Kennebunk High School’s Greg Smith teaches an innovative course focused on Black history. Contributed / Matthew Shinberg
Kennebunk High School teacher Greg Smith is taking an innovative approach to teaching race in a new elective course called, “Race in America.”
Through the class, students learn to look beyond their own worldview and turn classroom lessons into community action.
The course primarily focuses on studying the Black American experience through the lens of history and how it has shaped today’s society.
“It’s our best documented case study, and a lot of the structure of bias power structures is based on the structures that were created for Black America,” Smith said.
In a community where the demographic is predominately white, with over 98% of residents identifying as Caucasian, Smith believes it’s important for students to use race as a case study to examine their own lives.
While the majority of KHS students are white, Smith said the student body is still diverse.
“There is an incredible range of backgrounds, opinions, and experiences that are subject to all of these bias power structures that we’re talking about,” Smith said.
The course began as a response to an incident at the school involving race in 2019, when former teacher Rosa Slack, who is a Black woman, left her position at the high school and filed a complaint against the school system after she received two race-based threats from students.
Kennebunk High School seniors Kathryn Manning, right, and Lucia Collin, present their final project. Contributed / Matthew Shinberg
As the school’s Civil Rights Team coordinator, Smith was approached by the administration to teach a class focused on race.
But the course also fits into why Smith said he wanted to become a teacher to begin with.
“I teach because I believe that students are going to help shape the society of the future,” Smith said. “I want the future of society to be well-equipped with critical thinking. This is a perfect area for helping students develop critical thinking.”
The course rounds out with a final project at the end of the year that poses a challenge to students: develop an anti-racist project that would address an issue in a community of the student’s choosing.
The only guideline is that the student has to belong to the community of their choice.
“I never want to get into the ‘white savior’ complex where they’re swooping in and saving someone else,” Smith said. “It has to be their own community.”
This year, a pair of seniors focused on creating a trail not unlike Boston’s Freedom Trail that would highlight the history of the Black community in Kennebunk and Kennebunkport.
The idea came to Lucia Collin and Kathryn Manning after learning about a hidden pew designated for former slaves in a local Unitarian church.
“It’s a really great opportunity for the kids to start realizing that this is not someone else’s history,” Smith said. “We have our own history of slavery, segregation, and double standards. Usually, that is a very impactful lesson for the students.”
The students’ proposal would work in tandem with the town’s “Museum in the Streets” program with plaques marking locations significant to local slave history.
“The first step to solving a problem is recognizing the problem exists in the first place,” the students wrote. “Our project would open new doors of educational opportunity for students and schools.”
While no project proposed by students will come to fruition this year, as the class is simply a learning opportunity and not meant to develop actual projects, Smith plans to work with the Brick Store Museum during next year’s class to come up with a project that would actually come to life.
Something like a Freedom Trail or a history exhibit could appear at the museum in the future. For now, Smith said it is “vitally important” for people to look at the way their lives are structured around them, including in terms of race.
“We can’t say this is someone else’s problem and expect it to be taken away and taken off our plates,” Smith said.
