These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers:

1. • How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?

2. • How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?

3. • How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?

4. • Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

“Did Brown really desegregate schools?” This is the question that inevitably is asked when we begin our study of Brown v. Board in my graduate level class, “The History of Education in the United States.” Certainly, it is a valid question, but one that is problematic when one tries to reconcile the goals of the landmark case with the large number of segregated schools that exist today. When students compare how many segregated schools exist today with those of 1954, the simple answer, according to them, appears to be that Brown did not desegregate schools. It is the complexity of addressing this issue that makes teaching Brown a challenge. Pedagogically I should welcome the opportunity to teach such an issue that has no easy conclusion. As a result, it has the power to engage and challenge students in complex ways. Yet, there is a part of me that dreads teaching Brown because I fear that I cannot do justice to the enormity of that decision for the United States in 1954, nor to the significance that it has taken on in the ensuing decades. However, even with these challenges, how could I not teach Brown? From the outset I want to make clear that this is a reflective as opposed to directive piece. I certainly do not believe that I have a lock on the best way to teach Brown. Instead, I would like this essay to reflect my own uncertainty about what is pedagogically most effective.

When I ask students in my educational history and policy courses about the 1954 Brown decision and more broadly about the idea of integration, they recognize that desegregation might be a good strategy to equalize resources but add indignantly that black children certainly do not need to sit next to whites in order to learn. Students of color tend to be more critical of integration than whites, but all have as much difficulty imagining a good integrated school as a good segregated one; all have difficulty imagining the social vision that fueled demands for integration.

Some teaching innovations arise from a combination of good intentions, last-minute planning, and incredible luck. Colgate University hired me in late July 1997 as a visiting professor for the fall semester. As I scrambled to finish my dissertation and move my family, only a few days remained to pull together the syllabus for a course on Race and Education. I wanted to begin this contemporary course with an historical focus, delving into African-American experiences with school desegregation during the mid twentieth century, but could not decide on which of the many excellent historical case studies to assign. The bookstore wanted my order as soon as possible. So I ordered two books—David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road and Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential—hoping that at least one would arrive on time. When both magically appeared on the bookstore shelves a day before the first class, I decided to innovate and revised the syllabus. Half of the students would read Cecelski; the other half would read Walker. Despite some initial confusion, my students began to engage in serious discussions over historical interpretations of school desegregation, demonstrating a level of depth that would not have happened had I assigned only one book to the entire class.

The Brown decisions have become part of our collective American memory. Students know that the 1954 decision ended legalized segregation in elementary and secondary schools and rightly understand it as a benchmark in educational history. However, when pressed for information on the decisions, few have ever read the original court documents and even fewer realize there were two separate decisions, that four states and the District of Columbia were involved, and that the South fought aggressively for years to nullify their effect on school attendance. To teach Brown is to deconstruct simple notions of Civil Rights Movement triumphs and visions of a country eager to right historical wrongs. I incorporate Brown into three of my courses, but for the purposes of this piece I will focus on my Education for Liberation class since I believe that its comparative approach to Brown—as well as the entire class syllabus—teaches the worth of looking at educational reform through a variety of lenses.