Delaware kindergarten class that combined slavery with yoga ‘unacceptable,’ district says

Natalia Alamdari

The Caesar Rodney School District is investigating a Black History Month lesson that some parents are calling “culturally insensitive, offensive” and “disturbing.”

The prerecorded hybrid lesson was taught at the McIlvaine Early Childhood Center. A short clip shared by a parent on Facebook shows part of the 35-minute class, where a teacher combines yoga poses with her version of how Africans were enslaved and brought to America.

“African people came to America on boats to become slaves,” the teacher says in the video. “So here’s the great big country of Africa. They crossed the Atlantic to come over to America. So right now, I need you to get into your boat pose,” she says, demonstrating the yoga pose.

“Came? We were stolen,” the mother recording the video is heard saying.

The video goes on to describe the lives of enslaved people in America.

“Africans were treated very poorly, even though they farmed the land and plowed the fields to make America beautiful and help grow our food,” the teacher continues. “They worked in the fields all day. If you’re at home, you can try the plow pose.”

She then leads the kindergarten students through breathing exercises as they hold the yoga pose.

The video cuts off as the teacher transitions to talking about famous African Americans through history.

Widely shared on Facebook, the video out of Caesar Rodney School District has sparked anger from parents and community members.

“I’m totally speechless,” one person wrote.

“This can’t be real,” another wrote.

“It’s 2021, you’d think this stuff would have ended a long time ago,” Caesar Rodney parent Jessie Welch said. “But it hasn’t because of ignorance. And this is an educator who’s supposed to be teaching our kids.”

The district is investigating the lesson, and said it is “unacceptable and not consistent with Caesar Rodney School District values.”

Teachers struggling to cover – and sometimes avoiding entirely – the realities and horrors of slavery in an age-appropriate way is not new and is only recently being more widely challenged by parents and students.

In San Antonio, a teacher asked eighth grade students to list the positive and negative aspects of slavery. Textbooks have faced criticism for referring to enslaved people as “workers,” implying that they had a choice in the matter.

African American history is gaining traction as its own course but is still treated as separate from required history classes — or a lesson to focus on in February — during Black History Month.

And sometimes, parents and students are given the choice to ignore it completely — earlier this year, a school in Utah came under fire after allowing parents to opt their children out of Black History Month lessons.

When teachers do talk about slavery, lessons for younger students tend to focus on stories of resilience and escape, such as Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.

But guidance from Learning for Justice, a curriculum project by the Southern Poverty Law Center, suggests teaching students a balance of the oppression enslaved people faced as well as highlighting moments of resilience.

“Our omissions speak as loudly as what we choose to include. And what children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education,” the curriculum introduction reads. “Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history.”

Increasingly, parents and students are calling for a more truthful teaching of slavery.

“I would want my kid to understand the true facts of what [slavery] was and what happened, but, of course, at their level,” Welch said. “African people did not come over here to be slaves; they were stolen from their country. But yet, she made it sound like they came over on a cruise ship. That’s just wrong.”

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https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2021/02/26/delaware-school-district-investigating-unacceptable-black-history-month-lesson/6834627002/?fbclid=IwAR3YCvj29iTyZwt_tYNMXZBD_8oho49LJRq-zbUYw84s8i3xb5r57StP8Js