Teaching European Colonialism

Posted on August 18, 2020 Updated on June 10, 2021

by Georgia Brown

This summer the AGSL K-12 Fellowship went virtual! Our Public Services Librarian worked with four awesome teachers in the Milwaukee area as they developed curriculum for their upcoming school years. To see the projects and lesson plans, check out the AGSL’s Resources for Educators.

My name is Lukas Wierer, and I am a culturally responsive teacher leader in the Milwaukee Public Schools.  I currently teach Ethnic Studies, Restorative Practices and Justice and You at Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education.  Obama is a K-12, but I teach in the high school, which is about 400 students, of which 98% are Black. The unit that I created will be used in my two sections of Ethnic Studies and was focused on European colonialism, specifically the impact that European colonization has had on formerly colonized nations.  Throughout this unit, AGSL materials were used primarily as a way to show understanding.  For example, I created an ArcGIS StoryMap (European Colonialism) that tracked colonial timelines for six European countries: Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, the Dutch (Netherlands), France, and Germany.  Students were asked to examine the timelines, watch accompanying video clips, then, using the AGSL maps, they were asked to connect that content with the given map.  I did identify a couple of images of statues/monuments that honor explorers whose “discoveries” were responsible for the resulting colonization of indigenous peoples.  I also found a student article from the Black student newspaper, Invictus, entitled “Distortions of Colonization” which will be a good way to show a different perspective on colonialism, specifically the connection to exploitation that has emerged out of global capitalism.

In terms of how I view this unit helping my students, it is part of a sequence.  We begin the year by learning about Africa before European arrival, specifically how advanced Africa was economically and politically.  This unit will follow immediately and give students a better understanding of how Africa came to be exploited not only for its human resources (through the slave trade), but also for its land and the natural resources that would enrich the colonizers.  With these two units as a foundation, we will be able to further examine the role that colonization and global capitalism played in the formation of racist ideas that stick with us today.  Although the transition to a virtual classroom will present challenges, I have taught Telepresence for the last two years, so I am not totally unfamiliar with some strategies, but I imagine for this unit, we will spend a lot of our class time really diving deep into the AGSL maps.  Because map skills are not typically real strong with my students, this is an area that I will want to explore as a group.  The StoryMap and videos should be a little more straightforward for my students.  I look forward to using this unit with my students and continuing to blog about how it went.