Across the country, 60 schools are offering a unique course that teaches students about African American history. McDaniel High School is just one of the many schools selected by the College Board to help pilot the new AP African American Studies course. The hope is that by 2025 high schools across the U.S. will have the option to offer this course and allow students to take the exam for college credit. Maurice Cowley is Oregon’s first and only educator currently teaching this course. He joins us to share what his students are learning and his hopes for the future.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. 60 schools around the country are piloting an Advanced Placement (AP) African-American Studies Course right now, including one in Oregon. McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland is the home of this developing course that will go way deeper into African American history, struggle and triumph than earlier high school courses. Maurice Cowley is leading this effort. He teaches AP African American studies at McDaniel High School. He joined guest host, Geoff Norcross recently. Geoff started by asking what Cowley can cover in this AP course that sets it apart from other classes.
Maurice Cowley: I think when you have a history course, history is a lot of time. So you always have to make choices and you have to cover as broad a spectrum as you can, because it’s… again, a lot. So choosing a lane that is just centered on the African American experience means we already know the parameters. So we get to talk about life in Africa, about pre colonial existence, who the Africans were back then.
That is different to what you might talk about in a World History course. Because in a World History course, you’re talking about the history of the whole wide world. So where you might take a week or a day to talk about a particular place, in our course, we get to talk about life in Africa. I mean, we talked about it for maybe three or four weeks before we even got to the American experience of Black folk. So, by the time we got to life in America, my students were like, ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot we have to talk about…’
So that’s the kind of thing that we get to cover when you know, okay, this is our lane. We have a whole year to talk about the Black experience. We don’t just have to cover it real quick as a microcosm of everything else.
Norcross: Yeah, it’s like you get to go a mile deep instead of a mile long. How far back into the African part of African American history do you go?
Cowley: It’s pretty far back, actually.
Norcross: Like prehistory?
Cowley: Probably not quite that far. We’re talking about Mansa Musa, in the great Mali Empire. We’re talking about Egypt, the great Egyptian empires. The Sudanic Empires. So it’s pretty early. It’s definitely early. Yeah.
Norcross: And how much guidance are you given on what you can and what you should teach?
Cowley: That, I think, is one of the great joys of getting a framework like the one that we have. There are a bunch of source encounters, as AP calls them, that our students need to see. But there isn’t necessarily a prescription of how to teach them and what they need to do with the primary source documents that they encounter. And so it feels like a big tub of LEGOS that just gets dumped in front of me and it’s like, ‘Ok, build it how you want to build it, but these are the LEGOS you get to choose from.’
Currently, we’re doing a unit where we’re talking about things like the Great Migration and housing inequities and the struggle for civil rights. But we’re talking about life in Portland while we talk about all of those. So we get to talk about our specific locale while we’re also talking about the national news that’s happening at the same time. This class in New York isn’t concerned about life in Portland. But because my students are from here, we get to talk about Albina and gentrification. We get to talk about the Freeway-Rose Garden like all those things...
Norcross: The Vanport Flood.
Cowley: Yeah, Vanport and talk about this is where we’re from. When we think about the story of African Americans, you can look at life in Portland, and it’s the same thing across the nation. So that makes it really, for me, fun and engaging.
Norcross: And you’re in Oregon too, whose Constitution literally prohibited Black people from owning property in the state for a while. There were ‘sundown towns’ all over the state for a while too. Do you draw that into your course as well?
Cowley: We do. I mean, we talked about that because you, again, the idea with history is that the more you know about specific histories the more you’re equipped to kind of track how those things develop and where we can start resisting. That’s another joy of the class is that it’s centered around Black resistance and not just Black victimization of the colonial experiment.
Looking at real history of our place, our students are like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ and you get to be like, ‘Ok, well, yeah, this is a process. It didn’t just all of a sudden happen out of nowhere.’ So how do you start to identify where we need to experience resistance in the future? Just invigorating, I think.
Norcross: How many kids do you have in the class now?
Cowley: I have about 30.
Norcross: And what can you tell me about them?
Cowley: They are from everywhere. Mostly juniors and seniors. There are a couple of sophomores in there. Almost all of my students are Black or Multiracial. There’s a few from other non-white races as well. A couple of Hispanic students, an Asian American young woman and then a few white students as well. So they’re from all over the place.
Norcross: What kind of feedback are you getting from them?
Cowley: Mostly, they like it. And some of them are seniors and they are starting to get ready for graduation. But I think they’ve enjoyed the dialogue we get to have. I think they’ve enjoyed getting to think deeply on issues that are particular to the Black community. I think for a lot of my Black students, they’ve reflected that it’s really nice to learn this history from somebody who’s Black. As opposed to having somebody who is very apologetic for what’s happening or what has happened. And like, ‘Oh man, we have to talk about this, sorry guys I know it was bad for y’all’ but just to be like, ‘yeah, this happened and we’re still here and we’re thriving and it’s good to be us…,’ you know?
So I think my students have really enjoyed all of the experience and I think that it gets to be me teaching them has been really an added bonus.
Norcross: What the kids aren’t going to be able to get, at least not right now, is that college credit because this is a pilot program. But that’s a down the road sort of thing. Why do they participate then?
Cowley: They participate because African American studies put something at the center of curriculum that is not at the center of any other curriculum. Particularly for students who are Black, their experience has not always [been a part of] the curriculum, it’s not the thing, it’s part of a whole thing. But to get to be the center, to have language for stuff that they’ve known for a long time intuitively, is wonderful. I think for everyone else, it is just something that we’re curious about. People want to know the different parts of our society and how they work together and what their experience has been like.
McDaniel, as a school, does a really good job of highlighting our diversity as a student body and cultivating curiosity about other people. My students come curious and this is a new thing to get to experience and to deepen their knowledge.
Norcross: Can you point to a Black historical figure that you can teach in this course that you may not have been able to in another course?
Cowley: As I think about my own experience as a learner, learning through the civil rights movement is almost always gonna center around Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. They were the two dominating figures, two really polarizing figures, and rightfully deserve a lot of attention and that movement was so much broader. So learning more than just a passing, also, the Black Panthers existed, right? Getting to push into who they were, where they’re from, why their take was really different. We haven’t quite got there yet but I’m really excited to get to talk about something like that because this is the thing, right? We’re not talking about what else is happening across the world and even in our country where we get to highlight the Black experience. So learning more broadly about someone like Bobby Seale is gonna be super great, I think, for me as a teacher, and for my students.
Norcross: In fact, we asked our listeners on Facebook if they remember learning about any Black historical figures when they were in school.
Karanja Crews said, ‘I went to Harriet Tubman Middle School and I didn’t learn about her. But there was a book in the library of a man with a big hat, and that book taught me about Marcus Garvey.’
Eric Aleksandr wrote, ‘MLK, Douglass, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman. It all felt very antiquated. I wish we could have been taught the modern connections to today’s struggles.’
And Cindy Hines said, ‘Absolutely none. In my small Oregon town, in the sixties and seventies, outside of the learning of a quote, “few traditional Negro spirituals in music class.” I didn’t learn about anyone in history until I worked at the Black Cultural Center at Purdue University. That’s where I got my education in Black history.’
Does any of that resonate with you?
Cowley: Yeah, I think I asked a similar question of my students at the beginning and I think all of them had very similar [answers]: ‘Almost none,’ ‘MLK, and that’s it,’ ‘Rosa Parks, and that’s it.’ And having a broader swath of people to draw from has been really great, and both historic and current. One of my students wrote an essay for her midterm about a piece that was written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and he’s alive and well right now. That has been really great for their experience too. To know that like Black culture, Black history, it doesn’t stop in the seventies. It’s happening around us as we speak.
Norcross: Maurice, people may have heard the controversy over this course earlier this year. The College Board revised the curriculum after complaints from conservatives. Black writers associated with Critical Race Theory were purged. So were scholars on the Black Queer and Feminist experience. So what might your kids miss out on with those changes?
Cowley: So that’s actually a bit of a mischaracterization. As a pilot, the course has always been kind of under ‘in process,’ right? So part of what we do as teachers is provide feedback for what students are learning, what they’re struggling with. Things like pacing and what all is included. It was really kind of disheartening to hear the way that the media covered that, ‘Oh, College Board is acquiescing to conservative thought.’ That isn’t true. Most of the thinkers who are highlighted in conversation like that might have been moved from that ‘required’ category to ‘available to students,’ and not maybe not, ‘optional,’ is kind of the wrong word there, but move to a different category within the framework. Part of that is gonna be because the scholarship that went into creating this is like 10 years long, right? They’ve been working on this course for quite a long time.
Norcross: It’s the first AP course that’s been proposed in a decade, isn’t it?
Cowley: Yeah. We were at the official launch in DC back in February around the same time that this was blowing up. One of the men who was on the panel teaches African American Studies at Georgetown. And he was like, ‘For this class, I would never try to teach all of this to my Intro to African American Studies students. It’s too much. I wouldn’t do it.’
What we have is broad and deep. It’s far deeper than we could probably do justice in a year. So making some shifts allows for us to get through the curriculum we need to get through. And I think it allows for students to... rather than be indoctrinated into like, ‘Ok, this is what you should be thinking about Black folks right now,’ it puts a lot of that work into a research project that is a part of the AP curriculum.
I think 20% of my students’ grade is gonna be an extended research project that they get to choose the topic. What they’re curious about, what they want to know about. Things like Black Queer Theory show up there. Things like Black Lives Matter, Black Conservatism, whatever it is that my students want to know about in African American Studies and culture. They are doing the work to learn what it is, how it’s connected to them right now. It’s a more indepth and more meaningful exposure than just, ‘Ok, here’s the thing, now let’s move on to the next one.’
Additionally, I think one of the things that was really surprising is to read through the list of names of people who are supposedly banned and removed and to see those same people sitting on the panel in front of me telling me, ‘Oh, that’s not true. I’m still here. This is great.’ So Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is sitting on our panel back in February, as a contributor to the course and as someone who helped teach us back in August, as we’re getting ready to launch the course. And then again in February, just like ‘I’m still here, my work is still here. My work is relevant. I’m not banned. So whoever is saying that is not quite getting the picture right?’
Norcross: Ok, I appreciate the nuance that you’re bringing to that event, and to that occurrence. And I understand that the moving of some authors from one category to another is not exactly a ban. I get that. But are you satisfied that the College Board is making its decisions independent of any kind of political pressure?
Cowley: I’m going to believe so. Yeah, I believe so. I think one of the tricky pieces is that the people who I’ve encountered at College Board, the people who I’ve known to be a part of the process, I’m gonna choose to trust that they’re above board. That they’re doing their best work to put the most comprehensive and thorough class in front of teachers and students that they can.
At the same time, even as a Black educator, I find the idea that one course and the availability of one course is going to be the linchpin to Black liberation and educational equity like, ‘Oh, we have AP African American Studies – now everything is fine.’ That idea, I don’t buy in and of itself. So changing whatever the curriculum is, is better than nothing. This particular curriculum I would stand by as an educator to say this is a great tool for me to get my students into the field of African American Studies. With a real honest picture of both what it is to work in academic integrity, as somebody who cares about Black people, Black culture, the Black experience.
And like I said, I feel like this is a bucket of LEGOS that I get to put together and I’m still free to bring my own best judgment to what my students are after, what they’re asking about, what they want to know.
Norcross: You told The Oregonian, ‘This course needs to be everywhere people want it and probably in places where they don’t.’ What do you mean by that?
Cowley: I think that if somebody wants to have a course where they’re learning about Black studies, whoever they are, they should have access to a curriculum like this. I think that there are places where people wouldn’t necessarily think to ask for a class like this and whatever we can do to say, ‘Hey, this is an option that you might want to consider’. I think that’s gonna be really good.
We are better for knowing a more full picture of our history. We’re better for knowing more about every person who belongs in our community. It’s not that this course needs to be forced on anyone, but for it to be available everywhere, [it] feels really imperative.
Norcross: Last question. I’m curious how this experience in building this course has changed you and how you think about how you teach history or the Black experience or social studies or anything?
Cowley: I don’t know that it has incredibly changed too much about me. I don’t mean that to sound like I’m great and the perfect-est teacher… more so, that I have felt for as long as I’ve been an educator, that my students have the best experience when I get to bring all of myself to the table. I really appreciated the opportunity to bring the all of me to the table in different ways. A class like this, probably even a more focused way, than in a typical English Class that I’ve taught before. Like I said, we’re spanning so many different voices and so many different cultures, so many different genres, that for a class like this to have a well defined lane that says, ‘Ok, this is the lane, here you go.’ Like that is really freeing for me and it’s been invigorating to get to be my whole self in a class.
Norcross: Maurice Cowley. Thank you so much and best of luck.
Cowley: Yeah, thanks.
Norcross: Maurice Cowley teaches AP African American studies at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland. He talked to guest host Geoff Norcross last week.
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