Jordan Collum

I use Reconstructing the South: A Role Play in both my U.S. History course and my African American Studies course where it gets student’s actively engaged and critically thinking. I found that many of my normally disengaged students were actively participating in the discussion.

I love when we can have students travel back in time and try to make tough decisions that those in our most critical times in history had to make, in particular when we can get students to put themselves in the shoes of a much different group than their own.

I also enjoy this lesson because it challenges students to think about their values when asking them can we truly achieve freedom and recovery. Many of my students struggled to make decisions keeping these things in mind, which illustrated the level of importance about the decisions that had to be made. How to to give proper justice to the betrayers and those who have done inhumane things to your own people, but also make sure the country is able to recover and not end up back in another Civil War? It is overall just an awesome lesson that has so many layers to it.