CMU professors active in teaching Black history – The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

Erika Jackson and Sarah Swedberg dont wait for Black History Month to teach Colorado Mesa students about the history of race in America.

This past fall, Swedberg taught a course on American slavery, and several of those students this semester are in Jacksons upper-level History of Race, Immigration and Ethnicity in America class.

Sarah and I work together extensively, and whats been incredibly helpful in me teaching this class is that I would say a third of the students in my class took American Slavery last semester with Sarah, Jackson said. We were talking (recently), and they kept saying, Oh, yeah, this connects to this thing that we learned about American Slavery. And Im just like this, this is so great, so Im wondering if we should think about a way to pair the two classes together in the future, because those students having that prior knowledge that theyre bringing into the classes is really essential.

Swedberg said shes been interested in social justice I think all of my life, and every course she teaches has an element of Black history.

My (general education) classes focus on a lot of things, but I am always very clear that this is in part, a story about civil rights, to the point where sometimes on the evaluations, the white students say I didnt sign up to take a Black history course. she said. And if I were talking to them, Id say Well, its not a Black history course, its an American history course, and guess what, Black history is American history. We talk about a lot of other things, too.

This summer, she plans to develop an African-American History course for general education students. It takes a couple of years for new courses to be approved, but shes hoping in the spring of 2022 or the next fall, that will be added to the history department.

Hopefully if we can hire faculty members of color and if that person had expertise in history, then he or she could take over teaching that class, said Swedberg, who, like Jackson, is white. There is a long history of white scholars (studying and teaching) Black history, and its something that we all have to negotiate as far as building that trust.

Both encourage their students to bring up topics that concern them.

Its really refreshing to me that they are forthcoming and they will kind of challenge me a little bit in the first week and will ask me, are you going to teach my history? Jackson said. And I say, Absolutely, and if, if I am missing something, or if theres something that you feel is very important that were all learning about, please tell me. Ive noticed more of that, taking ownership of their history and and really saying, This is important. Everybody needs to know this.

They dont just stand in front of the class and lecture or read from a textbook. There are plenty of discussions, sometimes a little heated, and the students are assigned projects that are more than term papers.

Jacksons History of Race, Immigration and Ethnicity in America students have been assigned a service learning project.

Theyre really excited about it, she said. They have to identify a historical problem, it can be something that is more comparative, and they identify the problem, they contextualize that problem for me and then they talk about the contemporary relevance of that topic as well.

And then they have to propose a way that they are going to enact change within their community. That can either be the Grand Junction community or that can be their home community, but they have to propose something to me that they are going to actively participate in, to educate, to bring about change in some way.

Jackson gave the students an example to start them thinking, comparing the protest tactics of the 1950s and 60s to those that are being used in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Then they could propose as their service learning that they are going to be come engaged with their community chapter, a local chapter of Black Lives Matter, she said.

The students turned in their ideas this past week, and among the topics that have piqued their interest are Indigenous Women and Sex Trafficking, Perspective and the Historical Significance of the 1619 Project, The Holzworth Historical Site of the Rocky Mountain National Park, and Segregation in the National Parks System.

Swedberg was at the Juneteeth celebration at Lincoln Park this past summer and started thinking about a project thats created internship opportunities for CMU students.

I thought, I dont want all this history to be lost, I dont want all these stories to be lost, she said. Some of them always will be, but maybe we can start an oral history project for Black and brown community members.

The Social Justice Archive will be a series of oral history interviews, and shes working with the Mesa County Public Library to add to the Mesa County Oral History Project on its website. Its in the startup stage, with her intern learning how to conduct the interviews, and she hopes to train more to conduct interviews and research to build the archive. Shes done one interview with David Combs, a longtime resident who is with the Black Citizens and Friends.

I want to get histories, life histories, not just from the so-called important people, she said, but from young people, all sort of folks, just so that we have a really good permanent record of the lives of particularly Black residents of Mesa County.

Jackson is CMUs liaison for secondary and elementary education, serving as an advisor to future history teachers.

What Ive found from my students is that they want to bring about change, she said. They want to change the curriculum, they want to do all of these really creative, interactive things within the classroom.

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CMU professors active in teaching Black history - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel