An investigation of the dimensions of learner diversity: material (class, locale), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona). Examines social-cultural theories of difference, as well as considering alternative responses to these differences in educational settings - ranging from broad, institutional responses to specific pedagogical responses within classes of students. The course also focuses on the application of learning technologies and new media to meet the needs of diverse populations of learners. Its main practical question is, how do we use educational technologies to create learning environments in which learning experiences can be customized and calibrated to meet the precise needs of particular learners? Topics include: universal design for learning, differentiated instruction systems, and adaptive and personalized learning environments.
The School in Colonial North and South Carolina
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Negotiating Learner Differences: Towards Productive Diversity in Learning
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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From the lesson
Should Education be a Right?
In this module, we focus on the US case, first with an historical analysis of the emergence of public education, then with a case study of Asian Americans.
Meet the Instructors
Dr William CopeProfessor
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, College of Education
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
College of Education
Now, whereas Massachusetts had a more progressive start in Virginia,
you also see other colonies,
a part of the original 13 colonies that didn't take off the same way.
North Carolina and South Carolina were colonies both founded in 1729.
South Carolina was founded almost exclusively as a slave colony.
English settlers from British Barbados were in search of land
and their primary goal was to find kind of suitable land for the cultivation of sugar,
which was the cash crop in Barbados.
The challenge in South Carolina was sugar just simply wouldn't grow.
The climate was too intemperate and but
another crop grew just both indigenously and abundantly.
And that was rice. And so,
you see kind of the cultivation of rice in this region.
But the English neither the Native Americans really knew what to do with the rice.
It grew naturally and no one ever tried to grow it for commercial products.
And so the challenge was,
how do you take something that is
a crop that is suitable for consumption that everyone could use,,
but yet at the same time,
you don't have a labor force that can be cultivated it in any meaningful way?
Well, this challenge ends up taking place with
the importation of Africans to South Carolina.
This is why it begins almost exclusively as a slave colony.
And in this context,
Africans were in understanding of the cultivation of rice.
In many parts of West Africa,
rice is just indigenous to the region.
But the challenge is they quickly found,
was the Africans that were brought as slaves to South Carolina could
not grow the rice that was in that colony.
It was indigenous to that colony and it
didn't necessarily match the way Rice would grow in South Carolina,
it didn't match way it would grow in Senegal or in western parts of Ghana or Nigeria.
And so it's here that you begin to see a different problem that will emerge.
The solution was that South Carolina planters would
not only purchase slaves that were from
Senegal and summits in Gambia regions of West Africa,
but they also bring in import,
the actual Rice strain into America.
So, virtually every rice strain that we have now in South Carolina owes his home
more so to the Senegambia and Senegal region than it does to South Carolina.
This map shows you how the Transatlantic slave trade worked.
And so you'll see the importation of
Africans from the west and southwest coast of Africa,
and they would arrive in different stations from Bahia,
Brazil where the vast majority of Africans would arrive,
to the Caribbean and West Indies and Central America,
a limited number to the United States that would go from roughly about a
half million to nearly 4 million at the time of the Civil War.
And the crops that would come from North and South America,
would be shuttled back into Europe and different parts of Africa and South Africa.
And we see that in this map right here.
As you see from the Americas to Europe, and Africa,
and Asia, there were things such as turkeys and potatoes.
There were things such as the tomato and corn,
products that were indigenous to North and South America,
but now would make its way into Europe and Asia and Africa.
And again, from Europe,
and Africa, and Asia,
you will get citrus fruits and grapes and bananas,
things that were indigenous to these continents but
now found a new home in North and South America.
But in South Carolina, planters were willing to pay
a much higher price for slaves from rice growing areas.
And you can see it in these advertisements here,
where they would say slaves from Sierra Leone.
And the lower photo would show slaves that were part of the rice Coast.
And now one historian,
Daniel C. Littlefield notes in his book, Rice and Slaves,
as I had alluded to before,
that every strain of rice in South Carolina can trace its roots back to Western Africa.
None of the rice cultivated in the state is indigenous to the state any more.
And so, we see this pushing his pride.
The most important thing I might ask you to remember is that,
it's not just simply Africans were taken for the Bronn, for slave labor,
but they were also taken for their minds that they had a certain set of knowledge and
skill sets and disposition that made them suitable for the cultivation of rice.
And though they didn't necessarily want to be enslaved,
clearly they wanted their freedom no different than any anyone else.
They had an understanding of the way to world work that unfortunately suited
them for this scenario within the system of slavery in the United States.
So you might be asking,
why do I get such an extensive overview and introduction of Africans to the Carolinas?
Because the overview provide some context for some of the excerpts that I really want you
to think about as it relates to education and its development in these two colonies.
For example, in 1711,
South Carolina legislators and authorities stepped in to resolve
the controversy over the education of slaves in the region and literacy.
And as here, this excerpt is essentially talking about if a slave is baptized,
or if they read,
if they're Catholic and they read from the Catechism,
would this person be free by law?
And so what we're seeing here is that a person,
the way we've constructed slavery in the United States,
at least the abridged version here,
because slavery existed for 246 years in the United States but in these earliest years,
they're still trying to develop what does it actually mean,
who can or who can't be a slave in this regard.
And so the challenge that has been brought up here is at
first a language would be someone who would be a Christian couldn't be a slave,
but someone who would be defined as a heathen could be a slave.
And someone who would be seen as of African descent would be defined as a slave,
but someone who was not of African descent could not be defined as a slave.
So, here in this earliest context,
if a person reads from the Bible or if they take an oath that they would in Catholicism,
to honor God in this regard,
could that person still be enslaved?
But here in 1711,
South Carolina had already answered that question,
that no slave owner would ever have to worry about their property rights being
lost if a slave ever took on the attributes of a free citizen.
So, here you begin to see the shift from a religious component for
the enslavement of a person to a racialized component of a person who would be enslaved.
And even that would turn into hereditary slavery,
that any person born through the mother's line of a person who is enslaved,
their children, her offspring,
would be slaves as well.
And so you see this push and prod as
to not only evolution of public education in United States,
but even evolution of slavery and how it's now playing a central role
within whether one could or could not become educated in the United States.
So, this question again becomes even more real in 1719 and the same in North Carolina.
So these twin colonies,
both of them have their origins roughly the same day.
You see this push as to whether Africans and African-Americans could
become free citizens if they converted to
Christianity and if they read from things like the Bible or some other form of catechism.
And so, here you begin to see this push in
this challenge as to how this early settlement would play itself out.
Now, the irony is that
every Southern state that would adopt the institution of slavery prior to the civil war,
would go through the same challenges,
whether it was Virginia that would pass
a law that would say that a person who converted to
Christianity would no longer be considered as a Christian,
they still could remain a slave,
whether it was Maryland that would pass a very similar law thereafter.
And I've kind of posted a link to where all the other colonies
passed those laws during the 17th and early 18th century.
The amazing thing is,
what we're saying is not only the development of a nation,
we're also seeing the development of African-American culture in itself.
What it means to be distinctly of the Americas but of African descent,
and how there are laws that are being shaped,
that are forcing them toward one particular station,
that toward a path of slavery even though the individuals
themselves are fighting against that and they're asking certain questions.
They're trying to become literate to ensure that they can
remain free citizens of this country.
Now, unlike North Carolina and South Carolina,
Virginia, Pennsylvania also had a very similar path to Massachusetts.
It wasn't quite as progressive as Massachusetts,
but Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers, hails from Pennsylvania.
And if you read his autobiography,
what you begin to see is
just a variety of different educational opportunities that were available to
youth in this New England region, particularly in Pennsylvania.
Now, Franklin had spent a little time learning at the Boston Latin School.
Again, this was the first secondary school that we would have in the United States.
It was one of only few in that time period.
There he learned bookkeeping.
He was also given to the church as a tithe, a taxable income,
his father said he might make a good,
young minister one day.
Franklin thought otherwise.
They encouraged him to become a clergyman.
And throughout this whole thing, he learned sciences,
he learned agriculture, he became both a man of letters,
but yet he was a farmer at the same time.
What Franklin's autobiography signals for us,
is how education and schooling varied,
not just from one state to another,
but also in value from one generation to the next.
And so, how we think about the developments and
systems of schools are very, very important.
But we still haven't even gotten to the concept of public education yet.
It doesn't really exist in any meaningful way,
except maybe in a handful of pockets of our colonies,
but that will be for our conversation next time.
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