TEACHING KATRIINA:  A Critical Curricula Review

September 16, 2005 | One of the quickest responses to Hurricane Katrina involved educators from around the nation offering lesson plans to help children process the tragedy.  Curriculum Specialist/Writer Jeff Sapp offers a critical review of these lessons.

By Jeff Sapp | Curriculum Specialist/Writer, Teachingtolerance.org

    When Bob Peterson of La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee led a classroom discussion on Hurricane Katrina, his fifth-graders brought up stories they’d heard of children being raped and murdered in the chaos of the aftermath.

    “I didn’t have much of a response, except to acknowledge that if that occurred it was certainly horrible,” Peterson wrote on Rethinking School’s Critical Teach listserv.

    The following day Peterson let his students deconstruct an article he’d found on www.alternet.org that reported how what the students had heard and feared regarding the rape and murder of children wasn’t true at all.

    Peterson, also an editor for Rethinking Schools Magazine, wasn’t alone in wondering how to teach students about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

    Curricula on Hurricane Katrina appeared almost immediately on education listservs around the country.  Teaching Tolerance offers a critical review of three of these.

The MindOH! Foundation

Resources for Hurricane Katrina

Rating:   half a star (of no real classroom use)

    The MindOH! Foundation was one of the first organizations to put up an online curriculum.  MindOH! bills itself as a character-education organization, seeking to “transcend religious, political and cultural differences and focus on our common humanity.”  MindOH!’s curriculum sparked immediate outrage from some educators.  Deborah Menkart, from Teaching for Change, and Christine Clark, from the University of Maryland, posted a letter written to MindOH! on the National Association of Multicultural Education listserv.  Menkart wrote that she is dismayed that the lessons don’t “address what are recognized internationally to be the biggest issues of the day - race, class, the environment and our national policy.  Not only do they not address these issues, but they also feed into many of the stereotypes and misconceptions.

    MindOH! replied to Menkart’s letter by saying that its curriculum activities “transcend race” because we “are all members of the human family.”  Such colorblind language too often is used to deny that racism exists in America.

    The MindOH! curriculum falls short of looking at Hurricane Katrina through a critical lens.  The paradigm shift needed in the MindOH! curriculum is to stop trying to deny race and privilege by pretending to be colorblind and move toward a self-examination of power, privilege and bias.

(The MindOH! curriculum is no longer available online.)

The New York Collective of Radical Equators (NYCoRE)

An Unnatural Disaster 

Rating:  4 and a half stars (a solid, useful lesson plan; it’s anti-Bush stance may meet with resistance by some)

    The New York Collective of Radical Educators is “a group of public school educators committed to fighting for social justice in our school system and society at large, by organizing and mobilizing teachers, developing curriculum and working with community, parent, and student organizations.  We are educators who believe that education is an integral part of social change and that we must work both inside and outside the classroom because the struggle for justice does not end when the bell rings.”

    NYCoRE is anti-war and anti-Bush.  And the group’s curriculum, An Unnatural Disaster:  A Critical Resource Guide for Addressing the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Classroom, hits head-on issues NYCoRE believes are revealed by the hurricane.  These include, among others:

• • The legacy of African slavery
• • The criminalization of poor people of color
• • Militarism
• • Global relationships and the many costs of war
• • Problems with the privatization of services
• • The racism and classism inherent in our political system

    NYCoRE’s stance appeals to educators seeking social change.  The organization asks educators to move from a service/charity framework to one of social justice.  To do this, NYCoRE believes students have to “uncover  truths about the nature of power” in society.

    What makes NYCoRE critically important is that is urges students to question the status quo.  It seeks to reveal issues of power through critical dialogue in the classroom.  And it wants to make explicit the implicit rules of power in society.

    NYCoRE’s curriculum is the only curriculum of the three with sections available in both English and Spanish.

Alliance for a Media Literate America

Bringing Hurricane Katrina Into the Classroom

Rating:  5 starts (100% useful)

    The Alliance for a Media Literate America is committed to “promoting media literacy education that is focused on critical inquiry, learning, and skill-building.”  The AMLA posted “Bringing Hurricane Katrina Into the Classroom” on September 5th.  The AMLA curriculum beings by stating, “The response to Katrina has raised important questions about race, racism, socioeconomic class and poverty in the United States.”

    Unlike the pro-Bush MindOH! or the anti-Bush NYCoRE, AMLA isn’t concerned with a partisan stance.  Instead, its goal is to help “students learn to identify what the bias is and how that perspective might impact people’s interpretation of what they see, hear and read.”

    To begin with, AMLA asks educators to consider three questions about themselves:

• • Am I trying to tell students what the message is, or am I giving students the skills to determine what they think the message(s) might be?
• • Have I let students know that I am open to accepting their interpretation, as long as it is well substantiated, or have I conveyed the message that my interpretation is the only correct view?
• • At the end of the lesson, are students likely to be more analytical or more cynical?

    These are just the beginning questions in AMLA’s curriculum.  As a matter of fact, the first lesson plan is made up entirely of questions:  Who is providing this media report?  What techniques are they using to convey the facts?  What placement does the story get?  How might others interpret what they are seeing, hearing, or reading differently from me?  In addition to the facts, what values are being expressed?  Why has the media outlet chosen to report this particular story?  What has this report omitted?

    Another lesson plan asks students to make comparisons and then summarize what they find.  What are the similarities or differences in domestic vs. international coverage?  What about mainstream media vs. alternative media?  And what about the Internet vs. traditional journalism?

    The AMLA is a critical look at the language of what is said and not said.  Unbiased in its view, it could actually be used to deconstruct the other two curricula.

(The AMLA curriculum is no longer available online.)

In Summary

    In his book, Teachers as Cultural Workers:  Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, noted revolutionary educator Paulo Freire states, “education involves a passion to know that should engage us in a loving search for knowledge that is - to say the least - not an easy task.”

    He states that for this reason “that those wanting to teach must be able to dare, that is, to have the predisposition to fight for justice and to be lucid in defense of the need to create conditions conducive to pedagogy in schools; though this may be a joyful task, it must also be intellectually rigorous.”

    Hurricane Katrina is an event that has invited educators to dare, to work for justice, and to be lucid and rigorous in what we create for our children.  Educators also must be compassionate in what is created for children to process this tragedy.

    Most of all, like Bob Peterson’s fifth-grade students, we need to continue to ask difficult questions and struggle to find their answers.