Third Graders Learn about Restorative Justice and Loving Engagement Through the Civil Rights Movement
By Colleen Massaquoi
Third graders at Concord Hill School learned about the principles of Restorative Justice and Loving Engagement by studying the role of young people in the Civil Rights Movement. In our classroom, we centered the principles of Restorative Justice and Loving Engagement as part of a larger unit on youth activism. We found that focusing on these principles allowed students to dig deeper and make meaningful connections to other young activists we studied throughout the winter months.
To launch the lessons, students engaged in a “chalk talk” considering four questions:
Why do you go to school?
Where do you learn outside of school?
Who should decide what you learn?
What do you love to learn about most?
Children wrote their responses on Post-It notes and placed them on the questions around the room. Then they visited each posted question and looked for patterns in the responses. The answers to the questions were varied, and the discussion was lively! Students were excited to see that they agreed on many of the reasons that people go to school: to learn new things, to prepare for adult life, to learn about themselves, and to learn to get along with others. They also realized that they learn in many places other than school. They learn when playing musical instruments, attending religious gatherings, playing on sports teams, and from family and friends.
In posing these questions, we wanted students to reflect on the relationship between “school” and “learning.” Who decides what you learn? What do you think is important for kids to learn? We also wanted them to think about the control they have over their own learning, particularly learning that happens outside of school or in other environments. We hoped that by framing the principles with these questions, we could encourage students to consider how engagement with the wider world is a critical aspect of learning. We used the students’ reflections on their own learning to connect with two ways children and young people participated in the Civil Rights Movement: the Mississippi Freedom Schools and the 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama.
Exploring the History of Freedom Schools
We began by connecting our chalk talk to the 1964 Freedom Schools in Mississippi. This lesson was inspired by the episode “Young, Gifted, and Black: Teaching Freedom Summer to K-5 Students” from the Learning for Justice podcast Teaching Hard History. In the lesson, we used a simplified version of the Teaching for Change lesson Exploring the History of Freedom Schools to examine what children learned in the Freedom Schools. Our 3rd graders were especially interested in how Freedom Schools encouraged young people to question everything. We had a lively discussion in class using the questions from the sample lesson from the Freedom Schools curriculum. Our students were especially interested in discussing questions like, “Mass media—should newspapers, TV, and magazines tell the truth? Should that be their basic job?” and “Money—should a few people have a lot of money, should everybody have the same, should everybody have what they need?” These questions appealed to students’ understanding of fairness and justice and allowed them to make connections to issues we had discussed previously in our classroom.
After this lesson, students learned about the 1963 Children's March in Birmingham. We read the book Let the Children March by Monika Clark-Robinson and watched footage from the Learning for Justice film Mighty Times: The Children's March. Using these resources, students learned that young people in Birmingham used non-violent tactics to pressure city leaders to desegregate Birmingham. The children were fascinated by the film and the power of the students’ collective action, particularly when they learned that the Children’s March was the catalyst for desegregating the city and spurred on the cause of Civil Rights across the country.
Throughout the lesson, we asked the students to consider two questions:
Why do you think the children participated in the march if they knew they would be arrested?
What do you think the children learned from participating in the march?
In response to the first question, children wrote:
[The children] put pressure on the police and people who were arresting them. It’s ridiculous that kids were getting put in jail, so that’s how they showed it was unfair.
They knew they wanted freedom and that someone had to march - so why not them?
When asked what they thought the children learned from the march, one student said:
They learned that kids can change the world just like grown-ups, and [they learned] that there are lots of good people in the world who are with them.
In teaching these lessons, we realized how powerful it was for students to see themselves reflected in the change agents we discussed. Children so often learn that adults are the “real” decision makers. By centering the role young people played in the Civil Rights Movement, we hoped our students learned a powerful lesson: your voices do count and you can create change.
Colleen Massaquoi is a third grade teacher at Concord Hill School, an independent school in Chevy Chase, Maryland.