Where the North Meets the South: Southern Complexity and Teaching in the Southeast

• In Event: “The South Has a Gravity”: Teaching Social Studies in the Soul of America

Abstract

Much of the attention on laws regarding curriculum has been located in states like Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. As researchers and teacher educators located across these states, we begin by acknowledging the legacies of these spaces and how these legacies have shaped conceptions of the South. The duality of urban and rural creates the sense that some parts of Virginia feel like the Northeast while other parts engrained in Dixie. Yet, to tell the story of how the nation began in Virginia, the stains of the removal of Indigenous peoples and the beginnings of the institution of slavery in 1619 (Perry, 2022), is to illuminate deeply Southern roots. Georgia also marks the South as a place twoness, where the history of enslavement reveals the horrific dehumanization of enslaved Africans (see “The Weeping Time”) as well as the resistance and community (e.g., the Gullah-Geechee of the Low Country). Tennessee, in turn, carries many roots of change as the Civil Rights Movement grew here. In Tennessee, leaders like Diane Nash helped to engage students in the movement in new and meaningful ways. Social studies in each of these spaces is as complex and dichotomous as the histories there. In this paper, we explore social studies education in each state individually, comparatively, and collectively. We discuss them together because they reflect a part of the unevenness/complex identity of the Southeast.
Some social studies research about teaching about and in the South centers white supremacy or injustice (Gibbs, 2022; Stutts, 2020) without offering views of the agency and resistance of teachers and Southern Black, Indigenous, and Communities of Color. We explore this resistant work and the ways the South has been conceptualized by social studies preservice and in-service teachers in the states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, utilizing a critical (Cannella et al., 2015), collective case study (Thomas, 2016). For this symposium, we will highlight the narratives of two purposefully selected preservice teachers. Part of an ongoing project that will continue in the fall of 2023, the data for the part of the study shared during this symposium is based on survey data and lesson artifacts collected late spring of 2023.
Preliminary themes reveal that preservice teachers in the South feel there has been and continues to be discourse within broader society that positions the South as a racial and cultural monolith, which is translated into social studies curricula and affirmed through oppressive legislation. This discourse obfuscates and silences the historic and present-day lived experiences and pragmatic work toward justice by communities in the South (hooks, 2009). Despite the peculiar differences between Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, these teachers express a unique kind of kinship with teachers working across the South, as well as the need to pushback against these singular narratives and provide a more comprehensive understanding of their states. During the town-hall, it is our hope to gain a better understanding of the South and its complexities by discussing commonalities and/or differences in session participants' sense of the South and our studied communities.

Authors

• Delandrea Hall, University of North Texas

• Anna Falkner, University of Memphis

• Esther June Kim, College of William & Mary