“It Just Really Rubbed Me Wrong”: Black Preservice Teachers’ Perspectives on a Plantation Tour

• In Event: What Happened Here? High School and Preservice Teachers’ Engagement With History at Local Historic Sites

Abstract

This paper explores the experiences and perspectives of two Black preservice social studies teachers upon visiting a plantation home that sits on their campus. While there is a growing body of literature focusing on preservice social studies teachers and racial histories, the overwhelming majority of this research focuses on white preservice teachers (Buchanan, 2015; 2016; Demoiny, 2011; Smith & Crowley, 2015; Wright-Maley, 2022), leaving a dearth of research on Black preservice social studies teachers and their understandings of and plans to teach racial histories. Through this study, we sought to answer the following research questions: 1) How do Black preservice social studies teachers experience historic plantation sites? and 2) How do Black preservice social studies teachers foresee themselves utilizing that experience in their future classrooms? This study utilized Jones’ (2023) notion of difficult-ish history as a conceptual framework. Difficult-ish history seeks to trouble the binary posed by the notion of difficult history, magnifies lived experience—particularly those of people of Color, and seeks to move history education past its focus on white discomfort.
Data collection methods for this case study included observations during the historic plantation tour, where the research team took note of how participants physically and verbally responded to the tour and what kinds of questions they asked. Data collection methods also included a semi-structured interview where both participants were interviewed together, and participants’ responses to a writing prompt. Findings reveal that these two Black preservice social studies teachers wanted to learn more about enslavement at the historic plantation site than they actually learned during their visit, found the ways the tour guides approached the teaching of enslavement problematic, and interestingly enough, would be willing to take high school students on a field trip to an historic plantation site in the future. These findings support Jones’ (2023) troubling of the notion of difficult histories, as the data participants provided lead one to pose the question “Difficult for whom?” as Jones did in putting forth the notion of difficult-ish history.
This study has implications for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, as it becomes as important as ever that researchers gain an understanding of how people of various races and ethnicities experience sites of racialized trauma such as historic plantations, just as it is imperative that teacher educators gain an understanding of teachers’ perceptions of such sites. It is also important that teachers be able to interrogate their reasons for taking students to such sites, particularly when they are often presented with white-washed narratives that make difficult-ish histories more palatable to white visitors.

Authors

• Kristen Duncan, Clemson University

• Brandon J. Beck, Univeristy of Maryland Baltimore County

• Meghan Moore-Hubbard, Kennesaw State University

• Noble M. Edmisten, Clemson University