Stitching Stories: Re-membering Human Enslavement in the Elementary Classroom

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore this question: How can teachers, especially new teachers, create school spaces that present humanizing images and stories of people who were enslaved, particularly people of African descent in the United States? To explore this question, drawing from an ethnographic study of teachers at an elementary school in the U.S. South, I focus on two teachers, a new teacher and an experienced teacher. The concept of re-membering—reconnecting knowledge of the past that has been silenced or distorted (King & Swartz, 2015)—is centered in the analysis, in which the I propose the idea of stitching stories as a way to re-member knowledge of human enslavement in the United States.

Notes

¹ The name of the school, Lincoln Elementary, and names of participants and places represented here are pseudonyms used to protect the anonymity of the school and teachers.

² A symbol representing the Confederate Army during the Civil War (for a discussion on racialized symbols, see Alias, 2015).

³ Southern State is used here as a pseudonym representing the name of a state in the Southeastern region of the United States.