Teaching Race to Grade School Children: History & Struggle

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

In my blog post Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira, I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my Children's Ballet class for 7-10 year-olds in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to decolonize our curricula and educate our students in social justice as well as dance and martial arts. 
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Tips for Addressing Race & Social Equity with Grade School Children

• ​Make it relevant. Find the underlying emotions and experiences that children can relate to. Invite children to talk about their experiences, but don't insist if they don't want to.
• Draw on school knowledge. Ask some open-ended questions about what the kids have learned in school, and build on that knowledge in your conversation. 
• Use what children tell you, not what you assume. If a child shares their family history, identity, or experiences, then build on those to draw connections with the material you're teaching. Don't assume that a child or family identifies with a particular racial or ethnic group.
• ​Don't put anyone on the spot. You may have some children & families who are more likely to have personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experiences,  and don't expect that those who have experienced racism will want to share. 
• Relate it to your subject matter. It's okay to get off topic when there's something that needs to be dealt with immediately. But the long-term goal of embedding racial equity in your curriculum requires figuring out how it relates to what you were already teaching.
• Make it your own. Use my discussion points as a guide, but put it into your own words. Let your own and your students’ experiences and knowledge guide you.​

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The Lesson Plan

​Children's Ballet is a 60-minute live online class for 7-10 year-olds. The class follows a typical ballet format with floor warm-up, barre, and centre exercises. I incorporate history, context, and critical thinking in a variety of ways. In this class we watched the first 3 minutes of the video "Revelations from a lifetime of dance - Judith Jamison and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater," a TED Talk published in 2019.

Alvin Ailey's "Wade in the Water" from ​Revelations (0:00-3:00)

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to appreciate the work of classically trained African American dancers and choreographers.
• Students will be able to reflect on historical struggles experienced by African Americans and other ethnic groups.

Introduction (Pre-Video)

• This week we're talking about African Americans in ballet. Does anyone know what African American means?

One student guessed that African American might mean Africans who are in America.

• African Americans are Americans whose families, maybe recently or maybe many generations ago, came from Africa.
• All of us are American because we live here in America. But most of our families came from other places before living here. Do you know if your family came from another place?

​One student said her grandparents came from Germany. Another said that her mom came from Mexico.

• If our family comes from Germany, we might call ourselves German American, or European American because Germany is in Europe. If our family comes from Mexico, we might call ourselves Mexican American, or Latina because Mexico is in Latin America. People whose families come from a country in Africa might call themselves African American.
• Many African American families first came to this country as slaves. They were taken from their homes and forced to come here and work for other people without getting paid. Have you learned anything about this in school?

​My students nodded but didn't offer any details.

• This dance company is a mostly African American dance company, and a lot of the dances they perform are about African American experiences.
• The dance we're going to watch is to a song called "Wade in the Water," which is an African American spiritual, a song people sing in church.
• Do you know what it means to wade in the water? ...Wading is walking through water.

One of my students remembered learning in school that slaves walked through rivers to escape the dogs sent after them when they tried to escape.

• So when they talk about wading in the water in this song, they're talking about African Americans escaping from slavery.
• It can also be about Jews escaping from slavery in Egypt. Does anyone know about that story in the Bible?

One of my students remembered the Bible story.

• ​It can also be about anyone who is escaping a difficult situation, like maybe people crossing the river between Mexico and the United States to escape civil war and other kinds of violence.
• So this song and this dance are about struggle and hope and fighting for a better life. Let's watch.

Wrap-Up (Post-Video)

• ​What did you think of the dance? How did it make you feel?

My students said they liked it, and weren't sure how they felt.

• There are some things that are difficult to talk about, or that we don't know how to talk about, and sometimes we can express those things through dance.
• One thing I think is really cool about this dance is that we can relate to it emotionally, even though it's about something that we've never experienced ourselves. None of us have escaped from slavery. We can't really imagine what that's like, but in some way we can relate to the experience through this dance.

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History & Struggle

I like this clip for school-aged children because it draws on a historical story that they have probably learned about in some form, and makes it relatable through dance. It addresses violence implicitly but not explicitly, offering children tools to process a mature subject without exposing them directly to violent content.

My pre- and post-video discussion helps kids of all backgrounds relate to the experience that the dancers and choreographer are expressing. The video shows one of the best modern dance companies in the world, and exemplifies the power of the arts to help us as a society process complex social issues.

​For adults and teenagers, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater offers a wealth of powerful performances by world-class dancers and choreographers portraying some of the most difficult moments in our history. "Wade in the Water" emphasizes triumph and hope in a way that is accessible for school-aged children, and gives them context to process the historical struggles that they'll come to understand more deeply as they get older.

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