TSA Middle School Wins Grant for Curriculum Project
Marcy Innes and Fallon Abel are two TSA Middle School teachers who applied for and won a grant of $498 from the Bread Loaf Teacher Network to fund the purchase of 45 copies of the novel The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, for the Middle School’s unit on civil and human rights and to develop a program for TSA’s annual Chain Reaction Day.
Interdisciplinary projects are a hallmark of the TSA Middle School curriculum and, for the 2019-20 school year, Language Arts teacher Marcy Innes and Social Studies teacher Fallon Abel developed such a project to explore how media portrayals of race foster implicit bias and how biases play out discriminatory policing and sentencing as a part of the school-wide unit on civil and human rights.
The Hate U Give
TSA Middle School students have read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, through the years; but this text centers on white voices and advances a “white savior” narrative. The proposed project adds writers of color to the unit to help students hear countervailing voices and contemporary perspectives that connect Jim Crow policies with current issues of race and civil rights in America. Specifically, The Hate U Give will be used to provide a window into understanding how:
- Media representations construct and reinforce racial stereotypes;
- Implicit bias contributes to police brutality;
- Jim Crow-era policies have been replaced with discriminatory sentencing and policing of communities of color;
- Code switching can teach us about the history of black language and language as site of “respectability politics”; and
- To embrace discomfort and learn to engage in difficult conversations about race.
The funding includes involving Vermont youth from the 2018 cohort of BLTN’s What’s the Story Vermont , whom Abel mentored in the creation of a documentary about issues of racism in Vermont schools and the need for race and ethnic studies. She and Innes plan to incorporate the film into the curriculum to show TSA students how youth of color are seeking to address problems in their communities. In addition to sharing the film, a representative of the WtS team will be invited to TSA to speak about their experiences. Such an exchange would provide another opportunity for WtS youth to see their documentary have a real impact, while TSA students would gain insight into the local effects of racism that are rarely recognized.
Bread Loaf School of English
Abel developed an anti-racisit media literacy curriculum as part of her graduate studies at Bread Loaf School of English and learned of the action grant opportunity provided by its Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN).
TSA celebrates the achievement of the grant award for the financial support of our curriculum and for the example it sets of the creativity and energy of faculty and staff who strive to learn and grow. Their intellectual curiosity and eagerness to share their knowledge with our students reflects the school’s mission and ethos to be known, valued and challenged.
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