Day: March 16, 2023

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Ashley Kannan, an eighth grade history teacher at Oak Park Elementary School in District 97, had long thought about piloting a Black studies course. He even created a lesson plan during the summer of 2020. Then, a conversation with a student convinced him to take the leap.
The student liked his lectures, she told him, but thought the history class that Kannan normally teaches was boring.
That inspired Kannan to run with the course that fall. Students in his Black Studies course learn about topics such as the Black church, the Great Migration — when Black Americans migrated from the South to the North for jobs and other opportunities — and Black political figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist from Mississippi.
Not long after he started to teach the class during the 2020-21 school year, Kannan said, he noticed his students were more engaged with the material.
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