Is All Experiential Learning Good? On Plantation Field Trips and Racial Literacy

• In Event: (Non)Learning Racial Literacy in and Outside of the History Classroom

Abstract

With each passing year, there are more news stories about teachers using detrimental and dehumanizing methods to teach slavery. In the past year alone, journalists have reported that teachers have held mock slave auctions where White students bid on and pretended to purchase Black students (Griffith, 2019), had students engage in the act of picking cotton (Jordan, 2019), and had students play board games that required them to take on the identities of enslaved Africans attempting to escape plantations (WECT, 2019). While these attempts to simulate the trauma that enslaved Africans endured are troubling and egregious, every year throughout the southern United States, many teachers practice a teaching method that can also be troubling by taking students on field trips to plantations. In a brief conversation with the preservice teachers in my courses in the U.S. South, I asked who had been on a field trip to a plantation in their K-12 schooling, and every hand in the room went up. When I asked students what they remembered about the trips, they largely remembered very little outside of the names of the plantations they had visited. This somewhat uneventful conversation with my preservice teachers led me to wonder what happens on such field trips. Did students leave with an understanding of how plantations and the institution of slavery laid the foundation for the racial hierarchy that exists in the United States today? With this question in mind, I decided to visit the Magnolia Plantation & Gardens site, which boasts that it is the most visited plantation in South Carolina, in an attempt to understand whether or not visitors left this site of racialized trauma with a sense of racial literacy. While I realize that an ideal study of whether or not students gained racial literacy from this site would involve taking students to this location, I also understood that it is highly likely that visits to such sites could cause harm. For this reason, I visited Magnolia Plantation & Gardens alone.
Using a conceptual framework of racial literacy (Guinier, 2004), which focuses on the systemic nature of racism and understands racism as “the maintenance of, and acquiescence in, racialized hierarchies governing resource distribution,” which “has not functioned simply through evil or irrational prejudice; it has been an artifact of geographic, political, and economic interests” (p. 98), this paper provides a first-hand narrative of my experience as a Black woman taking both the From Slavery to Freedom tour and the House tour, which is the most popular tour offered at Magnolia Plantation & Gardens. Findings indicate that not only does this plantation site not help visitors gain racial literacy, but the institution of slavery is poorly taught here. Because this site does not help visitors gain racial literacy and does not teach slavery well, there is a strong possibility that the site participates in the spirit-murdering (Williams, 1987) of the Black students who visit with their schools. This study has implications for K-12 teachers, teacher educators, and social studies education researchers.

Author

• Kristen Duncan, Clemson University