Video: Teaching The Role Of Columbus During The Civil War

by Victoria Bailey

COLUMBUS, Miss.(WCBI)—Some Lowndes County fourth graders have taken over the classrooms at Mississippi University for Women this week. Caledonia and Sales elementary students are learning about the history and role of the City of Columbus during the Civil War Era.

Now this history is a major thread in the fabric of America but also contains controversial subject matter.

Subjects like flying the Confederate Flag or should confederate monuments be removed all put history teachers in a sensitive position, especially teaching nine and ten year olds. Gaining a working understanding of that time period is critical. Teachers tell me the key to teaching sensitive subject matters, like these, is all in the delivery.

There are certain parts of the civil war that can make teaching social studies a daunting task but is vital for the students.

” I think that it is an area that does not receive as much attention as it should because every student no matter how diverse they are no matter what ethnicity they are, They need to know about our past just to know how far we’ve come and how to move forward and how critical it is to be sensitive to the diversity that we have here,” said MUW Assistant Professor Of Education Dr. Crystal Hodges.

MUW Assistant Professor of Education April Coleman says It’s important for Elementary Student to learn the history of the civil war, but with multiple perspective.

” We really encourage our students, in teaching history to look at all the different diverse and multi-cultural perspectives that happened. Really we encourage them to go back to primary source documents and look at all the different situations. Focus on making different connections from the past to the present,”said Coleman.

Hodges says a big help to educating is using different teaching method.

“Our MUW senior students using those different approaches, specifically hands on, it’s helping our students to learn how meet the needs of the classroom students and tailoring their instructions to where every student has the opportunity to be successful learning the material,”said Hodges.

Learning the good and bad areas of history is important in preparing a student for the future.
” They are a member of this community and I think to be a productive member in a community you must know where we come from and where we’re going and what our roles are in that. So history is really an important part of being an informed participating citizen,”said Coleman.
The students will complete passport week with a presentation of their final projects show casing the civil war time period.