Teaching about the Impact of the Great Depression

E. Thomas Ewing, Jane Lehr, Melissa Lisanti, and David Hicks

Students reciting the pledge of allegiance, Norfolk, Virginia, 1941. (Library of Congress Prints and Photos, LC-USF34-062482-D.)

The Virginia Schools in the Great Depression project asks how the national economic crisis that began in October 1929 affected the lives of students and teachers in elementary and secondary schools and how these experiences and perceptions shaped the history of the Great Depression (1). Presenting these materials in the format of lesson plans ensures that this project will contribute to both comprehension of content and mastery of skills, including civic literacy, empathy, interpretation, and judgment. Using newspaper reports and editorials, articles from educational journals, photographs of schools and teachers, and statistical reports, this project brings a structured study of events, processes, and people at the local and state level into the United States history curriculum. Focusing on questions of scarcity, the allocation of public goods, and civic engagement also addresses the particular needs of civics, government, and economics teachers by providing materials that illustrate the dynamic relationship between individuals and their social environment. As students work through these materials, they will discover for themselves that opinions and actions matter, and that history is not just something that happened, but rather an ongoing process of engagement, participation, and transformation.

This article describes the content of the five educational modules designed to explore historical questions using primary source materials and tied to curricular content and goals (2). The inquiry-based mode of teaching is consistent with research documenting the advantages of approaching history as a series of questions for exploration, rather than a body of knowledge for memorization. Each module explores broad questions of the Depression’s impact on American, and particularly Virginian, society, while also providing distinct perspectives using selected primary source materials.

Module 1: The Impact of the
Depression on Virginia Public Schools

This module explores the impact of the Great Depression on public schools as a way to understand the sequence of causes and effects that defined this period of American social history. The evidence materials in this module provide competing interpretations of the impact of the Depression on public schools. The gravity of the crisis in education is documented by statements by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as well as articles describing shortened school terms, cuts in teachers’ salaries, and other restrictions on educational services. To offer a different perspective, however, the evidence section also includes editorials which argue that too much money was being spent on schools, and thus the Depression actually resulted in necessary spending reductions. Students who explore this module should come to a better understanding of the effects of the Depression on American society in ways that enrich and complicate the usual textbook accounts of this crisis.

Module 2: Who Should Bear the Burden? Public Opinion and School Policy in the Depression

This module focuses on the ways that educators and the public debated policy responses to the crisis of the Depression. To illustrate this question, the evidence section begins with a cartoon from the Virginia Journal of Education in which the “public” is said to demand that legislators “touch not a single bough” of the “tree” of educational funding. Exploring this question of public opinion and policy about schools, the remaining materials include articles, editorials, charts, and illustrations that provide further evidence of how policymakers, teachers, and the community responded to the perceived need to bear the burden of the economic crisis. The section ends with a series of reports from the city of Alexandria, where plans to reduce the school term in spring 1934 prompted a public outcry, including street demonstrations by high school students, which reveal how this question of responding to the Depression was not just a government matter, but a dilemma that involved the public in the policymaking process.

Module 3: Virginia Schools in Black and White: Enforcing Racial Lines in 1930s

Race was a central issue in Virginia schools during the Great Depression. The system of Jim Crow segregation ensured that education at all levels was rigidly divided along racial lines. African American pupils made up about one-quarter of Virginia’s total enrollment during this decade; in some districts, however, African American pupils actually made up a majority of the enrollment. This presence of a substantial number of African American pupils in the Virginia school system leads students to explore how race mediated the impact of the Depression on public schools. Differential effects of the Depression are supported by evidence materials that highlight the costs of budget cutbacks to African American students, teachers, and schools already receiving an unequal amount of funding, as well as a determination among some African American educators to use this crisis to prove their loyalty, and a growing movement demanding equality in public schools. The latter campaign, which emerged in Virginia during the worst years of the Depression, culminated in lawsuits filed by two Norfolk city teachers seeking equal salaries. These legal cases, which the Virginia Teachers’ Bulletin referred to as “the beginning of the end of the shameful practices that have always been used in most southern communities in the education of Negro children,” paved the way for the postwar lawsuits ending with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. During the Great Depression, the race question in Virginia schools had a long-term, national significance for the ways that Americans thought about equality in public schools.

Module 4: Who Should Teach?
Prohibitions on Married Women
Teachers during the Depression

Gender also exerted an influence of experiences, perceptions, and policy in Virginia schools during the Great Depression. This module questions why more than three-quarters of the school districts in Virginia imposed some kind of restrictions on married women teachers. These districts either did not hire women who were married or else required them to resign when they got married. The evidence section provides materials that allow students to explore the economic factors as well as the social and cultural presumptions that led to these restrictions on women teachers, which in turn had significant effects on their career opportunities and classroom authority. The evidence section includes letters submitted to newspapers that debated this policy, which illustrated the strong opinions that this question provoked. The final document in the evidence section, a comprehensive review of “the status of the married woman teacher,” concludes that the policies imposed by Virginia school districts were unjustified and detrimental to schooling. Recognizing how discriminatory practices were enforced and debated during the Great Depression provides new perspectives on the history of women’s rights in modern America for today’s generation of students and teachers

Module 5: Teaching Civics in an Era of Crisis: Virginia’s Curriculum and the Great Depression

The final module asks how some educators responded to the crisis of the Depression by asking fundamental questions about the purposes of education. In particular, progressive educators, including some influential policymakers in the Virginia Department of Education, argued for comprehensive curricular reform that would connect different subjects and promote a more holistic education for children facing unprecedented social changes. During this same era, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy as well as communism in the Soviet Union provoked new questions about the ways that schools should teach students to think about democracy in a time of crisis. The materials in the evidence section allow students to explore this question of how civics education changed in response to both the economic crisis and the debate on curriculum, with implications for larger questions of what role the school should play in teaching the values of citizenship. By exploring these materials, teachers and students will acquire a historical perspective on the meanings of patriotism while also adding important historical dimensions to today’s civics curriculum.

These five educational modules have been designed and developed in ways that connect the requirements of a standards-based curriculum with the opportunities, excitement, and rigor of an inquiry-based exploration of primary sources. Most importantly, these modules encourage learners to analyze primary sources, the most fundamental skill of historical understanding, with applications at every level of the educational system. Students read about the ways that individuals experienced the Great Depression, they see photographs of teachers and students engaged in the schooling process, and they evaluate the impact of the Depression through data about declining revenues, fluctuating enrollment, and the structured inequality of segregated education. By providing sources in their original format, these materials challenge students to go beyond seeing images, charts, or texts as just decoration and to understand the layers of meaning embedded in a single source. Finally, this project offers a significant proportion of visual representations of quantitative evidence in the forms of tables, charts, and graphs. These include data about enrollment, school funding, teachers’ salaries, and other measures of school access, equality, and opportunity. The range of historical materials serves the project’s overall purpose of challenging students to think about the impact of the Depression while also developing the literacy skills needed to gather information from multiple kinds of sources. Even while serving these instructional purposes, these materials are appropriate for the learning needs of middle and high school students, whose comprehension is enhanced when they are presented with a variety of materials that both complicate and confirm a core body of knowledge.

This project is designed to address teachers’ needs for materials correlated to a standardized state curriculum, while also enhancing skills of primary source analysis, introducing local and regional perspectives, and allowing students to engage in processes of historical inquiry. Both the overall topic of Virginia schools in the Great Depression and the specific content of each module and the selection of primary sources are drawn directly from elements of the Virginia Standards of Learning curriculum in U.S. history, Virginia studies, civics, economics, and government. In the U.S. History curriculum, for example, students must be able to explain “the causes of the Great Depression, its impact on the American people, and the ways the New Deal addressed it” (SOL VUS.9c) By providing materials that illustrate the scope and depth of the economic crisis, the role of public opinion in shaping educational policy, the differential impact on racially segregated schools, the ways that gender shaped perceptions and practices of teachers’ roles, and the debate on the purposes of citizenship training in a time of turmoil. These materials also address the content of the civics, economics, and government Standards of Learning. This project thus allows for the integration of historical materials into the teaching of the social studies more broadly.

We developed this project through an ongoing dialogue with teachers about their need for materials that promote active learning, engage students in self-paced and self-directed learning, integrate content with technology applications, and are available electronically in simple, intuitive, free, and reliable formats. As a result of numerous workshop presentations, regular conversations with teachers, and the advice of participants with extensive teaching experience, the Virginia Schools in the Great Depression project has evolved in directions designed to make it both challenging in its concepts and obvious in its uses, complex in content and simple in application, and flexible in its multiple meanings and reliable in its accessibility and content.

For a teacher seeking resources addressing the question of how the Depression affected Virginians, the modules provide multiple perspectives illustrating the complexity of this question. The evidence materials are selected and arranged in sequences that encourage a deeper understanding of the impact of the Depression on individuals and communities and the range of responses intended to offset, alleviate, or overcome the economic crisis. But the project directors also recognize that this kind of in-depth analysis is difficult in many classroom settings, especially with the pressures of standards testing. The modules, therefore, can also be used in more circumscribed ways. By listing all the evidence pieces separately in two different menus, the project is designed to allow teachers to assign selected pieces of evidence in order to provide a sense of the issues and perspectives, if time is not available to ask students to explore entire modules.

This project also exposes some core issues of history teaching that are not so easily resolved. A frequent complaint from teachers is that the Standards of Learning curriculum precludes the kind of in-depth exploration appropriate for the Great Depression. Concern with the amount of time that teachers and students can give to any topic remains a perpetual dilemma and stumbling block to creativity, inquiry and interpretation in all too many classrooms. We have responded to this concern by designing this project to accommodate a range of engagement levels by presenting easily comprehensible sources and allowing teachers and students to look at selected module documents, but we realize that this constraint is ultimately systemic in the educational system, and not something that new media can address. Because the modules focus on specific issues, allowing for rich and intensive work with sources and perspectives, they do speak directly to the broader content of the standards. By utilizing the modules, students learn mandated general content through careful study of real, complex, and meaningful situations, thus making the modules a valuable and efficient use of instructional time. A second concern raised by middle school teachers is that students have such limited interest in reading that they will disengage from any online resource that has “too much text.” While addressing the underlying constraint is beyond the scope of this project, we have responded to this concern by limiting the introductions, abridging longer text sources without compromising their meaning, and balancing texts with photographs, images, charts, and graphs. By designing this project to meet the needs of a range of classrooms, from the most advanced college preparatory setting to the challenges of high needs schools, we hope that all teachers can find useful resources and strategies that match their instructional objectives.

This project has received positive evaluations from educators. During an earlier presentation of selected primary sources, we received the following feedback from teachers: “If you personalize learning, students are more apt to engage . . . .  Students love local history. Using local stories from newspapers, especially the ones about students are very engaging . . . . I can see the merit in combining these local happenings and events within the context of the larger picture. I think using the local and national in tandem will help in making the milestones stick but bring the stories home.” Following workshop presentations near the time the project was completed, one teacher wrote, “Looks very promising. I can’t wait to explore the site,” while others commented on the site’s potential for promoting a “higher level of thinking,” as a resource “excellent for primary source and inquiry teaching,” and as a project that was “Well thought out—very comprehensive and user friendly.” Teachers have consistently praised the use of primary sources such as newspaper articles and photographs, the introduction of local perspectives on national events, the demonstration of different points of view, and the use of a historical inquiry approach as the most valuable instructional applications. By combining content knowledge with engaging instruction in a sophisticated technology environment, this project has the potential to enhance student learning about the Great Depression’s significance in Virginia and U.S. history. But  it also more broadly addresses the way individuals shape history through their experiences, interactions, and practices.

Endnotes

1. All materials from the Virginia Schools in the Great Depression project are accessible at: <http://www.vaschools.history.vt.edu>. Hosted by the Virginia Tech Department of History, this project has also received funding from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. The views and opinions expressed in this project and article do not necessarily represent those of Virginia Tech or the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

2. In addition to the Educational Modules, the Virginia Schools in the Great Depression project includes a Race and Education in Virginia archive, which provides more than three hundred primary sources, arranged in a searchable data base, which explore in depth the history of segregated schools in the 1930s.