Diversifying The Feast with Amber O'Neal Johnston

Transcript

Our goal in sharing selected talks from past CMI conferences is to foster deeper engagement within the Charlotte Mason community. By providing access to these enriching discussions, we hope to inspire reflection, growth, and a renewed commitment to the principles of a Charlotte Mason education. Each talk is a valuable resource for educators and parents alike, offering insights, encouragement, and practical wisdom to help guide the next generation in a life filled with curiosity, wonder, and learning.

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Diversifying the Feast

Hi everybody. I'm Amber O'Neal Johnston also known as Heritage mom, and I'm excited to be here with you today to talk about Diversifying The Feast: Finding Beauty Through Culturally Rich Learning. There are innumerable ways to integrate voices of color into our children's lessons naturally and consistently through the years. Formal and informal opportunities for diversifying the feast exist within history, literature, music, art, poetry and more. Some studies will lead our students to grapple with complex stories tragedies and trials, but we also have a unique opportunity to highlight the triumphs and joys rooted in every culture. This session will discuss specific ways to shape an inclusive home atmosphere that values the voices of people of color and the ideas that their stories and gifts convey to our children. 

"We are basically trying to create what should have been all along."

So when I think about this topic or this subject an article that I once read immediately comes to mind. It was an interview with Ezra Jack Keats who wrote the children's book The Snowy Day and in it, the interviewer asked him, in a period of time when very few people were showing normal expressions of African-American family life what made you know, they asked him what made him do that? Why did he do that? And it was interesting because I feel like in today's kind of landscape a lot of times when people are asked questions like that, they give a lot of politically charged answers or these deep philosophical answers. And he simply said that he did it because they always should have been there from the very beginning. And that that was just such a graceful answer, I felt, and that's kind of the approach that I like to take when I think about diversifying our children's lessons. We are basically trying to create what should have been all along. So it's not difficult or overwhelming when we think of it in that way. 

One of the most vexing issues facing American Education today is do we purge children's worlds of the things not everyone can share or expose them all to the same thing whether or not they can relate to it or not. And I would say that there is a somewhat of a middle ground there. But where that is, is going to be different for each family and each classroom. One thing that I want to make clear is that I feel very strongly that what we're here to discuss today is the right thing to do and even if Charlotte Mason's writings didn't support it, I would confidently forge ahead and encourage you to do the same. But the really neat thing is that a Charlotte Mason education not only supports the diversification of lessons to meet the needs of the child, the family unit, the nation, and the world. That freedom is inherently baked into the entire philosophy itself. The freedom in a Charlotte Mason education was the topic of my talk at last year's conference and I encourage you to go back and listen to it, if you can. I won't repeat all that I shared in that context, but as we prepare to dig into the nuts and bolts of culturally rich learning today, I want to set the stage with a few ideas from Mason herself.

What did Mason Say?

Mason opposed a factory education or a cookie cutter approach to lessons and yet many of us become very anxious when we realize that what everyone around us is doing isn't what's best for our family. In some cases, it feels like we're cheating on some sort of secret Mason Society or worst yet betraying Charlotte herself when we want our kids to read something that hasn't shown up on an experts book list. 

In the final paragraph of the Parents' Review article entitled "Recipe Versus Thought" by Essex Cholmondeley, she suggests that we examine Mason's volumes for the principles or truths upon which we base our practices. Stating.

“It is the part of every member to seek and find in his own mind the best means of applying those principles, that advice, to new occasions and to particular instances... We have no body of rules, no recipes. A few firmly rooted principles have been shown to us and in these consist the strength and usefulness of the Union. If in the study and expression of these principles we use our liberty, our best intelligence, our careful consideration and our honest labor we shall find a steadily growing power of meeting new difficulties, not by recipes old or new, but by vital truths.” - Vol. 25 p.785-791

We were meant to do precisely what we feel the urge to do by taking the principles and applying them to our unique familial or classroom context whether they're cultural, ethnic, or otherwise-- [it] is what she intended.  

Along those lines Mason said,

“I think we should have a great educational revolution once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called faculties, and realized ourselves as persons whose great business it is to get in touch with other persons of all sorts and condition; of all countries and climes, of all times, past and present. History would become entrancing literature a magic mirror for the discovery of other minds, the study of sociology a duty and a delight.” ~School Education p.175

We should tend to become responsive and wise, humble and reverent, recognizing the duties and the joys of the full human life.

And again, she says,

“Perhaps the gravest defect in school curricula is that they fail to give a comprehensive, intelligent, and interesting introduction to history… we cannot live sanely unless we know that other people's are as we are with a difference, that their history is as ours, with a difference, that they too have been represented by their poets and their artists, that they too have their literature and their national life.” ~Towards a Philosophy of Education p.178

And then later in a 1914 parents review article. E.A. Parish wrote,

“Rightly taught every subject gives fuel to the imagination, and without imagination, no subject can be rightly followed. It is by the aid of imagination that a child comes to love people who do not belong to his own country, and as he learns the history of their great deeds and noble efforts, he is eager to learn something of the country in which they lived, of its shape and size, of its mountains, woods and rivers, of the causes that made the people what they are... We English people. I am sorry to say, have not usually the art of teaching our children to love other countries, and many of us think of foreign lands as we might think of a show at the White City, something that is there for us to look at, something that may rest us or divert us, but not something that stands as high, if not higher than we do. We are still deluded by the idea that we may travel in a missionary spirit with civilisation streaming from our garments. We must change something in ourselves before we can hope to do much for our children in this respect.” ~"Imagination as a Powerful Factor in a Well-Balanced Mind"

And then finally as we lay out this path before us Mason says in a Philosophy of Education that:

“Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food.”

This comparison to food is so meaningful to me. When I first became a registered dietitian. I specialized in working with people who were suffering from eating disorders and disordered eating. Things had gotten so bad with many of the girls and women that I worked with that they'd been admitted to inpatient psychiatric care where they would work with me, but some of them hadn't yet received an official diagnosis, but I could tell they were suffering from what is unofficially known as orthorexia.

What is healthy eating?

So orthorexia is an unhealthy focus on eating in a very healthy way. Eating nutritious food is good, but if you have orthorexia you obsess about it to a degree that it can damage your overall well-being. The doctor that coined the term says that it means a fixation on righteous eating. Since then many medical professionals have accepted the concept. It is something that includes eating habits that reject a variety of foods for not being pure enough. Eventually people with orthorexia begin to avoid whole meals that don't meet their standards rather than eating for sustenance and pleasure everything becomes about the actual makeup of the food and control.

And if someone has orthorexia, they may worry about food quality excessively, high levels of concern about the source of their foods could lead to anxiety. They avoid going out to eat or avoid eating food prepared by others out of fear that foods that you don't prepare yourself won't meet your standards. They typically refuse to eat a broad range of foods. It's normal to avoid some foods because you don't like the way they taste or the way they make you feel but with orthorexia, you might decide to drop whole categories of food from your diet or any food that seems like it's not perfectly healthy. Sometimes they can be overly critical of their friends' food choices. And at the same time they don't always have an extraordinarily rational explanation for their own.

So what does this have to do with anything other than being interesting? I hope. Well, I think that for me, I feel it's related to what we're talking about today because many of us in the Charlotte Mason Community have at times developed an unhealthy obsession with being Charlotte Mason purists. Myself included, we obsess about the quality of literature, avoid reading books that are written by people who are different than us or who aren't on the approved list of Classics. We refuse to consider art, music, or poetry that aren't part of the traditional canon of study, and we can be overly critical of what our friends are doing. When we think that they've strayed too far from our personal interpretations of beauty. And to be honest, I think this is much of why we struggle so much with diversifying the feast it feels scary because we feel that somehow by including generous amounts of color, people of color, into the carefully prepared meal plan, we will adulterate it.

Clearly, this is unhealthy thinking and unsurprisingly the best treatment mirrors the common treatments for orthorexia. One is exposure and response prevention. The more you're exposed to the situation that causes you anxiety the less it'll upset you. That's part of why I'm here today. Behavior modification: understanding the negative effects of your actions so you can change what you're doing. Cognitive restructuring or cognitive reframing which helps you identify habits and beliefs that cause stress and replace them with less rigid thoughts and actions. And finally various forms of relaxation training also known as taking a chill pill. 

So as we spend the rest of our time here today, let's do so with the understanding that we're trying to rid ourselves of an unhealthy focus on spreading what has turned out to be a very vanilla feast in most circles. We're going to embrace the idea that when we take away, add, and swap books and resources from the Alveary or any other Charlotte Mason curriculum, we are doing so with authority. We have the right and duty to put together our children's lessons according to our families unique context. I have never seen a homeschool curriculum that is black enough for me. And even if someone tried to put one together, I'm 100% sure that I'd still tweak things to fit my family like a glove. So, rather than get frustrated about the things that you may need to revise for your personal circumstances, I think we should approach curriculum from the view of taking what we can and use it as the skeleton, feel thankful for whatever part of the meat works for our family while expecting to fill in with additional sides based on your personal preference and needs. 

Spreading a Variety of Richness

So then the question some may ask is why am I always focusing and talking and pushing for more diversity to be added to all curricula, the Alveary, and otherwise, it's not because I'm trying to turn it into the perfect thing for my family, but rather I'm trying to ensure that the skeleton, the core program from which we’ll all season and twist and turn and maneuver into something that works for our own family and our own way is inclusive of a variety of voices, perspectives, talents, thoughts, and ideas.

So we have the freedom to curate lessons that fit the needs of our specific families set in various 21st century contexts. We have the responsibility to create or revise lessons that celebrate the unique cultures of our children and families and by culture, I mean ethnic culture and family culture, the things that make everything family unique. And we have the expectation that will need to make some swaps because no curriculum can possibly create book lists and lesson plans to perfectly fit all of our various needs.

Three Tools

So as we seek to seamlessly integrate the voices of color into our lessons, there are three tools we have at our disposal. The first tool would be direct instruction. That's formerly centering diverse stories as the main idea or lesson. So a couple of examples from our upcoming school year would be reading Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington for history or studying Edmonia Lewis for the term's picture study. This is where most of us automatically go, the direct instruction, when we think about diversifying our lessons and rightfully so. It's important to include direct instruction by prioritizing the needs of our children to receive ideas from people of color and women. 

The second tool that we can use is adjacent instruction. This is including diverse voices related to the person or idea being studied for example, reading a book about Ona Judge while studying George Washington and the American Revolution. Ona Judge was enslaved by Martha Washington. Or reading a book about York. The only African American member of the Lewis and Clark expedition while studying Westward Expansion. He too was an enslaved member of that, the only enslaved member of that expedition. In these cases, Ona Judge and York aren't the main idea, but their voices provide added richness and a balanced perspective to what's being studied, broadening the view of who was living during a time period and what they were experiencing or contributing is a critical aspect of seeing the world as it was and is. 

"Our kids collectively suffer when they're fed a one-dimensional view of history, society, life and the thoughts and ideas of great thinkers."

The third tool is indirect instruction. This is casually tying lessons and concepts that you're already covering to diverse people and ideas. So an example would be playing music from a composer of color like Astor Piazzolla or Florence Price in the background during your school day and casually mentioning who you're listening to or going to a Shakespeare play with black lead actors. It could be hiring a Latina art instructor for your Co-op. I know that there are many people who think this kind of intentional placement of people of color is not right. I hear from a lot of them on social media and in my inbox, they think we should focus solely on the quality or character of what's being studied or who's teaching and without any regard to race or ethnicity and I understand that sentiment because I wish it were that easy too, but it doesn't work. The way things are is the way things have been for so long that it requires intentional effort to change them. If we don't put energy behind inclusivity, if we don't put effort behind diversifying the ideas our children received through their lessons and our home environment, most of their inputs will continue to be from and about white people, solely. I'm not okay with that for my kids for obvious reasons, but it's really important for me to state that it's not okay for your children either. Our kids collectively suffer when they're fed a one-dimensional view of history, society, life and the thoughts and ideas of great thinkers.

For indirect instruction the main idea or person in your lesson doesn't change and you're not even needing to pull in additional people instead your organically introducing the ideas and thoughts of people of color you're weaving them in as a part of the tapestry of learning throughout your child's childhood. Indirect instruction is subtle and you may even be tempted to skip it but it's the glue that brings an incredible amount of authenticity to what we're trying to do in our homes.

So by using all three of these approaches direct instruction, adjacent instruction, and indirect instruction, you can naturally and authentically diversify your lessons, your discussions, and your home in a beautiful way. So, once we're on board with the different approaches we can take, we can start to look at some specific subjects or lessons that provide natural opportunities to diversify the feast. And of course, let's start with history. Charlotte Mason said,

“Next in order to religious knowledge, history is the pivot upon which our curriculum turns. History is the rich pasture of the mind—which increases upon the knowledge of men and events and, more than all, upon the sense of nationhood, the proper corrective of the intolerable individualism of modern education.” ~ Philosophy of Education p.273

A Tale of Two Homes

The way we teach history as a nation has important ramifications for all children and we are witnessing the fallout of adults disagreeing about how best to approach sensitive or difficult topics in schools across the country. But the way we, those of us here today, teach history is even more significant because of its relative importance in a Charlotte Mason education. It's a foundational imperative. So it makes sense for much of our efforts to be put behind diversifying our history books and lesson plans.

”To us in particular who are living in one of the great epochs of history it is necessary to know something of what has gone before in order to think justly of what is occurring to-day.” ~ Philosophy of Education p.169

So several years ago, we had the opportunity to visit two historic homes in our area built in the 1840s and only 25 miles apart. They're the ancestral homes of local founding families. Both houses sit on former plantations that flourished on a foundation of chattel slavery. Each family had its own story. But with the details largely forgotten after all these years, I assumed that the experience of touring the homes would be similar I couldn't have been more wrong. In the first home, most of the guides discussion focused on the plantation owners. She described details of the enslavers family history and daily lives as we toured the property. There was the main home, the kitchen house, the corn crib, sweet potato house, storage barn, and the original smokehouse. The guide mentioned the black people who’d spent their entire lives helping make that plantation all that it was exactly three times during our visit.

The first was when the tour guide told the children that "unpaid workers" lived on the land with the family and I made a mental note to remind my kids that "unpaid workers" should be used to describe volunteers, not enslaved people. As we moved to another part of the home she talked about how much nicer this family was to their workers than other slaveholding families of the time. She even recounted a story where one of the enslaved boys on the property reportedly shot at Union soldiers coming to help from the roof to protect the white family from harm. I made another mental note to make sure my children know without a shadow of a doubt that nobody enjoys having their lives claimed or owned by another under any circumstances. And finally we learned that the white people cared so much about their workers that they buried them in the family cemetery with the other family members, but she left off the part about the white family members being buried in marked graves while the enslaved men and women were dumped and piled on top of each other in an unmarked space, their identities forever lost to time.

By the time that tour ended I was distressed by my children's exposure to shallow and biased teaching. The facilities' desire to present a pretty picture overrode the need to integrate hard history into the stories of what this white family had left behind. They choked out and covered over black voices. So, to this day I cannot explain why I was willing to endure another such tour at the same type of facility, but sometime later we traveled across town to visit a second historic home and the experience was vastly different. At this home, known locally as the Smith Plantation, we heard countless stories of people who lived and lost on the land both black and white, and it felt so good. The tour guide chronicled various aspects of the Smith family including where and how the 30 enslaved people who came to the property with them lived and how they contributed to the family success. He intermingled their stories with that of the white family. The first story found on the historic homes website describes the 19th century enslaved labor force from the perspective of Clarinda Richardson, a woman the family enslaved before the Civil War. We learned about the lives of the white children who grew up in the home and how they spent their time on musical and artistic endeavors that my children could really relate to. We heard of the sons who went to war as Confederate soldiers and how one returned home alive only to succumb to disease less than a month later.

"The docent took the time to weave in the voices of multiple generations of colorful people across a series of brutal and beautiful experiences."

And a good chunk of the tour paid homage to a black woman named Mamie Cotton who worked for the Smith family for 54 years during the 1900s. After the last of the Smiths died the city eventually purchased the home, with the stipulation that Ms. Cotton would be able to live out the rest of her life there. The guide showed us pictures of Mamie and her family, her favorite place to sit in the home, and a glimpse of her bedroom containing some of her personal artifacts that remained behind after her death. None of us were ready for this tour to end. The docent took the time to weave in the voices of multiple generations of colorful people across a series of brutal and beautiful experiences. He brought humanity to the white people's story by presenting touching parts of their lives, but did not shy away from their involvement and reliance on enslavement. And at the same time he celebrated the resilience and ingenuity of multiple black people who touch the home some because they found much needed employment within and others because they had no choice.

Though the houses shared a nearly identical history and culture, the atmosphere cultivated within made us want to run away from the first house and lean in to the second. The sanitized one-dimensional colorblind home seemed synthetic and contrived, despite its comfortable narrative, and it wasn't lost on me that the property that embraced brutal history intertwined with tragic and heartwarming stories from a cast of colorful people was a safer and more comfortable space. The empathetic and diverse atmosphere of the second home was cloaked in authenticity making it feel like a place to belong.

Someone consciously chose to cultivate the colorful atmosphere of the Smith home. They selected whose images to show and how to present each group and individual. They told their stories with equal doses of honesty and dignity. They made choices about what people would learn and experience while there and they thoughtfully wove that learning into every aspect of the home in a natural way. None of this just happened. It was the result of intentional forethought and effort, and all of the decision-making mattered. The disparity between the two properties drew my attention to the power of honesty, inclusivity, and storytelling while building a home culture.

"They made choices about what people would learn and experience while there and they thoughtfully wove that learning into every aspect of the home in a natural way."

Building a Home

I want an authentic home for my children, a place where we don't shy away from real history or try to make the past seem simpler, sweeter, or whiter than it was. Somewhere intimate where we can safely sit with truthful stories that may lead to tears, laughter and back again within moments. A home that honors and makes space for colorful overlooked voices and a more realistic picture of humanity. I want to balance the bitter with the sweet in the name of hope. And I want to do it around the fireplace and at the kitchen table and the back porch and when we wake up and when we go to bed wherever or whenever the mood hits us. This vision requires me to release the idea of history as a mere academic subject. It's more expansive than that and the reframe is crucial. History is a family treasure to be woven into the fabric of our days.

"History is a family treasure to be woven into the fabric of our days."

Many parents take a passive role in their children's history education. They expect the school to facilitate academic learning or purchased homeschool curricula are tasked with making kids conversant and people, places, and things. But hard history isn't necessarily being tackled in these ways and home is the place to address this oversight. Intentional parents are more motivated now than ever to have meaningful conversations with their children about our country's complicated past and the forces that shaped the society we live in today.

But most of us never learned about the tough topics at home or in school, so it isn't always easy to approach complex history in our homes with honesty and compassion in an age-appropriate way. Recent events in our society have polarized everything including education. We have parents who believe that patriotism and white-centered history are synonymous with some going as far as to suggest that the inclusion of black and brown voices in history lessons will lead to the complete unraveling of their beloved Americana. These parents don't want to deal with real history and they're not going to; they're angry and resentful about the reckoning occurring across our nation and much of the world. They've decided that they're going to keep things just the way that they were. They're going to keep their kids in the good old days of our great grandparents before everybody was woke and complaining about racism. 

Well, we also have parents in our communities who believe that every single book and lesson our children have ever been exposed to is overtly whitewashed and utterly devoid of value in the face of injustice and systemic racism. They're ready to publicly call out anyone who doesn't instantly lay down everything they hold dear for the cause and they deemed it okay to police and shame individuals who aren't in complete agreement with a symbolic book burning as they rid the Earth of anything that isn't holy and immediately representative of our diverse communities. And while I understand the frustration behind that all or nothing approach, primarily because I felt it myself at times, I don't believe that it's a wise position or prudent path. 

"If our kids are going to have a shot at authentic cross-cultural relationships and camaraderie, they need to be willing to get to know people who think and believe differently."

These two extremes, those who resent all mentions of the stains in our nation's past and those who insist it be shared exactly their way or the highway, impact our homes. Communities of engaged parents are simply microcosms of society and have been affected by the polarization. I've seen lines drawn in the sand and positioned state within our own ranks in the Charlotte Mason Community just as much as I've seen these things outside the realm of intentional parenting. But, there is another space not between, but entirely outside of the two opposing sides, a space that prioritizes authentic community over divisive ideology, even if we don't agree on everything. Previous generations could get away with siloed thinking and perspectives, but that way of living is outdated and if we don't prepare our children to thrive and diverse spaces, they will be left behind.

If our kids are going to have a shot at authentic cross-cultural relationships and camaraderie, they need to be willing to get to know people who think and believe differently. Not just know them in passing but know their stories and the stories of their people, the stories that have torn us apart and the stories that bind us together. We must ready our children to be active participants in this diverse democracy. That means that our kids need to grow together in real life, in their books, and across their lessons including and especially their history lessons, even when those lessons are hard.

"We must ready our children to be active participants in this diverse democracy."

This reminds me of something that the poet Langston Hughes wrote in his autobiography The Big Sea. He said:

“Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books in the wonderful world of books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas.”

There's something to be said about our children having the opportunity to read about suffering in a way that allows them to be one step removed from what is actually happening. It gives them a chance to safely examine the way things have been and why and how they impact the way that we're all living today. 

An Opportunity to Know People

So I'm not an academic or a researcher or a historian; history was the least inspiring class I took in school and the only advanced placement exam for which I received no credit. Dates, battles, generals another round of dates all to be memorized and regurgitated on command. I was so thankful to leave all of that behind as I progressed into adulthood. But all of this changed when I began to homeschool, as I read aloud from the books on our schedule something slowly shifted, I didn't immediately recognize the sensation, but eventually I had to label it for what it was; enjoyment. I was enjoying the history lessons, in spite of myself, I was intrigued with learning how the world we know today came to be and was especially delighted by the stories of people who lived, loved, and lost in another time. I began to see history as an ongoing inquiry of an epic story. And when I progressed from history as a subject to be tolerated to history as an opportunity to provide windows through which my children could know mankind, my energy and efforts grew. I decided to approach History simply as an opportunity to know people.

"I decided to approach History simply as an opportunity to know people."

I began asking not which events were missing from our timeline. But whose voices longed to be heard. I saw that diverse perspectives were missing but in the beginning, I felt really stuck between knowing I wanted more and feeling inadequate to provide it. It became clear that I'd prioritized my efforts to teach my children about all the wildflowers and beautiful birds at the expense of all the wild spirits and beautiful people. And from that point change came easily. If we're truly to approach history as an opportunity to know people, we need stories. The power of story draws us into the sights sounds motivations and thoughts of the age and isn't that what history is all about? History contains hard stories. They're hard to read and sometimes hard to hear and yet the stories are still worth being told.

Approaching conversations about today's complicated societal issues through the lens of History can help our children understand the causes and inherent difficulties or complexities of today's racial conflicts. It also provides some safe distance from which our children can explore human behavior while making connections to our world today. Not only can history give context to what our children are seeing and experiencing but it can also help them make choices about how they engage with others going forward.

We have a unique opportunity to guide our children through this learning in ways that extend beyond the bounds of formal academics or traditional books or the way things always have been. Regardless of the general foundation that they receive through their scope and sequence of popular homeschool curricula or things we even put together ourselves. We can step outside of all of that and help our children really dig in. We get to be by their side as they grapple with and make sense of their world. In fact, we can join them on an incredible exploration of our collective epic story right smack dab in the middle of the living room.

An Expansive Life

So I want you to understand I'm not talking about a unit study here. I'm talking about inclusivity as part of a lifestyle. I don't mean just for a certain time period where it's easier to include people of color, but I mean every day and every week through all the years of your child's education, and if you decide to integrate honest history into your home and family culture you should do so with the understanding that inclusive storytelling and diverse stories aren't something to be incorporated just for a single season or even a just for one year.This way of living requires an ongoing commitment to expanding your child's world so that he will find solidarity easy to come by. 

There's certainly ample room for studies on the history of specific people groups and cultures, I use them regularly. But the overarching message can't separate people of color by making white the default and everything else a special study. And this message is not just for white parents because when it comes to education white is inadvertently the default in many people of color homes as well, ask me how I know.

Historically, it has been difficult to find quality resources highlighting the experiences and perspectives of people of color. So many families, including my own, resorted to using what was readily accessible despite its lack of diversity. Availability is steadily improving but even so, now that I'm aware of how important representation is for my children and for your children, I'm often compelled to create my own materials. Approach your integration of colorful voices and history from a place of immersion and connection rather than analysis and pure academic study. We don't want our children to be controlled by their feelings, but we also don't want to sanitize and rationalize so much of what they're learning that they begin to approach others with a perfunctory expression of sterile togetherness. Relationships rely on informed understanding but they're also issues of the heart.

Compartmentalizing history is an ever-present temptation. It's easy to remain shallow or play it safe. But that's not what brings people together. It doesn't help us raise children with a nuanced understanding of where we are and how we got here. Inclusive history will come alive for our kids when we intentionally allow it to flow into the natural rhythms of our home life. 

How to Diversify the Feast

So where can we best diversify our history lessons? Well, the short answer is everywhere, but specifically we can look at our nonfiction books to begin with. Typically in most cases, we often tend to have some sort of spine from which we are learning or something that's giving structure to our time period as we're reading with our children. I personally have not found a spine that executes on or delivers the fullness of what I think our children deserve in terms of inclusive learning. So that doesn't mean that I don't use any of those books, but I would say that you can't rely on them exclusively at least not yet. Maybe there's something there that I don't know about or something that is in the works, but for now most of the books that we use may be good in terms of helping our children frame or to give form to the time period, but they're not enough. 

I often rely heavily on what I call topical nonfiction books. These are usually smaller, though not always, they're usually shorter books on a specific aspect of history and it most often will be related very narrowly to a specific group of people. So in my home a lot of those are related to Black History. So for instance in the 1900s, we would read have a topical nonfiction book about the you know, Great Migration. We're gonna have a topical nonfiction book about the Harlem Renaissance, about the experiences of black people during the Great Depression, what they did and how they lived during World War I and World War II. So I don't have a book that encompasses all of that but I have found individual books that can be intertwined and integrated in with chapters of the spine that make that part of History more realistic and honest.

Aside from our traditional nonfiction books that are giving form to the time period we have the opportunity to diversify through historical fiction. And this is probably one of the most delightful ways to add additional voices and experiences because there are so many options. In fact, some of you have heard me talk about the fact that historical fiction can't be the only place that we add experiences of color or voices of color because so much of the historical fiction featuring the stories of people of color is traumatic. It's full of tragedy and trauma and those stories are so important to tell but that shouldn't be the only story. We have a lot of options in that category though.

Another category are biographies.  So, very easily choosing that your children read a biography written by autobiography written by or biography written about a woman or a person of color. That's just such an easy way. I like to use a lot of picture book biographies in our home for a few reasons, one because of availability. There are many more people our children can learn about through picture books than they can through chapter books because the chapter books just don't exist to the same degree. So that's one reason.  The other reason is just for the sake of time. I mean, I wish my children can read full chapter book biographies of so many people because they're so rich and do such a great job of putting people in the time and place in which they lived. But we have a finite amount of time and so picture book biographies allow us to learn about more people in a sweet or beautiful way. But also those chapter book biographies are important because we can live with that person for a long period of time. So, when you're choosing your biographies for the year think about who your child hasn't heard from who do they need to hear more from you can dial that up or dial down what you think they're getting enough of elsewhere in that category. 

And then even beyond our books. Some Charlotte Mason families don't talk about going beyond the books, but we're gonna live on the wild side here and say that there are documentaries that we can watch and films, videos that help to place diverse voices into the time period in which we're studying. There are performances in our local communities. And when we travel that's been a big part of what my family has done, seeing performances. We saw a one woman show on Mary McLeod Bethune. We later saw a one-man show on Frederick Douglas. We've been to plays and musicals and other performances, storytelling, oral storytelling at festivals and at certain historic homes during special days. Those are all excellent ways to add voices of color to what you're doing with your history studies. 

And finally field trips. Those are big. I don't know. We don't really call them field trips at home. But just so you understand I'm saying leaving the house, going somewhere intentionally. Outings and rabbit trails are an integral part of my family's lifestyle. These cultural festivals, special events, demonstrations, reenactments, visits to landmarks and museums, these are all part of the regular rotation and I treat these opportunities as part of the main course not just nice to haves or extras. Because these are the things that peak my children's interest and breathe life into our inclusive historical explorations throughout the year. We've made many lasting memories while chasing these little adventures and all of my kids look forward to them. And also these are the things that help me add in details, ideas, and information where sometimes the books that I really wish existed or that I really wish I could find don't exist.

Finding Places and Resources

To have identified many great opportunities people often ask me. How do you learn about all this stuff? It's very simple I set up a specific email address and then I use that email address to sign up for the newsletters and mailing lists at our local historical societies, museums, cultural arts centers, community centers, ethnic organizations, special interest groups, the library, historic sites, national parks, state parks and travel websites. So I didn't want all that flooding into my regular inbox because it's already scary enough on its own. So periodically I go to that email address and I go through the relevant newsletters and emails and note dates for activities and excursions that I know my family will enjoy and I'm open to all sorts of engaging opportunities, but I pay special attention to the things that give my children the opportunity to learn from people of color, because those are so much harder to come by. 

If your family enjoys traveling, consider taking a road trip to discover a different facet of History. Over the years, we've enjoyed exploring the complexities of American history, for example, while visiting the former homes and plantations of past presidents and other prominent families throughout history. Some of my friends have questioned the wisdom of our road trips to places like George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. I think there's a fear that by visiting these estates where some of our country's leaders held humans captive against their will that I'll be perpetuating the message of heroism without facing the realities of how these men and their families lived but that can't be further from the truth. I don't shy away from human complexities with my children and there's no better place to explore the nature of man than on the porch of a slave cabin resting on the property of some of our country's most esteemed leaders. 

My children are learning to grapple with the that history doesn't fit into neat boxes because people are messy and the organizations running these properties have quite frankly done a better job than I ever could of giving an honest portrayal of flawed humans. I especially recommend signing up ahead of time for specialty tours that focus on the lives of the enslaved and other specific aspects of the properties. I appreciate the rich conversations that these tours ignite in my family and how they bring our books to life in an incredible way. And be sure to make time for the incredible gift shops at these historic sites because they always contain exquisitely curated diverse book collections filled with titles I've never seen elsewhere.

And be sure to include visits to places that specialize in telling the stories of people of color in their own words. Smaller history museums like the African-American Panoramic Experience or Apex Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, the Pocahontas Island, Black History Museum and Petersburg, Virginia. The DuSable Museum of African American history in Chicago and similar facilities are often staffed by passionate historians who work hard to preserve the stories of their people. 

And there are also more prominent museums like the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American history and culture in Washington DC that really provides a unique opportunity to see a wider breath of black experiences across centuries. Wherever you travel be sure to check the national register of historic places to find out about intriguing sites that may be nearby not far from the Smithsonian Museum is the Charlotte Forten and Grimke House born free to activists parents in 1837 Charlotte Forten was part of Philadelphia's Elite black community. Forten was a prominent abolitionist and women's rights advocate who battled racial and gender inequality. 

Other landmarks like Fort Mose historic State Park in Saint Augustine, Florida, provide insight into forms of resistance, which is typically ignored or glossed over in traditional history lessons. At the site of the first legally sanctioned free black settlement in the territory that would become the United States the small on-site Museum houses artifacts and information on the history of the unique property. So, whether our children are being taught at school or at home, chances are that their history curriculum is not wrestling with all of the areas that are most important to your family. It's unlikely that our kids will naturally be led down a path that includes the fullness of people of color and the relationships between various cultures and ethnicities through time. The lack of intention and resources in schools and some traditional homeschool programs can be frustrating. But the truth is that our children's growth and character are ultimately our responsibility. 

Our Responsibiliy

So home is a place to initiate learning and build relationships, but it's also a place to correct wrongs and fill gaps and part of the allure of home lies in its power to provide. "Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history." This quote attributed to historian Carter G. Woodson warns of the consequences of a limited view of History. By integrating book learning with real-life experiences, we're able to help make honest history come alive for our children. Hearing multiple perspectives on related and disparate topics lays a foundation of historical context and understanding that our kids can continue to build upon for their entire lives. We are teaching them to seek out and listen to an amalgamation of voices as they study the past and experience life today and this level of engagement and interest is what invites our children to care.

"We are teaching them to seek out and listen to an amalgamation of voices as they study the past and experience life today and this level of engagement and interest is what invites our children to care."

Alongside the calling to share hard history with our children, lies a responsibility to lead them with hope. If our kids walk away from our homes feeling like things always have been and always will be hopeless then we've completely abdicated our role as loving guides. Honest history is both necessary and heavy, but heavy doesn't have to mean ugly. There's beauty tucked between the pages of every story even if it's difficult to spot right away. When I share the history of black people in America and throughout the world with my kids, I strive to balance our honest discussions with heavy doses of that beauty. I recognize that there's pervasive background noise an ongoing thread of struggle in the complicated stories of all people and the black community is no different. My drive to search deeply for another frequency, one of joy and hope, is not an attempt to disown the pain of my people but rather an acknowledgment that there are experiences worthy of celebration woven into the unique fabric of every culture.

We are our ancestors' wildest dreams and though we bear the weight of their tears, we also carry their resilience and laughter inside us. Learning the hard truths about the past doesn't always manifest in outward happiness, but embracing the fullness of our stories can bring lasting inner joy and contentment and that's what I want most for my children and yours, too. 

Art

As I've sought to balance tragic history with beauty within our home. I've colored our days with art, music, and poetry that represents diverse thought and work and gifts and experiences and ideas. These are some of the easiest ways to bring culturally rich learning into an already colorful home. I use these forms of creative expression to help my kids cultivate and appreciation for the varied ways that people tell their stories. 

So let's dig in and listen to a few examples that I want to give for how this can happen within your own lessons. So let's take art for instance. So, if we look at art, music, and poetry through the lens of the tools that we discussed earlier, direct instruction, adjacent  instruction and, indirect instruction, it will be easy for me to give examples of how you can take these ideas and diversify the feast in your own home. 

So an example of direct instruction when we think about art would be studying the work of artists of color. We have three terms a year one of those terms you pick an artist of color and you study that person's art the same as maybe you pick a woman because often we are studying, exclusively, the work of white men and a lot of cases. So this year coming up with the Alveary you have two artists of color to study and one of them is a woman and that's just really remarkable. That's an example of direct instruction. 

Then you have adjacent instruction. That would be like introducing related pictures from artists of color to a non-diverse picture study. So you might be picturing, you might be studying traditional artist and you will take a picture that a person of color has done and put them together in the picture study after your child's had a chance to study the original picture and you can compare and contrast and there are many examples of that. I know you may be thinking well, how am I supposed to know, a quick Google search? That's the same way I know, because I was in school with you. I don't know these things inherently either but I found so many examples online and it's been a really sweet thing. 

And an example of indirect instruction under the category of art could be sharing artistic styles and mediums of artists of color with your children as they pursue their own art lessons or handicrafts. And I'm gonna give an example of that later on. 

Music

So let's talk about music: direct instruction would be studying the work of a composer of color. And adjacent instruction, an example of adjacent instruction, would be sharing compositions from people of color that are notably similar or different from the musicality or style of your chosen composer for the term. So you're bringing another composition alongside what you've been listening to and saying, “Okay, well this person was either composing during the same time period or maybe much later or earlier and these these this work share some similarities or is very divergent, yet created at the same time.” Those types of things. You're not studying, you know, the fullness of the other composer or artist, you're just bringing alongside and saying like there are other people doing things like this now or back then and it just helps to broaden the view of your lesson. And then for indirect instruction with music, an example would be sharing versions of him or folk songs sung by people of color or sung in a style this the way that they're singing is a way that people of color often sing.

So some of you guys have heard me tell the story before but it's it's about the heart behind the Heritage Hymn Study on my website. Where that that study came from this perfect example, so I had been using links to hymns that I found online and various homeschool curricula and lists and all that and it was great and I printed the words and we were learning the hymns and we would play the link and we would listen. And I couldn't help shake the feeling that like, I know these words. I have never heard them sung like this and I was dealing with it myself and one day my husband walked into the room while we were all singing and listening to this music and he stood behind the kids and he went like, “What are you doing?” Because he also was like, that's not how we sing this song and I realized then that I was trying to put my family into this like box for the simplicity of having it already done. “Just click the link” you know, but that link didn't represent the culture of my home and my family and so I said, you know what guys let me just turn this off for a second and I did a quick search on YouTube and I played the song the way that my husband and I had grown up hearing it, and my kids lost their minds. You would have thought they were like at the concert of the year and they were just clapping and they were so excited and they were like instantly into it and I was like, "that's called gospel music," so though the words are the same and I want them to know that their variety of people were all praising and worshiping in our own ways. But we are all saying the same thing. We are all holding the same thing in our hearts. So, you doing that from there, I went beyond gospel and we started listening to Bluegrass and Country and Jazz and all that and that's what Heritage Hymns is. But that type of thing that type of indirect instruction, it didn't change the song, it didn't change the lyrics it just changed the interpretation or the experience of how I presented it. 

Poetry

And then finally we have poetry. So, direct instruction would be to read about the lives and work of black and brown poets. And an adjacent instruction example would be to pull a poem with a similar theme or style from a poet of color and read that alongside your study of whatever traditional poet you may be studying at the time or a very famous poem you may be studying at that time. And then indirect instruction would be for you to select recitation pieces from poets of color. So in that case, we're not necessarily studying their lives and and all that but it's just you're just putting their words into your children's hearts and minds.

Bible, Geography, Handicrafts, Language

So our time together today is limited. So I really focused on history and the lessons that present the most opportunities for diversification, but the truth is that every subject presents opportunities to root our children in their own cultures and in each other's cultures. So, for example some other opportunities are Bible. You can include images of people of color when you're showing imagery or studying biblical art.

Geography, this is one of the most obvious places to infuse people of color and how they live. Geography’s the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. So that's both the physical properties of Earth's surface and the human society spread across it. So, geography seeks to understand where things are found and why they're there and how they develop and change over time. And I find that many of us in the Charlotte Mason World tend to focus more on the physical geography with the Earth seasons, climates, atmosphere, soil, streams, landforms, oceans, maps, and less on the human geography, the distribution and networks of people and cultures across the Earth. And I understand that tendency in some ways because physical geography is just easier to teach and learn, but it's the human geography that turns hearts. So let's make sure that we're giving it the attention that it deserves. Mason wrote that, “The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and to furnish the imagination with pictures.” I think that's so beautiful. 

So what about handicrafts you say? Well, what does that have to do? How do you diversify that? I usually research a little bit about our activity and share stories of the people who used the skills passed down through the generations. Sometimes, I can connect a handicraft directly to a specific family member of mine because I recall seeing them do it. But more often I'm relying on the cultural idea behind the process. In other words, it could be something I know our people did or just something I think they may have done based on things I've heard and read it's not a science for me, it's really again a matter of the heart. 

So for example, we explored the work of quilting guilds by reading about the Gee’s Bend quilts made by a group of women and their ancestors and Gee’s Bend, Alabama. We then visited a folk art exhibit at our local History Museum featuring exquisite quilts that once ignored, are now recognized as some of our countries artistic treasures. And then shortly after that, it just so happened that we were able to attend the Atlantic Quilt Festival where my children could speak with women whose work was displayed in many of them being women of color.

It's through these experiences that quilting has become a family interest. My oldest completed last year the top of her first piece an ambitious queen size quilt for her grandmother that took her nine months to finish. And as I recently shared a Boston Globe article with my kids about the centuries long tradition of narrative and social commentary quilts within the African-American Community, new ideas sprouted. The journalist explored the idea that narrative quilts are like historic documents and I couldn't agree more. That idea connects my kids and what they're creating during their handicraft time to other people who are still making the same things just further watering their roots.

And another area where we can Infuse diversity is in our foreign language studies. Charlotte Mason said,

“Is there one subject that claims our attention more than another? Yes, there is a subject or class of subjects which has an imperative moral claim upon us. It is the duty of the nation to maintain relations of brotherly kindness with other nations; therefore it is the duty of every family, as an integral part of the nation, to be able to hold brotherly speech with the families of other nations as opportunities arise; therefore to acquire the speech of neighboring nations is not only to secure an inlet of knowledge and a means of culture, but it is a duty of that higher morality (the morality of the family) which aims at universal brotherhood; therefore every family would do well to cultivate two languages besides themother tongue, even in the nursery.” ~ Parents & Children p.7

So, when learning a language our focus should not just be about the mechanics of language acquisition the pictures we use, the stories we provide, the songs and imagery we put before the children. All of these aspects of our language lessons are opportunities to share our own culture or perhaps the culture of others in some way.

And finally, we'll look at reading practice. Even our reading lessons present opportunities for our children to see themselves and their neighbors reflected. Most traditional early readers feature animals and/or only white people, especially the older books, and that's not an issue. The problem comes in when those are the only books we put before our little ones as they're learning to read. Because while the words may not change either way, images are powerful communicators, and we need to make sure that the materials we use are communicating the messages that we intend to share with our children through the years. 

An Authentic Meal

So as we wrap up today, I want to point out that a diverse feast is not a second rate version of the real feast. It's not a plan B for people of color or those who are different than the mainstream Charlotte Mason family in some other type of way and it's not a watering down of what Mason intended. A diverse feast is the authentic meal served on the table in a life-giving home. Limited, all white interpretations of Mason's philosophy have cheapened the meal to one of a processed list of acceptable books, songs pictures, and poems meant to be a one-size-fits-all approach to what is supposed to be a living, breathing, beautiful thing. Passionately pursuing a diverse feast that works for your family is an enlightened choice for parents and teachers who desire a more authentic, intentional path to raising children who feel valued and who thrive as passionate open-handed lovers of people.

I wish that I could stay and talk in more depth about all of this because I love it, but our time today is coming to an end. If you'd like to read more about curating a diverse and inclusive home environment, including extensive details on books as mirrors and windows, digital media usage and selection, teaching hard history, language acquisition, embracing joy in your own culture and others, and so much more, please check out my book called A Place to Belong: Celebrating Diversity and Kinship in the Home and Beyond. It's available in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook wherever books are sold, and you can learn more at APlacetoBelongBook.com. You can also find me online at Heritage Mom and on Instagram and Facebook at Heritage Mom Blog. It was an absolute pleasure speaking with you today, and I hope that you were able to gain a lot of insight and practical help from our time together. Thank you.