Teaching Hard History: Past, Present, and Future
Date: Thursday, June 13, 2024 from 5:30 - 8:00 pm
Location: Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, Freeport
An educator workshop and teacher-appreciation dinner with Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries of The Ohio State University, Dr. Kate Shuster of the Hard History Project, and longtime education leader Maureen Costello, who works at the intersection of history, civics, and social justice education.
Two major projects – Teaching Hard History and the 1619 Project – began changing the way schools taught the story of race-based American slavery. In the years that followed, the movement made a lot of headway as teachers took workshops, gained access to accessible online tools, and brought previously untold stories and overlooked perspectives into the classroom. But in the past two years, teachers and schools came under attack for teaching honest and hard history. Today, the question is: What's next, and where do we go from here? Attendees will hear from the leaders of Teaching Hard History and learn about new resources for teaching and defending a fuller history. They will also will have the opportunity to engage in conversation about how to meet the challenge ahead of us.
Dr. HASAN KWAME JEFFRIES is the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement
Dr. Jeffries chronicled the civil rights movement in the ten-episode Audible Originals series “Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement,” and has told the remarkable story of the original Black Panther Party in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, which has been praised as “the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for.”
Hasan has collaborated on several public history projects, including serving as the lead scholar and primary scriptwriter for the $27 million redesign of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Board of Directors of The Montpelier Foundation, which stewards the Virginia estate of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States and the architect of the Constitution.
Hasan regularly shares his expertise on African American history and contemporary Black politics through public lectures, op-eds, and interviews with print, radio, and television news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC.
He has also contributed to several documentary film projects as an historical advisor and featured on-camera scholar, including the 2023 documentaries Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World (PBS) and Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (NBC/Peacock). And his 2020 TEDx Talk “Why we must confront the painful parts of US history” has been viewed more than 2 million times.
For his public history work, the King Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio honored him with a 2023 Legacy and Legends Award.
Hasan’s commitment to teaching what he calls “Hard History” led him to edit Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach civil rights history accurately and effectively, and to host the podcast “Teaching Hard History,” a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice division. Hasan also helps school districts develop anti-racism programming and culturally responsive curricular content centered on social studies by conducting professional development workshops for teachers and administrators.
A College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Associate Professor in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, Hasan takes great pride in opening students’ minds to new ways of understanding the past and the present. For his pedagogical creativity and effectiveness, he has received numerous awards, including Ohio State’s highest commendation for teaching – the Ohio State Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Hasan graduated from Morehouse College in 1994 with a BA in history and earned his PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.
Dr. Kate Shuster is an education researcher and author based in Montgomery, Alabama who served as project director for Teaching Hard History.
Kate Shuster, Ph.D., is an education researcher and author based in Montgomery, Alabama. Her work as project director for Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching Hard History initiative has included the following: researching for and writing the widely cited report Teaching Hard History: American Slavery; leading a team of experts to write and revise a suite of innovative K–12 curricular resources; producing the Teaching Hard History podcast; and creating and managing partnerships with related interpretive centers and institutions.
Kate is also the author and researcher of Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching the Movement reports, evaluating the state of national education about the civil rights movement. She was the pilot manager and lead evaluator for the former Perspectives for a Diverse America, a Common Core-aligned anti-bias curriculum for K–12 students that is now embedded into TT’s Learning Plan Builder, Student Text Library, Student Tasks and Teaching Strategies.
Shuster is one of the world’s leading debate educators, having written 10 textbooks and trained thousands of teachers across the globe while directing the nation’s largest program for debating in the middle grades.
Maureen Costello, retired director of Teaching Tolerance, has been a teacher and educational leader for over 40 years.
After joining Teaching Tolerance (now Learning for Justice) in 2010, Maureen Costello grew the program significantly, adding a number of new initiatives: the Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching; the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards; the Teaching the Movement project; Teaching Hard History: American Slavery; in-person professional development activities; and the Educator Grants program supporting anti-bias programming in classrooms, schools and districts.
Under Costello’s leadership, Teaching Tolerance magazine went from two to three issues a year and garnered dozens of awards, including the AAP’s Golden Lamp Award. She wrote two groundbreaking reports on the impact of the 2016 campaign and election on American schools, and she helped name the phenomenon “The Trump Effect.” She also held a lead role in the production of the student-friendly documentaries Bullied and Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot.
Before joining the Southern Poverty Law Center, Costello worked for Scholastic, Inc. and directed the Newsweek Education Program. She began her career as a history and economics teacher at Notre Dame Academy High School in Staten Island. Throughout her career, Costello has been committed to fostering the ideals of democracy and citizenship in young people. She is a graduate of the New School University and the New York University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. In retirement, she continues to write and speak on education issues. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.
A WHERE2024 event, presented by Atlantic Black Box in collaboration with Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, Maine Black Community Development, The Third Place, and Portland Public Schools.