaves, which you might not normally consider as things to share with young children. Jen: 00:03:13 But which Dr. Bickford has actually done very successfully. So, the thing that makes these resources unique is that they use frameworks developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center for teaching young children about these topics. So, it's not just a random collection of books and pictures and videos that we thought were interesting, but together they address what scholars believe to be the most important ideas on each topic. Things like the fact that enslaved people brought rich cultures and traditions with them that continue today and that the Civil Rights Movement was pushed forward by many, many concerted efforts and not just by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Primary sources do exist for a lot of these ideas, but where we couldn't find any, we supplemented with interesting secondary sources like videos. So, if you subscribed to the show through my website, you'll already have received these resources and the email about this podcast episode. Jen:00:04:02 If you subscribed through a podcasting platform like iTunes or Stitcher, then I don't have a way to get this to you, but you can head over to this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/TeachingRace to download these resources. So, back to the interview, Dr. Bickford received his Bachelor's Degree in History, his Master's Degree in Secondary Education and his Ph.D. in Social Studies Education all from the University of Iowa. And he's now Associate Professor at Eastern Illinois University where he teaches How to Teach Social Studies at the elementary and middle school levels. His research focuses on how social studies and history education is taught at these levels, how students think about history as well as historical misrepresentations within children's literature. And today we're going to discuss a ton of resources to help us teach children about topics related to race. Welcome Dr. Bickford. Dr. Bickford: 00:04:51 Thank you for having me. Jen:00:04:53 All right. So, we've started each episode in this series by both me and my guests stating our privileges. And so my guests have heard mine a number of times right now. So, I'm going to state these quickly. These are my Whiteness, my economic status and the upper middle class, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and my education. And I was actually also reminded by one of my Instagram followers last night that I should acknowledge the native Americans on whose land I sit, and those are the Chochenyo Ohlone. And I actually pay the Shuumi Tax, which is a donation that's acknowledgement of this land used to belong to these people and was taken from them. So, I wonder if you could begin by telling us some of your privileges, please. Dr. Bickford: 00:05:28 Well, it would be Whiteness and upper middle class socioeconomic status. I'm a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied White male. I benefited tremendously from having two parents with college degrees and a grandfather who was a college professor. So, education and enriching experiences like museums and concerts were something that I kind of grew up with. I also have the privilege of being physically larger and more athletic than most folks, but my teenage son would disagree. And since you mentioned about the first people’s or native American’s land on which you're sitting, mine would be of the Mississippian culture or the Cahokian culture. Jen: 00:06:12 Oh, wow! And you must know that off the top of your head because I added that after I sent you the question list. Dr. Bickford: 00:06:18 Yeah, yeah. That was not on the list, but one of my favorite passions as a child and as an adult now still with my own reading is about the native people of North and particularly Central and Southern America. I really, really enjoy that. Yeah. Jen: 00:06:33 Okay. Well, we may get to talk about that a little bit more in the interview. I wonder if we could start up by talking a bit about your work. Can you tell us what kind of books you study and how you study them? Dr. Bickford:00:06:42 Sure. Generally speaking, I study the texts and tasks, the best facilitate historical reading and thinking and writing. These are the sources and strategies that get kids to think historically not memorizing historical dates. That's historical comprehension. But real historical thinking is looking at different sources and figuring out what actually happened, like a detective at a crime scene, so to speak, and invariably that involves the texts that include the curriculum the parents and teachers choose and use with their children and teenagers. And from an educational psychology standpoint, I spend most of my time on elementary children and some children in the middle grades. If you were to think of it as like a Venn diagram with one circle being what the experts know, the historians, the archeologists, the anthropologists, and then the other circle being what's included in the curricula, textbooks and trade books. Jen: 00:07:40 Those things overlap in some way? Dr. Bickford: 00:07:43 In some ways they do. I explore the areas of convergence and also particularly the divergences between historians and children's authors. I don't get too much into the historical quibbles or the nuances. I tried to focus on what I consider important big picture aspects. Like is this accurate? But also age-appropriate. Could this be taught to a 5-year-old? Could this be taught to a 10-year-old? Things like that. Jen: 00:08:10 Yeah. We had a fair bit of email conversation before this episode and I was looking for a blog post that's actually well have been published by the time this episode goes out on what we should learn during Black history month. And so I asked Dr. Bickford if he knew of any online resource that actually presented an accurate view of Lincoln rather than this, not quite accurate version that a lot of us understand. And he kind of said, well, historians get over these things when they do an undergraduate degree. So no, there's not really information out there because they don't have a reason to put it out there because they just know it's not true and they don't really speak to laypeople. And I was really interested by that and I'd never thought about the resources that are available online in that way before. Dr. Bickford:00:08:52 It really is remarkable, but it's kind of like this idea if you were to ask a hundred folks, when did native Americans start to inhabit North and South America? Probably 95 of them would say something like about 10,000 years ago they walked across the Bering Strait and since then they populated North and South America. The five people who wouldn't say that have background in archeology or historiography or anthropology. Jen:00:09:21 Okay. Don't tease us like that. Give us the answer. Dr. Bickford: 00:09:24 It's hard to know. But they know that they came over more than one way and they can do this linguists. Linguists by evaluating the different patterns of languages and people disagree to degree. But it's anywhere from four to six different language groups that are in the North and South America for Native Americans. And they assume it was in these four to six different waves because presumably there were small tribes that walked across and linguists may disagree here and there on the small aspects, but the most logical answer that most people would agree with is that it was probably multiple groups probably starting somewhere between 25 and 35,000 years ago and probably the last one was maybe 10 to 15,000 years ago and I just mentioned the linguistic evidence, but there's also a lot of contemporaneous evidence when it comes to spheres and in bison and woolly mammoths and things like that, spearhead points and things like that. It's a whole lot more complicated than what I can just convey in a short answer here. Jen:  00:10:25 Yeah, for sure. I didn't realize your expertise extended to that area. We've been talking a lot about slavery and Lincoln and I didn't realize that was one of your primary interest. Dr. Bickford: 00:10:34 Actually, my primary interest is what historians call the Black Freedom Movement from slavery until beyond the traditional Civil Rights Movement. Native American history is something that I'm deeply fascinated by, but I haven't taken too many courses in that. I just read it on my own. It's a hobby. But I have done some research on it. Jen: 00:10:55 Super. So, let's get back to that Venn diagram that you mentioned and I'm going to quote from one of your papers. It says “Trade books potential and popularity give a false impression of their curricular soundness.” And so firstly, I wonder if you could just briefly just find what trade books are for us. And then secondly, what are some of the more egregious examples that you've seen where historical events depicted in these books are just plain wrong? Dr. Bickford: 00:11:19 Sure. Trade books are biographies, narrative, nonfiction, historical fiction books, books that parents buy for kids over Christmas break and summer break. They're distinct from textbooks, which is trying to be comprehensive. With textbooks, there's lots of different ways to look at textbooks, but you can't cover everything. If you have to cover from Columbus to Lincoln in 300 pages, you can't cover everything. But it's the trade books, it's the biographies of Rosa Parks. It's things like that. It's the biographies of Abraham Lincoln that I'm most curious about because they're presenting themselves often as nonfiction. And that's what I mean by trade books. Some of the most egregious examples, the two most common are phrases like Hitler brainwashed. Where about 40% of the books actually used that word brainwashed. For one of my articles, I reviewed about 50 books, maybe 60, I forget, all centered on the Holocaust. Dr. Bickford: 00:12:18 And I couldn't get over how often that term...