NOTE: The Saturday, Jan. 21, workshop has been postponed due to inclement weather.PULLMAN, Wash. – When literacy expert Barbara Ward was a young teacher, she didn’t need to open the classroom dictionaries to find “discrimination.” The books embodied the meaning with threadbare bindings and 30-year-old copyright dates.
The year was 1982. She was teaching in New Orleans, where many of the public school buildings should have been condemned. But it was the sight of those often coverless, defaced dictionaries that stoked Ward’s anger on behalf of her mostly African-American, mostly poor students.
“How could they be expected to compete with other students who had up-to-date instructional materials, who didn’t have to look up words in an obsolete dictionary with pages riddled with obscene illustrations?” she asked. “Would the school district have been so careless with its instructional materials had the students been mostly affluent or middle-class white children?”
Ward is a clinical assistant professor who teaches future teachers in the Washington State University College of Education. She’ll talk about her experiences and offer advice at a free, public “Teaching for Justice” workshop 9 a.m.-noon Saturday, Jan. 21, at the Talmadge Anderson Heritage House, 935 B St., Pullman.
Jeff Guillory, WSU diversity education director, will co-conduct the workshop, which concludes WSU’s weeklong remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. Light refreshments will be served.
Ward will share her “civil rights primer,” a list of books that includes everything from picture books to adult novels. She began compiling the bibliography, she said, because teachers sometimes don’t know where to find materials to stimulate conversation about social justice.
Ward is always on the lookout for books about little-known parts of the civil rights movement.
“I was thrilled, for example, when Phillip Hoose wrote ‘Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,’” she said. “It’s about a teenager whose refusal to move from her seat on the bus predated Rosa Park’s own actions.”
Children had a big role in the civil rights movement, Ward said, adding that kids today need to know that because they often feel voiceless.
“I want my WSU students – and their students, in turn – to know about children in the movement, about the buses, about the mules that carried Dr. King’s casket, about the separate water fountains for blacks and whites, about practices that were accepted but based on ignorance,” she said. “I want them to understand the power of asking a question, asking it again, and challenging the assumptions we make about ourselves and about others.”