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Curricular Experimentation
     

Vernelle Harris Hall
                                
       

“We taught the whole child while still setting high standards for our students. If a child needed shoes, we would find a way to get them. If a child needed clothes, we would find them. School at that time was unequal but we found a way.”
Vernelle Harris Hall

              
                                     


“The [Staley High School] assembly on Thursday was one of the most substantial proofs that changes are coming quite surely in the work of the school. The occasion was Negro History week and the entire assembly was planned and presented by the pupils. The music showed a growing taste and discrimination, the dancing showed an interest in a new form of group expression, the costuming was effective, the dramatizations were faithfully characterized and in every way this assembly showed enormous growth of the pupils of the school in important social traits. Much seemed to me to have happened to the body of the school since one year and a half ago when I first visited the school.”  W. A. Robinson, Director of the Secondary School Study, from Tri-County News, April 1942

    
     



"Teachers wanted us to be creative and they instilled a sense of respect—from us and for us. We were taught to go to school not just to get a job but to learn—to learn to be creative.”
Theotis Ray Daniels

 

  

   
Theotis Ray Daniels


Beulah M. Carter
 

 

“The project method was important at Staley High School. In fact, there was ‘a project day’ for the entire county when school children would come together and present their projects.” Beulah M. Carter

    
   


Staley High School graduating class of 1946

One dimension of curricular planning that permeated the Secondary School Study was the effort to correlate the traditional subjects into a core curriculum, i.e., to draw out connections among the individual subjects as they were taught in their respective classes. The content was decided through a combination of teacher-pupil planning and teachers’ analysis of students’ needs and interests. While the “project method,” a common progressive education instructional practice of the time, was employed in many classrooms, the curriculum still remained focused upon academic knowledge.

  
   


“Home room was important and quite innovative for that time. The home room teachers would go beyond the curriculum and would focus on us. They stressed academics at Staley, but home room was where teachers talked to us about what was important . . . . to us—our social needs and personal problems. The teacher was there to help us become better school citizens. There was much talk about school citizenship during my years there. Cultural events were discussed and feelings were described. We would even have home room programs where some would recite poetry and others would display their musical talents. Current events would be discussed in home room; World War II was an unnerving time. The homeroom teacher was our guide.”
N. Carolyn Thompson




N. Carolyn Thompson
             

Addie Rose Owens

“Yes, there was student-pupil planning in the progressive tradition. Staley teachers adapted the formal curriculum due to the fact that they veered in order to meet the needs of the child. General health was a good example (and TB was feared). Teachers would begin addressing issues of health when they saw social problems.”
Addie Rose Owens


 
   

“As an elementary school teacher (beginning in 1941), we had very close contact with the Staley High School teachers, especially since so many of them came from McCoy Hill School. I attended Albany Normal School. When I returned to teach, we used the ‘project method’ and other progressive education methods that drew on the interests of the students. We knew that if we found out the children’s interests, they could be taught.”
Vernelle Harris Hall

Vernelle Harris Hall,
3rd grade teacher
at McCoy Hill School, 1941-1949
           
                                 

graduates from the Staley High School Class of 1944
 

During the time of the Secondary School Study, the Georgia State Department was encouraging schools to develop an integrated type of program based on seven persistent problems of living (inspired by Hilda Taba and Robert Havighurst). Staley High faculty planned an integrated program where science attended to the persistent problems of health and, at the eighth grade level, sample units were developed on three specific “persistent problems”: health, citizenship, and earning a living.

           


Alpha Hines Westbrook

“We used a Problems of Living curriculum and taught more than what was in the books. Students had many questions about life at that time—there was much more information needed than mere facts about life, food, and shelter.”
Alpha Hines Westbrook, the Staley High School vocational education teacher during the time of the Secondary School Study
   
                                             

from Tri-County News, April 1942: 
“One of the features being stressed by Prof. Reeves on the older boys in the school at this time is preparing to be cooks and bakers in the army or in whatever place such services may be required. The boys have been enrolled in the home economics class under Alpha V. Hines, teacher in cooking, and are receiving training which it is believed will fit them for service in the Army, Navy or in some other branch of defense work.”


The historical mission of black education at the secondary school level is often described as the tension between a college preparatory course of study and a more occupational-vocational curriculum, a false dichotomy established by the emblematic beliefs of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Participating Secondary School Study sites often configured their curricula to bring together all students and to permit the core courses to serve as an occasion to define community. Further, traditional "vocational topics" such as homemaking were expanded to address general education topics of health and social action (in the classic progressive education tradition of the 1930s with projects focused on community welfare). Specialized courses allowed students to pursue specific academic and vocational interests, yet the core courses brought all the students together in homogenous groupings.

     


“The teachers were trusted by the principal. We were individuals working on our own without too much oversight. And the old books didn’t matter. I taught American history and US government without using a textbook. I knew the Constitution and the Amendments by heart. We drew from current events and from life.” Leroy Williams


  

Leroy Williams
    
                   
                           
                                           

 
     
             
 
     
   

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