The Civil Rights Movement in Context: Online course syllabus

Syllabus for the course The civil rights movement in context which investigates the precursors to the Civil Rights Movement, its leadership, its opposition, and its legacy, including lesser-studied events of the movement and primary sources.

Learn more

• The civil rights movement in context: Online course A professional development course for teachers which investigates the precursors to the Civil Rights Movement, its leadership, its opposition, and its legacy, including lesser-studied events of the movement and primary sources.

Related pages

• Experiences of the Civil Rights Movement: A roundtable project: This activity allows students to participate in a roundtable discussion by taking on the persona of someone who lived and experienced the Civil Rights Movement. By participating in a role playing simulation, students are more able to achieve higher-level thinking skills and, as a result, hopefully be able to think more critically about the Civil Rights Era.
• Civil rights wax museum project: In this lesson plan, students will choose African Americans prominent in the Civil Rights Movement and research aspects of their lives. They will create timelines of their subjects' lives and a speech about their subjects, emphasizing why they are remembered today.
• A living timeline of civil rights: This fifth grade lesson plan is one piece of a civil rights unit. This particular lesson is an opportunity for students to demonstrate knowledge of a specific person or event that occurred during the civil rights movement. The students will share their research with others as they take on the role of a museum artifact.

Related topics

• Learn more about African American history, American history, civil rights, and professional development.

Legal

Course description

Too often, our students view civil rights in isolation — they don’t understand the rich historical background of African American history or the legacies of the movement in the more recent past. They often know some of the major civil rights figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks, but they don’t grasp the complexities of civil rights leadership, or the experience of the movement’s foot soldiers — the students in SNCC, the freedom riders, or the everyday people who marched, boycotted, protested, and volunteered to make the movement happen. This course will try to explore the movement from all of these perspectives using, where possible, first-hand accounts from the people who lived this important history.

The instructor will assume that the main historical outlines of the movement are familiar to K-12 teachers—instead of recounting that basic history, we’ll spend much of our time delving into lesser-studied events of the movement and the primary sources that will allow us to explore our own ideas about the movement, its leaders, and its meanings in detail.

Dr. Walbert has selected websites and multimedia resources that will give participating teachers access to a wealth of interesting, classroom-oriented primary and secondary sources on civil rights history. Primary documents including newspapers, photographs, film clips, oral histories, and more will be at the center of course readings and assignments, and thoughtful secondary articles and lively discussions will enhance our exploration of critical issues in the history of the civil rights movement. As a participant, you will have the opportunity to analyze these sources through engaging, well-designed activities , to create a lesson plan for classroom use and possible publication on LEARN NC, to receive individualized constructive feedback and answers to content-oriented questions from a well-versed instructor, and to join other teachers from across the state in lively online discussions throughout the course — all on your own schedule from home or from your school’s computers.

This course promises to be challenging, but we are confident that it will also be a rewarding and tremendously valuable part of your professional development. The instructor wishes to reassure teachers who may be concerned about their ability to complete this course that with regular attendance in the online environment and the always-available support from the instructor, teachers should have no problems completing this pass/fail course within the allotted time and that teachers may request a short extension if personal circumstances require a bit of extra time toward the end of the eight scheduled weeks of the course.

Prerequisites

None. Some teachers find that this course is a good companion course African American history to 1950 and choose to take that course before, after, or at the same time as this course. But while the courses do complement one another, they are designed to stand alone and teachers should feel free to take just one or the other.

Course goals

• To expand teachers’ knowledge of the civil rights Movement in its historical context.
• To provide access to a wide variety of Internet-based primary and secondary sources on civil rights history that teachers can use for their own professional growth and/or in their classrooms.
• To engage K-12 teachers as adult learners through creative, interesting assignments that will not only challenge teachers to expand their own understanding of course content, but also provide models for potentially useful assignments that could be adapted to the K-12 classroom.
• To provide a forum for meaningful discussion of historical content and pedagogy related to the teaching of civil rights history and related subjects.
• To allow teachers the time, resources, supportive community, and assistance that will help them develop an original, high quality lesson plan that they can use immediately in their classrooms and, if they choose, share with other teachers through the course discussion forum and by submitting their lesson plan for consideration for publication on LEARN NC.

Required material

There are no required textbooks for this course, but teachers will be required to complete a series of online readings for each of the six topical course modules.

Special technical requirements

Your computer will need the ability to read PDF flies. Some optional readings and some assignment choices will involve listening to audio online or watching video online, so a high speed internet connection and RealPlayer or other audio/video software may be helpful. But the course can be successfully completed without those resources.

Course requirements

This course takes place over eight weeks. Each week you will be required to complete a series of readings and select one assignment from among several options. The assignments can be found in the Assignments area of the course, which includes one folder for each course module. You will note that in most cases, there is at least one module assignment that is specific to North Carolina or that would allow a teacher to focus on North Carolina.

Modules for this course are organized as follows:

• Module one: Precursors to the civil rights movement
• Module two: civil rights in the 1950s
• Module three: Non-violence and the civil rights movement of the 1960s
• Module four: The backlash against civil rights
• Module five: The black power movement
• Module six: The legacies of the civil rights movement

You are expected to:

• Complete all assignments and participate in all class discussions.
• Complete a high quality lesson plan related to the course topics and tied to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study.

Readings

Each week you will be responsible for reading assigned online material or articles that may be provided.

Written assignments

In most weeks you will be required to complete a written assignment, usually consisting of a response paper or a creative writing exercise. You will have choices for each module and can select the assignment that best matches your interests, needs as a teacher, and learning style. Most assignments can be successfully completed in a page or two of thoughtful, but informal writing.

Discussions

There will be several discussion forums set up in the course. You will be expected to post to the Introductions discussion to introduce yourself to your classmates and to post at least once in the each of the six discussion forums devoted to the six topical course modules.

Your module discussion contributions may be in the form of a reflection on the module readings, a reaction to the assignment that you chose for the module, your thoughts on a particular primary source or other document from the module, a question about the historical content or about teaching strategies related to a module topic, or a response to another teacher’s posting. Please make sure that you make a substantive and meaningful contribution to our discussion of each course module.

All students are expected to post in a responsible and courteous fashion.

Lesson plan

You will be required to develop a high quality, original lesson plan related to African American history and tied to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. Details will be provided in the course. This lesson plan is due on the final closing date of the course.

Evaluation

All assignments, including the final lesson plan, are graded on a pass/fail basis. Teachers who successfully complete all seven assignments (one assignment for each of the six topical modules, plus the final lesson plan project) and participate consistently and thoughtfully in our online discussions will receive full credit for the course and a certificate attesting to their participation.

Professional development offerings through LEARN NC do not carry graduate credit and do not issue grades. Participants are awarded Continuing Education Units (CEUs) based on successful completion of the course. The course instructor determines to what extent participants have completed all required course activities and have participated in the learning community.