D.C. Educators Present Columbus Trial During National Deaf Education Conference

This year, D.C. educators, Lia Bengtson and Tarja Lewis presented during the 2020 National Deaf Education Conference. Bengston and Lewis are middle school educators at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School, a day school for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students in the District of Columbia. Their presentation, Exploring Hidden Narratives to Engage Diverse Students covers topics of representation and cross-curricular lessons that teach hard history. 

Bengtson and Lewis share:

This helps our students understand historical events, relate to them, and critically think about them. After discussing the book, we head into a mock trial, something we've been doing for the last two years. So our classes work together in this trial to run it. We assign different roles. We talk about the millions potentially — the thousands or millions of enslavements, killings, and other bad events that happened in that area. And we used primary and secondary resources to encourage the students to take two sides of the story in a trial environment.

The presentation features video from their classroom's exploration of The People vs. Columbus, et al, an interactive mock trial lesson by Bill Bigelow from the Zinn Education Project’s Abolish Columbus Day Campaign.