Collective Memories, Oral History, and Preservice Teachers Making Sense of School Desegregation in Virginia

• In Event: Historical Consciousness and Conflict: The Challenge of History Education in Diverse Democracies

Abstract

This study is grounded in the scholarship of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950; Wertch, 2002) and considers Virginia as a space of contested memory (Halbwachs, 1950). Historically, Virginia is one of the states such as Kansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and South Carolina, from which came the cases that were decided together and are collectively known under the name of Brown v. Board Education of Topeka in 1954. Implementing the Brown decision was not that easy, however. Most notably, the Virginia legislature enacted a set of laws designed to prevent school desegregation that became known as Massive Resistance, which came directly into play in the school year from 1958 through 1964. Consequently, more than 14,000 Virginia students were locked out of their public schools to prevent integration in Front Royal in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk. Even worse, in Prince Edward County, all the public schools were closed for five years rather than integrate.
This study investigates how pre-service teachers in Virginia make sense of school desegregation, looking into the ways in which they craft their narratives about school desegregation, and challenges that they encounter in doing so. One case that was bounded by three academic semesters, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, & Spring 2015 and an elementary social-studies-methods course in a public research institution in Virginia, was selected. Multiple sources about pre-service teachers’ narratives (N= 56) on school desegregation have been collected, including “background packet,” “oral history project,” and reflection papers. Data was analyzed given Hess’ (2005) five perspectives on Brown – various ways to conceptualize Brown as a history-in-use in U.S. society - as initial categories: 1) an icon of “democratic achievement”; 2) a liberation referent; 3) an unfulfilled promise; 4) a well-intended error; or 5) irrelevant.
Initial findings indicate that despite some variation, pre-service teachers presented the master narrative of Brown, framing it as an icon of democratic achievement. When crafting their stories from the various sources, including oral history interviews and historical texts, pre-service teachers predominantly used the stories from their interviewees as evidence over other texts; and amplified the place of oral histories to the master narrative, ignoring how individual stories challenge the master narrative. We, however, found that the oral histories—as lived experience—helped students complicate their understanding of the past by facilitating the opportunity to take multiple perspectives (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Brooks, 2011). This opened the possibility of moving beyond the master narrative. When comparing their own stories with their peers’ and their own research, some revealed the ability to critically look at the interviewees’ stories and came up with alternative stories of their own. This paper will end with a discussion of pedagogical implications of oral histories as a tool to disrupt textbook accounts—a master narrative in use in schools—and to help pre-service teachers become critical consumers of the school history that they will teach in their own classrooms.

Authors

• Yonghee Suh, Old Dominion University

• Danielle Eileen Forest, University of Southern Mississippi