Politics in Florida is like the car crash on the other side of the highway; you know it’s rude to rubberneck, but you can’t help watching anyway.
The most recent bit of idiocy to come out of Florida erupted last week, when Governor Ron DeSantis blocked the introduction of a new Advanced Placement high school course that teaches African American history. Claiming that the proposed course “lacks educational value and is contrary to Florida law,” DeSantis blocked the pilot program, which is planned to roll out to 60 high schools across the country for the 2023-24 school year.. According to reports, officials were not able to specify exactly what law the course breaks.
My faithful readers are aware that I usually write about the Osher Program at William and Mary on Tuesdays. I’ll circle back to that later in this essay.
According to AP Central (the part of the College Board website that described Advanced Placement classes), here’s how this course came about:
For more than a decade, the AP Program has worked alongside colleges, universities, and secondary schools to create an AP course in African American studies.
Drawing from the expertise and experience of college faculty and teachers across the country, the course is designed to offer high school students an evidence-based introduction to African American studies.
The interdisciplinary course reaches into a variety of fields—literature, the arts and humanities, political science, geography, and science—to explore the vital contributions and experiences of African Americans.
The purpose of Advanced Placement courses is to make high-level classes available to academically talented and motivated high school students. The website explains this relationship:
A new AP course can only launch if colleges and universities commit to awarding college credit and placement to students who achieve qualifying AP Exam scores. More than 200 institutions have already committed to supporting AP African American Studies through credit and placement policies, and we are encouraging more higher education partners to support the launch of this important course.
The AP Program is committed to developing AP African American Studies and has already engaged faculty from hundreds of colleges and universities to ensure the course reflects the academic rigor of introductory college courses within the discipline.
We expect AP African American Studies to have a significant positive impact on college course enrollments within the field. Research consistently shows that students who take AP courses are more likely to take additional related coursework in college and to major or minor in that discipline.
Here is the timeline for the development of this course:
2022-23 First pilot at 60 schools across the country.
2023-24 Pilot expands to hundreds of additional high schools.
2024-25 All schools can begin offering AP African American Studies.
Spring 2025 First AP African American Studies Exams are administered.
The purpose of the two-year pilot period is to get feedback from students, teachers, and the community about the components of the program.
To place this newly developed course in context, here’s a list of the existing Advanced Placement classes:
Funny how no objections were raised to the teaching of Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, or Spanish Language and Culture. Funny how it’s okay to teach Art History, European History, Comparative Government and Politics, Human Geography, US History, and Modern World History. What could be the problem with a course on African-American History?
I could not find the details of the curriculum for the AP African-American History course. It appears that instructional materials were distributed to pilot schools and teachers last summer but are not on the AP website yet.
However, since the website states that the curriculum was developed in consultation with university faculty members who teach and write on this topic, the curriculum probably follows something like what is in the George Mason University course description.
AFAM 200-001
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, political, cultural, and artistic issues concerning people of African descent in the United States. Students will examine the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans from the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the emerging Black Lives Matters Movement. Emphasis will be placed on developing an understanding of the role of protest and resistance in African American history. Through readings, documentaries, and discussion, the course will illustrate the multiple ways in which African Americans have protested and resisted oppression. The course promises to be challenging, stimulating, and transformational.
Under former Governor Ralph Northam, in 2021 the state of Virginia added a high-school level elective course in African American History to the approved Social Studies curriculum. This course was offered in the Williamsburg-James City County Schools in 2022-23. Here’s how the course is described in Jamestown High School’s Program of Studies:
This course surveys the African American experience from pre-diaspora Africa through today. Topics include the Transatlantic slave trade, the role of slavery and race in the nation’s founding, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement, and African Americans in the contemporary United States. The course is offered in a blended format, so students complete online modules in addition to face-to-face learning experiences. The course concludes with a capstone project, where students connect their knowledge about African American history to contemporary social, political, cultural, and economic questions.
I haven’t spoken to anyone with the school system to find out how this course is going. Nor do I know if WJCC Schools is hosting a pilot program in AP African American History.
Now, here’s the connection to the Osher Program.
I would love to see someone associated with Osher offer a course on some aspects of African American history. To make this happen, we would probably need to recruit an instructor outside of the ranks of our current members and instructors, because we are a pretty white-bread group. That is not a criticism, merely an observation.
While we wait for that to happen, I can recommend an opportunity for you to learn about African American history on your own. Professor Jonathan Holloway’s 2010 course on post-civil war African American history is available for free on the Yale “Open University” site. Professor Holloway taught at Yale before becoming President of Rutgers University in 2020.
I became aware of this program in 2020 when my daughter Lori hosted a virtual weekly showing of the videos from his class. I joined this class, as did several friends from Williamsburg. Over the 25 weeks of the course, we were in discussion with people we would not necessarily encounter in an Osher class – they were generally young, many were LGBTQ+, and about half were people of color. The discussions we had based on the videos and associated readings were provocative but civil. You can find the course description at this link. https://oyc.yale.edu/african-american-studies/afam-162. If you click on the “syllabus” link, you will find the list of readings. If you click on the “sessions” link, you’ll find links to all of the videos.
As I was looking through this material over the last couple of days, it struck me that Osher might be able to figure out a way to use these videos as the basis for a class. The Terms of Service restrict the use of Open Yale Courses and Materials for commercial purposes, but a closer reading of these terms seems to allow for use of these materials by an Osher instructor. Here’s what it says:
Question: I am an educator for a non-profit entity. Can I download your materials for use in my class?
Yes, you can use all or a portion of the Open Yale Courses materials to teach. This applies under the following conditions.
Whether you are teaching high school students, college students, post-graduate students or at another level of education.
Whether you are teaching this course at an accredited educational entity or as part of a non-profit professional training program. If you are a for-profit corporation, you may teach this content as part of a professional training program, as long as you are not charging tuition specifically for the class based upon Open Yale Courses content.
Whether your students are in a physical classroom or online.
There are 25 sessions in this course, so we would need to figure out how to do this over the course of several semesters. But I think we could make something happen. I can see structuring something like this in 6-week chunks, for example, over four semesters. Each session within a chunk (that’s a technical term) would focus on a one-hour video and then a follow-on discussion.
This also raises the possibility of using other Open Yale Courses in our program. You can find a list of available courses at this link. https://oyc.yale.edu/courses We would have to think – a lot – about this, but it opens up new avenues for the Osher Program at William and Mary.
Have to agree with you. Each morning I wake to a new "crash" and wonder how the heck we got here. Thanks for the info on Yale, too. I'm checking it out and enjoyed the one you linked in your article.
Love this analysis (especially the comparison of FL and DeSantis to a car wreck), and the possibility of an Osher class is intriguing.