Black history class makes students become authors

By Carolina Guerra | Published March 1, 2018

As a new semester begins, Abigail Perkiss, a professor in the History department, embarks on a new journey with her fellow students. She is teaching a new course about Black History, but with a twist.

In Perkiss’s “HIST 3306: 20TH Century Black History,” each student in her class is expected to write a children’s book about Black history. Her curriculum includes showing her students diff erent examples of children’s books, such as “Vision of Beauty” by Kathryn Lasky to show how they can be written.

“I’ve been wanting to teach this class for a long time on writing history for kids,” said Perkiss. “You can pay attention to how history gets disseminated over time…the way kids learn history is through the books that they read.”

Perkiss stressed the importance of teaching others about history in a creative, fun way.

“They [children] don’t think about them as history books, they think about them as stories. Th is is a way for young kids to start engaging with the past,” she said. “I think storytelling is one of the most powerful modes of engaging kids in what’s come before and making them think about their place in the world today.”

Perkiss is encouraging creativity among her students’ manuscripts as the books could be geared toward children or young adults. In addition, they could be graphic novels, picture books, and so on. Perkiss said she would also like to have copies of her students’ work in the university archives or work with one of the gallery spaces on campus to display her students’ work.

Surprisingly, the books her students create do not have to be completely finished. She is not concerned with the books being published, but more so the process of their understanding of core concepts.

“I wanted our students to participate in that process of writing the history as well…the students are already coming up with great ideas,” said Perkiss. “I’m really excited to see what they come up with.”

She plans to expose her students to different kinds of books, such as young adult books and picture books to provide examples to inspire the students’ creative process. In addition, she is incorporating both “workshop time and writing time to balance different interests.”

“Each week we’re going to be reading children’s books, some young adult books, some picture books, and really digging into the history and the way that the history gets presented,” said Perkiss. “We’re diving into the history, we’re diving into the literature and we’re trying to use that as a model for creating our own work.”

Perkiss goes on to say, “One of our goals as a department is not just to get students thinking about the past and thinking critically about the world around them but to develop skills that translate to whatever they’re going to be doing in a professional sphere.”

The class is student-led and they engage in open-minded conversations about current events, such as learning the different cultures and lessons each book provides and credibility. In addition, Dr. Perkiss is allowing the students to collaborate on books. For example, if certain students find drawing as their strong suit and others find their strengths in writing, those students can work on one book together.

As hoped, Perkiss is reaching the students and engaging them in important conversations. The positive reception of the course is evident with the students.

“I definitely like the diversity of this class, this being an African-American class not just filled with strictly African-American students,” said Alyssa Holmes, a student of the course. “We’re not strictly seeing one point of view from one culture or one cultural perspective, we’re actually seeing the perspective of multiple cultures, multiple personalities and how they view this one culture.”

Samantha Brannigan, another student, said, “What I like about this class is I get to hear different perspectives. As a white person, I get to hear different perspectives from African-American people that are my age, which I wouldn’t normally get to hear because we’re not always having these difficult conversations. So, this class really forces us to have those difficult conversations and I hear the perspectives of them, which influences my perspective on things.”

“I wanted to get a better sense of collaboration, cooperation and also a way to really convey the underlying tones of America, of where it’s a shared history, and not just one in particular,” said Djimberry Pierrelouis. “I like the fact that we are the center, and I say that because it’s another form of teaching that I feel that I could have only gotten from Kean University, where one the convenience of smaller classrooms and two where the professor guides the students to convey the message or the lecture in a way that they understand it or that they could digest it. I feel empowered by this professor, I really do.”

Another student, Mrs. Bailey, said “I chose this class because as a mature woman coming back to school, classes like this was not offered to me in highschool and I’m always interested in learning about my history. And I thought this would be a good class to take. Not only do we talk about black history, we also talk about writing black history in a way children can understand it and get some knowledge from the writing.” She stresses, “I hope to see that the young people in the class kind of get a sense of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we’re trying to achieve. To me, there’s gotta be some kind of togetherness, kind of unity. I hope that by other people learning of not just African-Americans, but people in general, that there’s some kind of connection that we can draw from each other.”

This is the first time Perkiss is teaching this class and is open to the possibility of teaching the class again. “I’m excited about the possibility of teaching it [the class] again,” said Perkiss.

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