Attendance at a recent Texas Humanities webinar about Race, Slavery, and the U.S. Constitution prompted a closer look at our approach to the TEKS related to the issue of slavery and with that this question.

When and in what context are students introduced to the topic of slavery in the TEKS RS curriculum?

Since the Texas standards don’t really address slavery with any depth until Grade 8, we made that the focus of our exploration into the inclusion of slavery in the curriculum. Researchers in the webinar related that a survey of textbooks found that most textbooks first referenced slavery in the context of the writing of the U.S. Constitution. These individuals pointed out that students should study about slavery in colonial America first, as that is when slavery is introduced into the colonies. It makes sense that students would need to understand in what ways slavery was a feature of colonial society to understand the angst it causes when adopting the U.S. Constitution and possibly why it wasn’t an issue with the Articles of Confederation.

Fortunately, we found that 8.7C (Analyze the impact of slavery on different sections of the United States.) was included in the Unit 2 IFD Colonial America. Very good. Or at least until we saw the specificity, which seemed to reflect the tendency educators have had to shy away from this tough topic. The specificity has been given a robust update.  While maybe too late for inclusion in Unit 2 this year, a review of the introduction of slavery into the colonies may not hurt when students next encounter 8.7C in Unit 9 Sectionalism. This is because another issue with teaching about slavery is that it is a feature of all the eras of American history prior to the Civil War, but many times it’s not really addressed until a unit on Sectionalism. For this reason it might be beneficial for students to at least examine a timeline of the expansion slavery in the United States from the colonial period to the 1860s.  Kudos to all the teachers that taught about slavery in the colonial era beyond the merger specificity we previously had in the system.

During this process SE 8.7B (Compare the effects of political, economic, and social factors on slaves and free blacks.) came to our attention also. This is an oddly worded standard and again I ask, what is that the SBOE particularly wanted students to learn? Here is how we decided to approach the standard. Compare how slaves and free blacks were affected by political, economic, and social conditions in the 19th century United States. Compare – identify what is similar and what is different. Political, economic, and social factors are integrated together to effect these groups. The specificity now explains that similar effects for slaves and free blacks, included that they acted to defy dehumanization, faced discrimination, faced violence, and maintained resistance and resilience. The specificity explains that the differences were in how the political, economic, and social conditions were experienced by each group. Again this is more robust specificity that we hope supports teachers in teaching this tough TEK. We also hope this resource can be helpful too.

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