As an activity for Black History Month last February at MS 324 in Brooklyn, Laurie Kingsberry-Ford sent her charges out with video cameras to interview African-Americans in the community.

One student found and interviewed Juanita Sekano, a native New Yorker who had just returned to the city. She had lived for 30 years in South Africa where her husband had been working with the African National Congress to help free Nelson Mandela.

"The children were fascinated with her," said Kingsberry-Ford, a member of the United Federation of Teachers, the New York State United Teachers affiliate in New York City schools. MS 324 was presenting the South African musical Serafina at the time, and she incorporated the interview with Sekano as an introduction to the show.

The video-interviewing exercise was one of many activities Kingsberry-Ford used to get students in her primarily African-American school thinking about their heritage. There was also a costume parade in which students could role-play the parts of historic African-American figures, after researching them. "We do it for Halloween, so we may as well try it for Black History Month, too," she said.

In a broader sense, the month provides "a starting point for a whole litany of standards-based lessons," said Barbara Ellis, a UFT member from Staten Island. Ellis and Kingsberry-Ford both teach in NYSUT's Effective Teaching Program, featuring professional development courses seminars and inservice programs.

Ellis said the observance can be useful across all racial and economic populations.

Opportunities

"We want to have our students have interesting experiences that create opportunities for them to develop research and communication skills," she said. "They need to develop the skills of handling technology and print, and they need to go from short-term memory to long-term memory to learn how heritage affects their lives."

For African-American students it's an opportunity to learn their own history, often overshadowed in textbooks, she said. It should bolster their sense of identity and provide a historical context of accomplishment, she said.

Roots

Ray Lillis, of the Eastchester Teachers Association in Westchester County, teaches fifth grade in the almost all-white Greenvale school. He uses African-American history throughout the year, showing the miniseries Roots to students as a way to illustrate history from a different perspective.

"One of the reasons we have Black History Month is to make up for not teaching enough of it during the rest of the year," he said. "We need to bring all of our children to an appreciation of all of our people's contributions. One reason I get the kids to watch Roots is to get them thinking about their own heritage, as well."

Ellis said the topics can expand to lessons broader than the African-American experience. For instance, a unit on African-American music is wide open because music bridges racial divides.

"Many students think of it simply as rap or R&B charts," said Kingsberry-Ford. "But the current trends can be traced to a rich and more diverse history of African-American musical culture," including opera and other classics.

Even from the popular music angle, Ellis said, you can expand. Start talking about Aretha Franklin; get them thinking about what makes her who she is. Then ask them, "Who's the Aretha Franklin in your family?" Next thing you know, you've moved from understanding Aretha to thinking, researching and writing about the child's own heritage.

Along the way, you involve parents and families, develop interpersonal skills, keep students writing and speaking about what they've learned, and thinking about who they are, Ellis said.

"Study skills will emerge, note-taking skills will emerge, writing and speaking skills will emerge," she said. But even more importantly, "you should start to see an emergence of personal goals, as well."

- Hoskin

Ideas that work

Here are some ideas from Brooklyn middle-school teacher Laurie Kingsberry-Ford:

• Black heritage quiz month: Ask daily questions over the intercom and give prizes to students who return the correct answers.

• Black history "quilt": After researching African-American personalities from history, students create items to be assembled as a kind of quilt. Items could include pictures, poems, symbols, or any items students feel symbolize their subjects.

• Assemblies: Local career people can give brief presentations about their professions and roles in the community.

• African-American personal history timelines: Students research their lineage and create timelines to trace their ancestors.

Barbara Ellis, a UFT member from Staten Island, says Black History Month is an opportunity to cultivate student interest in history and encourage them to do their own research, both in libraries and on the Internet.

Perhaps the best source, both as a library and on the Web, is the world-renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Blvd., New York, N.Y. 10037-1801, telephone (212) 491-2200, online at www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html.

PBS materials available

African-American history begins in Africa. Black History Month is an appropriate time to illuminate the dark continent for students. The www.PBS.org Web site provides six lesson plans on Africa that use television and computers as learning tools for mathematics, social studies and language arts.

The lessons are written for middle- and high-school students, but could be modified for elementary-school use.

The activities, created by teachers, parallel the six-hour television documentary, Wonders of the African World, which aired on PBS in October.

Each of the six lessons refers to relevant resources in print, on the Internet and in multimedia.

Many lessons have corresponding downloadable activity sheets. (Note: To print the student activity sheets for each lesson, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader software.)

A sampler of black history texts

• The Black Americans, by Milton Meltzer, Harper Collins Children's Books, New York.

• Afro-Bets Book of Black Heroes: From A to Z, from Just Us Books, Orange, N.J.

• Our Global Village: Africa, from Milliken Publishing Co., St. Louis. Includes lists of resources, books for children and for teachers.

• One Hundred and One African-American Read-Aloud Stories, edited by Susan Kantor, from Black Dog and Leventhal, New York. Short items suitable for young children range from African creation myths to biographies of Sojourner Truth and Arthur Ashe.

• Black Pioneers of Science and Invention, by Louis Haber, Harcourt, New York, ages 4-8.

• The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and The Story of the Underground Railroad, by Conrad R. Stein, Children's Press, Chicago, for ages 4-8.

• Jump Ship to Freedom, by Lincoln and Christopher Collier, Dell Yearling Paperback, New York, for ages 5-11.

• To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester, Scholastic Books, New York, ages 8-11.

• Pioneers in Protest, by Lerone Bennett Jr., Johnson Publishing Co., Chicago, for teens and up.

• Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans, by Roland Owen Laird Jr. with Taneshia Nash Laird, illustrated by Elihu "Adofo" Bey. W.W. Norton and Co., New York. This encyclopedic illustrated history can be ironic, but some content may be too violent for elementary students.

• African Americans: Voices of Triumph, a series from Time-Life Education, in a set of three volumes, Perseverance, Leadership and Creative Fire. It is geared toward secondary schools. Each volume includes a teachers' guide.

Union's role in civil rights, minority recruitment

New York State United Teachers leaders have played a role in African-American history since the early days of the civil rights movement in this country.

Many NYSUT leaders marched for civil rights in the South in the 1960s, including current officers Alan Lubin and Fred Nauman, and the late Al Shanker and American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman.

In the early '60s, as president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, Shanker formed alliances with A. Philip Randolph, head of the predominantly black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, who became director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Shanker was treasurer of APRI, which was founded to foster the "Negro-labor alliance."

Representing UFT's support for the movement, in 1965 Shanker handed over the keys to four station wagons to Martin Luther King Jr. for use in voter registration drives in Alabama.

NYSUT's commitment continues to this day. In the past eight years, a NYSUT Task Force on Civil and Human Rights has addressed issues ranging from protecting affirmative action in higher education to private-school vouchers.

Since its inception, the statewide union has been a proponent of recruiting more minorities into education. Last year, the union's task force on minority involvement in NYSUT and affiliated locals issued recommendations to promote diversity in the union and in public education. One result was an expanded intern program at NYSUT headquarters in Albany that has increased the diversity of union staff.