Montgomery Co. teachers learn about race

A daylong seminar provided advice on how to better teach the subject to students.

Matt Gentry The Roanoke Times
BLACKSBURG -- A group of Montgomery County teachers learned about the history of race in Virginia through a series of presentations from professors and a panel of experts and got advice on how to talk about race in their classroom history lessons.
About 30 teachers from grades four through 12 and school board member Joe Ivers attended Thursday's event at Blacksburg Middle School.
The history lessons included Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, a Virginia court case brought after an overcrowded all-black high school in Farmville began using an old bus as a classroom. That case was later consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that led to desegregation of the nation's schools.
University of Virginia professor Patrice Grimes, a former middle school teacher who now researches the socio-cultural context of schooling, led one discussion during the teacher training. Grimes said knowing that the desegregation case has ties to Virginia would be good for students.
But, she said, any discussion involving race should dig deeper.
"Before we can even begin to talk about the others, we must first talk about ourselves," Grimes told teachers.
She suggested teachers attack barriers to race discussions by creating a "culture quilt," which melds pieces of each student's life to those of their classmates.
She sent the educators home with a packet of lesson ideas to incorporate on their own.
Many teachers said the day was helpful. Gretchen Distler, a sixth-grade teacher at Blacksburg Middle, said the discussion will help her find ways to broach the topic of race "instead of dancing around it."
Her students learn history through 1877 and won't tackle more modern history topics until the seventh grade. Now, she said, she'll be able to prepare students for that by tying more 20th century topics into her pre-Civil War era lessons.
The training was funded in part through the Montgomery County schools' Teaching American History grant and the Virginia Tech Department of History.
During the panel discussion, paid for in part by a diversity grant at Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Grimes joined Christiansburg resident Elaine Carter and Virginia Tech professor Peter Wallenstein to talk about Virginia segregated past.
Carter is a graduate of the Christiansburg Institute. That school, opened in 1866, was the only secondary school for blacks in Southwest Virginia. Carter now runs a project to preserve the school.
She spoke about her time in the school's music department and about the teachers who supported her. She said stories like hers must not be overlooked.