How well are we doing introducing homeschooled students to objectivity, bias, inclusion and the analysis of competing truth claims?

 

Objectivity, bias, inclusion, and truth claims are important concepts whenever we study history. Often, we feel so strongly about our own positions that we fail to investigate alternative claims and evidence. Sometimes we swear that what we have always been told is the absolute truth and the only way to think about an issue or event. Decisions can be made based on the force of an argument without necessarily probing the root ideas upon which the argument was founded. As King Solomon said, “God requires an account of the past”[1]. An investigation is warranted before we die on the sword of an opinion that we refuse to nuance or debate.

Mark K. George, professor of religion at the Iliff School of Theology, wrote about how the Bible models an approach to recording history that includes both sides, that shows the flaws of the heroes, and that does not shy away from controversy[2]. Here at the Kentucky Faith and Public History Project, we have committed to objectivity when we discuss the Christian history of Kentucky. We are involved in rigorous historic research. Our bias is that we are faith-based and unapologetically Christian, but we refuse to be dishonest or disingenuous when dealing with historical, cultural, and individual failures and atrocities perpetrated in the name of the church or of God.

George’s article provides a good analysis of how the American story is being treated as a tug of war between our flaws and our triumphs. The question is whether we are willing to undergo the rigorous scrutiny of our past that is necessary to sift the truth from hyperbolic wanna-be-renditions. For homeschooling parents it is especially important to introduce students to multiple points of view, to historic archival research methods, and to the Socratic debate that can elicit enough information about each perspective for them to respectfully present, defend and critique the arguments. How well are we each doing?

©2021 By Lesley Barker PhD

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[1] Ecclesiastes 3:15. The Holy Bible, New King James Version.

[2] Mark K. George. “What the Bible’s Approach to History Can Teach Us About America’s Glory and Shame”. The Conversation. 2021. ONLINE at https://theconversation.com/what-the-bibles-approach-to-history-can-teach-us-about-americas-glory-and-shame-151394 ACCESSED 3/2/2021.

Making Paint from Petals - A Homeschool Lesson Inspired By the Life of Helen LaFrance

Do you have paint and paper at your house so that if your students wanted to paint a picture they could just go to the cupboard, get the supplies and get started? When the folk-artist, Helen LaFrance, was a little girl she did not have this luxury available but it did not stop her from developing her gift.

Helen LaFrance is a famous Kentucky Christian who only finished the fifth grade. She grew up on her parents’ farm in Graves County and went on to become a significant folk artist whose paintings are about Kentucky farm life, African American country churches and illustrations based on biblical stories and imagery. Her paintings can be seen in museums and in private collections including Oprah Winfrey’s. Helen LaFrance lived for 101 years, 1919-2020. Helen’s mother showed her how to make paints using berries, flowers and bluing. The first picture she painted was a rabbit. For paper, she used an old piece of wallpaper.[1]

Homeschoolers can easily make their own watercolors from flowers. The project can become the inspiration for lessons in botany, chemistry and art. It provides an opportunity to introduce the scientific method to elementary and middle school students because this always begins with the formation of a hypothesis. Here is a basic lesson plan along with the time you should allot and can count for your students to complete each task.

1.    Send the students to pick some flowers. (15-60 minutes)
2.    Use botanical guides to help the students identify the flowers. Press one of each type of flower between pieces of wax paper – cover the wax paper/flower sandwich with a cotton towel and use a hot iron to press and seal the flower. Mount the flower on a poster board or in an album and label it neatly. Draw a small rectangle next to the flower to be used with paint made from its petals (60 minutes)
3.   Ask the students what color paint they think each flower will produce. This is the hypothesis, a big word for guess. Write down what they predict. (15 minutes)
4.  Test the hypothesis. Use a glass bowl for each type of flower. Put the petals in the bowl. Mash them. Boil water and cover the petals with two or three inches of boiling water. Allow the petals to steep, like tea, for an hour or even overnight. Strain the liquid and discard the petals. The liquid is the paint. (60 minutes plus time to steep)
5.  Add challenges for older students. Older students can be asked to predict what happens to the pigment when the steeping time changes. They may be asked to come up with additives like salt or vinegar or bluing liquid, for example to enhance the pigment. Older students can keep a log of their trials and results. (1 to 2 hours)
6. Paint each rectangle with the pigment that came from the flower. (30 minutes)
7. Return to the original hypotheses. Ask the students to remember their predictions and to evaluate or judge how close they came to being right. (10 minutes)
8.  Use the paints to make a picture. (30-60 minutes)
9.  Write a summary of what they did from going to pick the flowers to painting their picture- for students grades 1-4 assign them to write one sentence per grade. For 5-8^th grade students, assign a maximum of five paragraphs. Revise and edit the summary until there is a final draft that is ready to be turned in. (30-60 minutes)
10. Share the summary, the poster and the painting with another student or relative. (10 minutes)

c. 2021 by Lesley Barker

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[1] https://kchr.ky.gov/Hall-of-Fame/Pages/Helen-LaFrance.aspx 

Say His (or Her) Name

 

What would you think if no one ever called you by name? This is what happened to Peter and Dinah Durrett. They were famous Kentucky Christians who arrived in the Lexington area in 1781 with a group of nearly 500 people known as the Traveling Church. The Durretts were enslaved African Americans owned by one of the Baptist pastors, Joseph Craig. In most of the books and other documents written about the Traveling Church, the pastors are always named as are some of the other leaders. Very occasionally, Peter Durrett is named. Usually he is called “Uncle Peter” or “Old Captain”. One of the best accounts of the Traveling Church talks about Peter Durrett but it never calls him anything but “Captain”. His wife is not named at all[1]. However, had it not been for Dinah Durrett, Peter might never have moved to Kentucky. 

It was not because Peter and Dinah Durrett were unimportant that their names were not recorded. Peter Durrett was the first African American man to preach a sermon in Kentucky. He and Dinah started the first African American church in Kentucky. Peter was one of the scouts who prepared the way and led the Traveling Church over the mountains from Virginia. Do you think it could be that the fact that Peter and Dinah were enslaved that kept historians from naming them? Peter even had a white father, his former master. 

Dinah’s likelihood of being named was even less than Peter’s. She was an enslaved African American and she was a woman. Not naming people makes doing historical research very difficult. We need names to search for individuals in plantation records, municipal and county records, and census records. We need names to connect parents to their children and grandchildren and to find marriage and death certificates or records of military service. 

Naming people continues to be a way for justice to be served. Think about the contemporary cries for racial justice such as the protest call to “Say his (or her) name” after the death of George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, for example. As we at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project continue to research the Christian men and women whose public affiliation as Christians made them succeed, we are committed to find and call them by name. We won’t be content to speak in generalities or to use pejorative nicknames or to call people by their roles. We will say their names and we will do our best to find verifiable information about their lives. That will bring recognition to previously lost or marginalized stories as well as honor for their memory.

©2021 By Lesley Barker PhD

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[1] George W. Ranck. The Traveling Church. Louisville, KY 1910

How Tony Snow's Life Poses a Question About the Relevancy of Faith

At the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project, when we identify a Kentuckian whose public statements indicate that he or she was intentional about their Christian faith, we attempt to pinpoint how and when this commitment started. We look for evidence that the person stitched their faith into every aspect of their life, both personal and professional. We search for what Christians may call their “testimony”. Our hope is to demonstrate how Christianity is embraced and walked out in the normal everyday lives of its adherents. Unfortunately, this search for public proclamations of past Kentuckians’ Christian faith is  quite difficult. Take what we can find about Tony Snow, for example.

Tony Snow was born in Berea, Kentucky. He became a prominent journalist on radio, a television anchor, a syndicated writer, a speech writer for the first President Bush and the press secretary for the second President Bush. He was not shy about writing or speaking about his faith, especially after he was faced with the cancer that took his life in 2008 when he was just 53 years old. He wrote an essay about the blessings of cancer for Christianity Today in 2007 in which he said:

                “I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care…Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out. But despite this – because of it-God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face to face.”[1]

Snow wrote many articles for The Jewish World Review in which he was explicit about his faith. In 2005 he wrote this: “the last few months — my time of surgery and chemo — have been the happiest and most thrilling of my life. They have confirmed lessons that seem at once too good to be true, and too important and vital not to be. Here is a short inventory: Faith matters. Prayers heal. Love overcomes.”[2]

However, after his death, few of the many eulogies celebrated his faith.  Mollie Hemingway wrote: “While the New York Times and the Washington Post found room to include Snow’s salary at his White House job, neither of them mentioned his strong religious views that were so integral to his outlook on life”[3]. The conclusion of her article notes that: “Considering all of the material that could be drawn on, it is somewhat surprising that most major coverage failed to mention Snow’s Christian faith”[4]. Perhaps what CNN journalist William Schneider said is true and “The press… just doesn’t get religion.”[5]  Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that the press mostly does not see the relevancy of religion. Some do. One journalist, Bill Kristol, posed his own question as he thought about his decades-long friendship with Tony Snow. “Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?”[6]

Our project and its purpose is to show that religion, and specifically how the Christian religion is, for its practitioners, as Bill Kristol surmised, a superior grounding both for living and for dying. Hence, we bring Tony Snow’s faith forward as an example of Kentucky’s parade of Christians whose lives and contributions were enabled and strengthened because of the centrality of their religion. For us, it speaks to an essential question of relevancy.

©2021 By Lesley Barker, PhD

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[1] Tony Snow. ”Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings” in Christianity Today. July 20, 2007.

[2] Tony Snow. “Counting Our Blessings and Passing Them On” in The Jewish World Review. Sept. 16, 2005. ONLINE at www.jewishworldreview.com/tony/snow091605.php3 . ACCESSED March 12, 2020.

[3] Mollie Hemingway. Tony Snow, Catholic, Dead at 53. ONLINE at https://www.catholiceducaton.org/en/faith-and-character/faith-and-character/tony-snow-catholic-dead-at-53.html. ACCESSED Jan. 28, 2021.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Get Religion.org/contact. ACCESSED Jan. 28, 2021.

[6] William Kristol. The Character of Optimism. The New York Times. July 14, 2008. ONLINE at https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14kristol.html?hp ACCESSED Jan. 28, 2021.

Opportunities in History for Homeschoolers

 

Since 1974, a research opportunity and competition for middle school and high school students who love history has existed. It is the National History Day. The rules and the theme for the competition are announced each June. The projects are judged in regional competitions in early spring with the winners competing nationally later. The Kentucky Historical Society facilitates the National History Day in Kentucky which is hosted online here: https://history.ky.gov/for-educators/national-history-day/.

This competition is rigorous. The participants produce original research. There are several different formats in which they can present the research.

The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project encourages homeschoolers to get involved with this opportunity. Follow the competition this year so you will be motivated and informed about how to get started on the 2021-2 competition when it is announced in June.

 

A Homeschool Lesson about Washington DC's Buildings and Monuments Inspired by a Letter by a Famous Kentucky Christian

 

This is a homeschool lesson plan that is appropriate for students in middle school or high school.

Introduction

Explain that this lesson is inspired by something that Mary Rhodes, a famous Kentucky Christian, wrote about Washington, DC. She was one of three women who became the founding nuns of the Sisters of Loretto Roman Catholic Order, headquartered in Nerinx, Kentucky. This  first American order of Catholic nuns was established in Kentucky in 1812. Rhodes grew up in the vicinity of Washington DC before she moved to Kentucky. Years later in 1851, she wrote to her nephew about how beautiful the buildings and monuments of our capitol must be. She also used that idea to connect to her faith. She wrote:

                “I can readily conceive that the creation of those edifices, and various other improvements have greatly contributed to the beauty and magnificence of that immortal city – but what immortal did I say? Alas! To truly does the tiny smitten flower as well as the crash and fall of empires tell us, that all things on earth must pass away! Absurd and inapplicable then the word, to ought else below, than to the undying Spirit, breathed by the Omnipotent into this our poor tenement of clay…”[1]

Vocabulary & Reading Comprehension

This passage contains many words that homeschoolers may find unfamiliar. Before they can truly understand what the writer is saying, they should use a dictionary to define them: conceive, edifices, immortal, smitten, absurd, inapplicable, omnipotent, tenement. Then, using what they have learned, students can be encouraged to rewrite the passage using their own words. This will tell you whether they truly comprehend it. Then ask the students to discuss whether they agree with what Mary Rhodes wrote.

History and Geography

Download the map that Pierre L’Enfant drew in 1791 to illustrate the plan of Washington, DC from the Library of Congress website[2]. Then download the National Park Service’s map of the monuments in the city today[3]. Compare and contrast the two maps. Discuss what the students would like to visit if they had the opportunity to visit the nation’s capital. Ask the students to use the maps to give directions from the White House to one of the monuments or other famous buildings. Require them to use the words, “North, South, East and West”.

Research and Writing

Ask your students to select a monument to learn more about. Then help them devise a research plan using the internet or the library. Assign them to write an essay about the monument. Make sure they cite their work. This is a great time to teach about how to use and write footnotes.

Art Extension

Ask the students to draw a poster or make a 3-D model of the monument they researched.

By Lesley Barker ©2021

 

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[1] February 15, 1851 Letter from Mary Rhodes to her nephew, Hillary Rhodes

[2] https://www.loc.gov/item/88694380/

[3] https://www.nps.gov/wamo/planyourvisit/maps.htm

A Homeschool Lesson about the Tenth President of Liberia - Alfred Francis Russell (a Kentucky Christian)

 

This homeschool lesson about Liberia and its tenth president (who was from Kentucky) can be adapted for use by students in the fourth grade and above. It includes map skills, computer and internet skills, math, history and writing. Use some or all of the suggestions. The activities can be spread over several lessons.

Introduce the lesson with a brief biography of Alfred Francis Russell (bill hours to history)

From Wikipedia: Alfred Francis Russell

Alfred Francis Russell was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1817 where he and his mother were slaves. His father, a white man, was the son of Russell’s owner. When Russell was sixteen, in 1833, his mistress (who was his grandmother) emancipated him and paid for him to join 200 other freed slaves to move to Liberia, Africa. There, he became a Methodist minister and later, an Episcopalian priest. He farmed sugarcane and coffee. He became active in politics, was elected senator and then vice president of the country. When the elected president resigned, Russell became the tenth president of Liberia. He served for one year.

Pose some questions to evaluate how much knowledge the students already have

Where is Liberia?

Guess how far you think it is from Lexington, Kentucky is Liberia and, in 1833, how would someone get there.

In the United States, the president must have been born here. Russell was not born in Liberia yet he became its president. How was that possible?

Show where Liberia is on the globe and follow up by assigning some activities using maps (bill hours to geography or map skills)

Download and print an outline map of Africa with the names of today’s countries. A good one is located at http://www.georgethegeographer.co.uk/Base_maps/PDFs/Africa_b&w_named.pdf. Direct the students to find Liberia and to color it in. Have them label the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Ask the students to describe the location of Liberia in terms of north, east, west and south. 

Download and print an outline map of the world such as this one: http://www.georgethegeographer.co.uk/Base_maps/PDFs/World_b&w_unnamed.pdf .  Instruct the students to find Africa and to put an X at the approximate location of Liberia. Ask the students to locate North America. Then ask them if North America is east or west of Africa. Direct them to label the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Then tell them to put an X at the approximate location of Kentucky.

Use the internet to research some facts (bill hours to computer science, history or geography)

Tell the students that they must use the internet to find the capital of Liberia (Monrovia). Then see if they can find out who it is named to honor (President James Monroe). Find out when Liberia became a nation. Does this correlate with James Monroe’s time as the president of the United States?

Talk about what questions would be good to put into a Google Search to find the distance from Lexington, Kentucky to Monrovia, Liberia (5,061 miles).

Discuss how travel has changed since 1833 (bill hours to history, technology or math)

Calculate how many years it has been since Alfred Russell traveled from Lexington to Liberia? (Ask students to set up and solve the math problem that will answer this question: 2021 – 1833 = X ).

Ask how we would travel to Liberia from Lexington today and how much it will cost? Use the internet to figure out what airlines fly this route as well as the cost of the flights.

Tell the students that Alfred Russell took the brig, Ajax, to Liberia in 1833. This means he had to first travel to an ocean port like New Orleans, New York or Philadelphia using river boats, horses and wagons because this was before the railroad had been built. A simple explanation of what a brig looked like can be found online here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brig .

Discuss why Liberia was formed (bill hours to history or political science)

Explain that two African nations, Sierra Leone and Liberia, were created as places for former American slaves to be resettled. Sierra Leone belonged to England and was used to relocate American slaves which had fought with the British in the American Revolutionary War. Liberia was formed by the United States as a place where emancipated American slaves could move. So, the first Liberian citizens were emancipated American slaves. This is how Alfred Russell could become the president of Liberia. Use this website to learn more about Alfred Russell: http://liberiainfo.co/prd/presidents/alfred-f-russell/ .

Have the students show what they have learned (bill hours to writing, art or communications)

Assign the students to use what they have learned to respond to the following question by writing an essay, drawing a comic strip or preparing a presentation. Imagine that you are a sixteen year-old enslaved person living in Kentucky in 1833. Suppose that you were offered your freedom if you agreed to travel across the ocean to build a new home in a new country and that you would probably never be able to return to Kentucky where you have relatives and friends, what would you do and why? 

By Lesley Barker PhD ©2021