TEACHING PORTFOLIO: MEGAN THOMPSON
REFLECTION
As I analyzed primary and secondary sources in Civil Rights of the Twentieth Century, interpreting those documents and synthesizing what I learned into historical arguments helped me connect significant events and government responses to one another as well as to events today, considering the impact that history has on modern movements. Just as the gay rights movement laid the groundwork for strategies that supported the legalization of gay marriage, so the Civil Rights Movement laid the groundwork for the tactics used by modern organizations like Black Lives Matter. I brought this focus on interconnected and causation to my lesson on First Amendment rights at school, touching on current political events (kneeling during the national anthem) to past cases that reflected their own political context, like prayer in school and the pledge during the Red Scare.
HIST 581: CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Interpretation and Synthesis Artifacts and Reflection
RESPONSE PAPER
After reading Curtis Austin's Up Against the Wall: The Role of Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party and Jeanne Theoharis' The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, I found contradictory and corroborating evidence from each secondary source to develop an argument that non-violent actions were most effective in the Civil Rights Movement, even when utilized by groups known for violent tactics.
RESPONSE PAPER
In researching and writing my first response paper for this course, I utilized an academic article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” the documentary Slavery by Another Name, and the Constitution of the United States to develop an argument. I focused on the complicated nature of the Reconstruction Amendments that appeared to grant equality to African Americans. In reality, as my paper discusses, the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause does not include those who are incarcerated, and the drive for profit created a system in which African Americans were imprisoned so that farmers and industrialists could exploit their labor.
RIGHTS AT SCHOOL LESSON
Though this class was about civil rights, it helped me developed a more intentional way to teaching both civil rights and civil liberties in AP Government courses. Three required cases for the exam involve student rights at school, so I created a lesson that revolves around Wisconsin v Yoder, Engel v VItale, and Tinker v Des Moines to connect the FIrst Amendment to primary and secondary sources. They connect required cases to related cases, supporting their conclusions with Constitutional clauses and specific examples from government and politics.