Bettye Thomas and Joe Patton lecture, "Teaching Methodologies," at the University of Iowa, 1975

Speaker 1: Briefly, our format for this morning. Dr. Bettye Thomas will give some summaries of methodologies discussed in a recession. [Joe Patton] will talk about reconstruction and methodology, and perhaps he will introduce more specifically what he's going to speak about. And then for the time that is left, the three of us, myself, Dr. Thomas, and [Joe] will talk and exchange with you some problems and questions of methodology, particularly in those areas of your specific concerns. Okay, thank you very much. Dr. Thomas? Dr. Bettye Thom...: First of all, I hope that you all have a copy of this model for methodology for the Reconstruction period, put together by three members of group A. Jim Randall, Gwen Hill, and Jim Lackey. We thought it was fairly good, and that perhaps copies should be made for the complete group. There are several corrections in order, in particular under supportive histories. It should be Fishel and Quarles, not [fushel] and [churles]. F I S H E L, and Quarles, Q U A R L E S. And that's Margaret Walker's Jubilee under supportive of illustrative literature. Dr. Bettye Thom...: In approaching this whole question of developing a teaching methodology for some aspect of the period, 1865 to 1920, the participants of group A focused upon specific topics which interested them, and no doubt other topics will be brought up this morning. In particular, group members were interested in topics such as the courts and Blacks, the Reconstruction period, and Black thought. In devising methodologies for these topics, the chief concern was to, one, identify through readings and discussion the major pattern which prevailed in the country during the time period. Because we often find that students can't distinguish between what is a dominant pattern, and what is a minor pattern. In fact, that has often come up in our discussions in the last two weeks. Whether certain kind of pattern prevailed in terms of thought, and in terms of action, whether it prevailed in a given area, whether it prevailed throughout the country. Dr. Bettye Thom...: So we think it is important first to establish what the major pattern was in the country, for whatever discussion you're engaged in. Then number two, we thought it was important to zero in on the state and local patterns, to see how closely they corresponded to the major pattern. Example, if the topic that you're dealing with is civil rights, the civil rights acts and the courts, students could explore the congressional acts that were passed in the period 1860 up through 1920, and the subsequent involvement of the Supreme Court in determining their constitutionality. And in exploring this topic, students could explore state and local ordinances that were passed during the same time period in order to find out how closely related were the local state and national acts. Local newspapers, police board reports, city council minutes, in particular could be used to determine local practices not defined in law and the extent to which national state and local laws were enforced in the local area in comparison to other areas. Dr. Bettye Thom...: Students should be encouraged to utilize major sources of Black life which provide information about local Black life and proscription, and we in particular discussed the number of sources that could be used. And I'm not going to relate all of them here today, but I don't know how many of you are aware of the fact that Crisis Magazine, which we've been underscoring for two weeks as an excellent source, has been indexed and cataloged. And this is very recent, I got the notice in the mail about two weeks before I arrived here. It's available through Greenwood Press. And we thought that students could use Crisis Magazine to identify many local practices, and perhaps they can find some for their particular area. The methodology used for the topic, the courts and Blacks, may be viewed in a sense as a structural model for almost any topic. Dr. Bettye Thom...: For example, if one is focusing on Black thought in a given period, again, it's necessary to define the broad pattern and then to spotlight the local area. Students could identify locally prominent figures and their contributions, and in part, I think Dr. Butcher was saying the same thing last night when he said that the Walkers weren't people who were well known nationally, but they were prominent local figures that need to be identified. Students could develop biographical sketches of these individuals. And particularly in this bicentennial period, with the paucity of data that is available, published data that is available for your local areas, I would see this as a tremendous project, and a much needed kind of project to educate the community and of course all others about the role that Blacks have played in different periods. Dr. Bettye Thom...: They could explore the development of Black institutions. You could talk about the development of Black institutions on the national level. If you're dealing with this period, you could use a variety of sources, studies that have been done on various cities, like the Spear study on Chicago, the Katzman study of Detroit, the Blassingame study in New Orleans, and so forth. And then, you could have the students to look at the development of Black institutions in their own community, by exploring charter records, church and other organizational records. And if you have a Black newspaper in any given part of that period for the local area, they could actually pull through those papers on a day by day basis and identify various kinds of movements, individuals, thought, and everything else you can think of in that Black community. Dr. Bettye Thom...: Now, in the absence of newspapers, I really want to emphasize that charter records in that early period, right after the civil war, often yield very valuable information relative to literary, political, social, economic developments in the Black community. [inaudible] you can find out a great deal about social stratification in that Black community by looking at the list of incorporators. A second suggested teaching methodology was to use closet type dramas and skits to spotlight the significance of literary figures, activists, politicians, events, and practically anything else you want to spotlight. They may be employed to stress a variety of themes, and wherever possible, the characters should articulate actual statements verbalized or written by historical figures. Dr. Bettye Thom...: A third suggestion was to use student constructed annotated bibliographies, which are orally discussed. Oral discussions of annotated bibliographies tend to stimulate discussion, and helped to inform students about sources for different topics. We thought too, that it's necessary for teachers to give some serious thought to the development of methodologies, which help to establish greater rapport between them and their students and among students. And it was suggested that students be encouraged to relate their research to their particular major, wherever possible. And really, we suggested a number of things, and some of them I really forgot after the meeting, because a number of people suggested ways in which rapport could be established. We have discovered over the last two weeks that a great barrier, perhaps in terms of teaching, is the problem of communication between the teacher and the student. Dr. Bettye Thom...: The problem if it is a Black teacher dealing with predominantly white students, the problem if it is a white teacher dealing with predominantly Black students, the problem if it is a white teacher dealing with predominantly white students and a Black teacher dealing with predominantly Black students... We feel that you have such a variety of views and feelings when you're teaching any kind of course on Blacks that somehow you've got to have some sort of sensitivity session. You got to desensitize the participants, and that this is really germane to any kind of methodology that you develop. Now, I'm sure that you have lots of questions you'll probably want to address to the participants in group A, and I'm sure that they'll have a number of other things to suggest, but these were the basic things that we discussed. Joe Patton: I'll probably be accenting some of the things that Bettye has said, but I do want to say that my major interest is the historiographical approach, and to offer some more concrete types of sources for that particular period specifically. But I do want to say that I think that there are probably three or four approaches that could be used specifically for history, and that would be the thematic approach, a comparative approach, and the state and local approach, and then oral histories, and family histories would be good too. And I want to stop right there for a second, because I think that's important. You could utilize oral histories. For example, I know in the class that I'm working with this summer, one of the students is concerned about some property that her family has in South Carolina. So in the debate in the family as to who's going to get what, we thought... She and I sort of brainstormed. Joe Patton: She thought that she could do a family history of how her people got to Des Moines, Iowa, for example, by way of South Carolina. They walked from Columbia, South Carolina to another point in South Carolina, then finally they made it here. So these types of things, I think, can be captured in interviewing older members of students' families, and compiling this and using the framework of the period supported by other histories, where you would have a sense of a time and you could write family histories. The other source that I'd like to recommend would be the slave narratives, and the Federal Writers' Project, Slave Narrative Collection in particular. And most people get that confused, and not thoroughly familiar with that. Those narratives were collected in the 1930s, and so over 2000 that were collected, those people have been slaves, but since the average age was around 86, that meant most of those people had not actually lived under slavery for a long time. Joe Patton: So their most vivid experiences then would be of the Reconstruction period, and the period shortly thereafter. So that particular body of data I think is an untapped source, and would offer quite a bit of information there about what was going on. And this would be the people themselves as interpreters of what went on, rather than historians who have attempted to interpret the period. So that is the Federal Writers' Project, Slave Narrative Collection, that many of your libraries probably will have. But it's published by Greenwood Publishers, and of course George Rawick is the editor of that series of 19 volumes now, when they included the 2 volumes from Fisk, God Struck Me Dead, which was a religious experience, conversions experiences of the former slaves, and another volume that was subsequently added. Joe Patton: So I think altogether, there are about 19 volumes in that collection, published from Greenwood Publishers. The thematic approach I thought would be good rather than... Because I had mentioned to [Percy] early on that when he was asking August Meier what would be some books to use that... Perhaps a good way to get at this period since there is a dearth, limited amount of sources available, secondary sources, that the thematic approach might be very helpful in a history class. And you would identify different things. For example, you could treat the area of migration over the period from, say 1877 to the war when it climaxed in the World War I period, as a theme. And because there are very few books out that deal exclusively with migration, then you could use periodical information on migration. Joe Patton: Or, for example if you're in an area like Chicago, you could just simply ask students where did their grandparents come from. And chances are, most of them would probably say Mississippi, because in the research I've done with the Illinois area, Mississippi was one of the major [feeder] states to Illinois because of the Illinois Central Railroad. So again, this type of information or this type of approach, a thematic approach, using a number of sources from the journals and periodicals along with some standard texts, would probably prove very valuable in a history class in particular. Joe Patton: Then I thought the comparative approach would be good. This may be overdrawn sometimes, but it serves a useful purpose for students who are concerned about what's going on, say now, the relevant, in quotes. And sometimes it's very difficult to get them to go back. And so if you can relate to them the many things that have happened that are happening now are not really new, and that people were dealing with these ideas and problems say, for example, the late 19th century, then you get sort of a more enthusiasm. And the comparative approach, I think, can serve this purpose. For example, with the riots. For example, in 1917, there were 26 riots throughout the country, and of course we know about the catastrophic riots the 1960. So for example, a topic could be a study and anatomy of a riot, and you could use a comparative approach with say Detroit, and then one of the big ones like east St. Louis, and see what precipitated the riot and do a comparative study of the two riots. Joe Patton: So I think then you can do this back and forth with other particular topics, too. For example, the women's movement could be contrast and compared. So the comparative approach I think lends itself, particularly to this period. And of course, [inaudible] was implying that in his opening talk with the 1880s and the types of things saying that that was really nothing new, that these people in the 1880s have been doing the same things that the people in 1970s... So a competitive approach, I think for college students, especially in the freshmen, sophomore area, would prove pretty interesting. The other thing Bettye expanded on quite well was the state and local. I think that a lot of times, we're so interested in general studies that we fail to see the significance of state and local studies. And the state and local studies I think are in vogue, now. Joe Patton: For example, Peter Wood has just done one, a Black majority study of 18th century South Carolina slavery, which is a very good work. And so these state and local... Then Peter Kolchin has done one in Alabama, concerning the responses of Blacks to emancipation and the Reconstruction. So state and local studies focus, I think, and give you a greater intense view of what is going on at a particular time. And of course again, you can bring in the comparative approach, because you can compare different localities. One thing that we did this summer, we've sort of taken South Carolina as our main state to focus on for the Reconstruction period in comparison with other States, because the complexities of reconstruction were very different throughout the reconstructed states. So again, I think the state and local approach will be very important in history. And then I mentioned the oral histories. Joe Patton: And then I just want to say one thing about historiography of the period, the Reconstruction period in particular, and especially for advanced students on the graduate level. As seniors, I think historiographical approach is important, because you would assume by then that they have gotten the background. They know what the Reconstruction period was. They know the difference between reconstruction, the congressional reconstruction, and presidential reconstruction. So they have the fundamentals. I think then the point that there would be at this particular time, would be in evaluating the historiography of the period, and seeing how historians have interpreted the period and comparing. And I would just suggest that there is a definite pattern and trend in the historiography of reconstruction, and it sort of basically starts off with the Dunning school. And that's Archibald Dunning's work, Reconstruction, and a group of men and women who sort of support his work in state and local studies throughout the 1920s and up into the 1930s. Joe Patton: Now, that particular point of view, I always like to say that Dunning was to reconstruction what Phillips is to slavery. He perpetuated the idea of what you saw on the film Birth of a Nation, that type of mentality, and was accentuated by Claude Bowers' work, The Tragic Era. So by the 1930s and late 1920s, you see different interpretations coming out, and AA Taylor was one of the pioneers in that change in historiography, and later Du Bois. And then of course, Kenneth Stampp and John Hope Franklin, but Kenneth Stampp later, which I guess probably is one of the definitive works, his book on reconstruction. Like his book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution has been considered so far, and as far as revision, one of the major works. Joe Patton: And so I would suggest getting at and seeing the period from historiographical point of view, and seeing what motivated these men. Why were changes... What brought about these changes in the thinking patterns of Blacks? And then a good anthology on the revisionist writing is Kenneth Stampp's and Leon Litwack's anthology, Reconstruction; an anthology of revisionist writings, which was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1969. That's Reconstruction; an anthology of revisionist writings, and it takes in a whole Panorama of revisionist writing since the Dunning school. So that's basically what I have to say about methodology on the period, and some approaches. Speaker 1: Well, I suppose the three of us could stay upfront and take questions, and ask questions of participants that have specific- [crosstalk] No, he's just rearranging. It might be even better. Why don't we just stay where we are? Speaker 4: This is not going to be great or anything, but I think we'll try to get what we can as far as audibility. Speaker 5: Somebody mentioned something about the definitive work, and my comment is that when a definitive work of anything comes out, we will all be dead. [inaudible]. Speaker 6: I think all what you said is good, but I think there are there's one major problem inside the methodologies, and that is, do you have people... All the historians or the people you [inaudible] too, are they themselves adequately trained to present this type of methodology? What I'm saying is, although granted some of us are into state studies and various things, but as a collective group, can we be prepared to send our students into, let's say, into Ohio, into the Black press of various areas looking at state documents and what have you? Do we know what exists ourselves, at the present time? I think this is a major problem, in that I'm not against that, but I'm saying... How many of us can adequately do the job well enough that the students can gain something from it? Are we going to use the students to educate us? Dr. Bettye Thom...: I assume, maybe I shouldn't make this assumption, that most teachers have to prepare themselves. They have to actually go out and identify the resources in a given area. I'm not saying that they identify all the resources, because students can actually find certain kinds of things that you didn't know existed. But I mean basic resources, such as newspapers, manuscript collections in a given area that are located at an archives, or a library so forth, and that you have some general knowledge about that particular resource so that you can carve out certain kinds of topics for the students. Because if you don't really know about these resources, really students on a whole aren't going to get to these places. They'll never find them. [crosstalk] Speaker 1: I think that's a very good point. And just from personal experience, knowing for instance, how from one Mississippi town, we've got a whole community of Blacks in Waterloo, Iowa, for instance. And we've got a number of students at the university from Waterloo. Now, I've been trying to get Waterloo students to go and see when and why the people came up from Mississippi. We know they came up for labor. Okay, what about labor relations? Can you find materials on labor relations? Can you find materials on housing patterns that were beginning to be established, information on race relations and so forth? Histories from the old people in the oral histories from older people in the community? And I think, as someone's already mentioned, it's very difficult for these kids to take that step backwards, because they don't really know how important the material is. I think Percy's question is well laid out. I personally do not know how to make use of these materials, but I thought I could learn by getting the student involved and trying to answer some of the problems that the student was encountering in collecting materials. Dr. Bettye Thom...: Also, he's saying too, Fred, that in terms of some of the local materials and state materials we're talking about, if you don't go as a teacher and identify yourself as so and so to the people at these particular municipal buildings, students will never see those documents. And even so, in some cases, the people who are there don't even know that they're there. You have to really go and bury it out and identify that these documents do exist, that they're sitting on the fourth floor in a locked room in the city hall, and when you send them, you send them with that information that they wish to look at such and such records that you do have in a locked room on the fourth floor. Dr. Bettye Thom...: I discovered that that is a thing that you have to do. For example, I discovered that no one in the city hall in Baltimore, where they have all kinds of records and I just can't give you a total picture of the place, and I suggest that you have places like this in the communities that you come from, records were just all over the floor in the basement when I arrived five years ago and I got to the catalog. They were just on the floor. Dusty, dirty records, and nobody knew what was even there in the city hall. They weren't prepared for anybody but me to use it, because I was going to flip through to find out what was there. when they made a catalog, they discovered for example, that they actually had the manumission papers, or the registers for free Blacks. They didn't even know they had those. Beginning in 1820, going from 1820 to 1860. You were talking about families and finding out about genealogy. That's a very important source in many cities, but finding out about families and tracing them even back to plantations, because they state that in one of these books. Dr. Bettye Thom...: Now, if then the teacher doesn't go and actually identify them, because I'm not saying that you have to go through them and know every page that's in the source, but identify that it is there. Go and find out where the charters are. Sometimes these people just turn it off to students. If they're telling their students... They don't bother to look, don't bother to identify. They'll say, "Well, no. We don't know where they are. We don't have these records." And go and actually just briefly look through the books to see how you use these books. Sometimes that's the problem, how to use them. How do you use the wills and the inventories? What is the system they have set up in that particular office? Dr. Bettye Thom...: So when you send that student off and you say, "Well, here we have the names of 10 people who were locally prominent, going back to those sketches, those biographical sketches. Let's try and find out if these people wrote wills. Did they own property, and how did they dispense with their profit?" And these will tell you all kinds of things about them and their involvement in community. Now you don't actually know that there are 10 wills there for those 10 people, but you've got to know the names. And once you have the names, you know how to use those particular resources, and you know whether or not the wills are in one building, and the inventories are some other place, like what's happening in Baltimore. The wills up to 1875, are all in Baltimore... No, after 1875 in Baltimore