Marcee Hinds is a history and social studies teacher at Barton Academy for Advanced World Studies, the first public school in Alabama. The school reopened in 2021 and currently serves grades 6-9.

Earlier this month, Hinds was awarded “Outstanding Teacher of American History” by the Alabama Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Hinds will be honored by the state DAR in March and considered for the national award as well.

Hinds was born and raised in Mobile and has received degrees from the University of South Alabama and Spring Hill College. Here, she talks about her love for American history, how she approaches teaching history and how readers can support students.

Questions and answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.

You mentioned how special it is to be recognized by the DAR when your specialty is early American history. If you could talk more about why you enjoy teaching early American history so much, and what it means to be recognized for this award.

This is one of my favorite stories when I talk about teaching, because my want and my love of history goes back a long time. I’m one of those nerdy kids that at five years old, my parents took me on a family vacation to Williamsburg, Virginia. And I was immediately absolutely entranced with the old houses and the people in costumes. And that right there became kind of a starting point for me, I became a history nerd as a very young child. My paternal grandmother, and my mom actually kind of fostered that love of history me, they would take me to historic sites, museums, that was that was our idea of fun. And they fostered that love for me. But there was something about the early American period that I always had an interest in. I was the American Girl doll generation, like that first generation. I don’t know how familiar you are with those.

Oh, I’m familiar.

Felicity was my girl! There was something about that period, as an American, and having that ability to share our founding. How our country was created from I don’t want to say nothing, I want to be more eloquent about it, let me see if I can rephrase this. Getting to share that determination and that fortitude of the founders, and not just the founders, but all the people behind them, the average person. I just think it’s fascinating to tell that story, and to share that story.

Education has really been kind of shaken by the pandemic, and everything that’s happened. How does it feel to be a teacher in the classroom today? Maybe that’s a loaded question.

A lot of people think that the job in the classroom is simply you come in, you teach the students, they leave your class, you assess them, and that’s it. Teaching is much more than just what people see on television, or what they assume, walking in the classroom, spurting some information and moving on with your day. These students need a lot from their teachers, it’s not just their support when it comes to their schoolwork. They need social, emotional support.

Especially over the past couple of years, with everything that’s gone on with COVID, and just the general discontent of the world, we have to offer a lot more to our kids than just being the teacher in the room. And we have to be willing to have our doors open and be there for our students, because sadly, for so many of these kids, they don’t always have adults in their lives that are there to do that for them. So, when we say that we wear a lot of different hats, we really do. A kid can come in one day saying, “Hey, I don’t have this assignment done.” And it can be because something beyond our control at home, that we as adults would never want a child to have to deal with. That’s the big part of teaching that so many people don’t understand. And that’s why sometimes I wish that people can have the opportunity to walk in the shoes of teachers. They think it’s so easy just to come in and manage the classroom. Come on, come see what it’s like. Because you’re more than just managing kids and their grades. You’re managing them as growing, blossoming adults? We want them to be good, well-rounded kids. So, it’s a lot more than just one dimension when it comes to the classroom.

History has become such a charged topic, I think, in political discourse. There’s been controversy about the Department of Archives and History in Alabama, and this concern about critical race theory, and how we teach slavery and some of the uglier parts of history, American history in particular. How does that inform your teaching?

It does inform my teaching very much, because it’s a constant attack on my subject matter.

In the classroom, I don’t get a lot of pushback from what I teach. My kids seem to be pretty open minded. It’s coming from behind the students, the pushback comes a lot of times, it’s from adults, because they’ve had these narrative pushed on them for so long, that this is the mindset about how we teach things, or we shouldn’t teach these tough topics. And it’s hard for them to reconcile, the adults, that these things really happened.

That’s the way that I have to approach it with my students, that these things really happened. We can’t hide from them, we can’t reconcile them. But we learned from those mistakes, so we don’t make those same mistakes again. A lot of times I teach this in the perspective of civil rights, I just went through the Civil Rights Movement, and Alabama is a hotbed of activity for that. And I talk about the generations, and I’m very honest with my students about looking at, say, your family life. And I think back in my family life, how it’s changed generationally, people’s mindsets from, say, my grandparents and to my parents who grew up in the middle of desegregation, but were always very open and honest with us about things, and were always so great to us about who we brought home, was never judgmental. But I think about their parents, my parents’ parents, and maybe their mindset about it, and how generationally, it gets better, because these behaviors are taught and these mindsets about racism, and who’s better than who, those are taught behaviors. If we can look at the past with a clear mind and understand this was bad, and it happened. But if we can positively change moving forward, that’s how we honor these people. We make the better generations better than what they had before…

I have kids asked me difficult questions all the time. And we have to just go to the root, to the source. I tell my students all the time, source material is where you go to, if you really want to know how things happened. History books are great, but look at the sources, where they came from, look at the actual documents with the time period. That’s where we’re going to find the truths about it, not someone’s interpretation of that.

But I’ve been very fortunate to work with a great administration. And overall, I’ve really had great parents that are very supportive. Like I tell my students, I’m not here to teach you how to think, I’m here to teach you how to think for yourselves. So that’s the biggest thing that I always approach in my classroom, religion, politics, topics of racism, slavery, we have to talk about these things. But you need to learn how to think about this for yourself.

That’s another thing, to this idea of indoctrinating students. I laugh all the time. I’m like, if I could indoctrinate my students, I would indoctrinate them to get them to turn their work in on time. That’s never my intent as a teacher. Again, that’s what we’re constantly fighting, from the outside. But personally, for me, it’s always been nothing but support from parents, administrators.

How can our readers support the children in their lives?

Encourage them to do activities off of their devices. Make sure that they’re staying active that they’re involved in extracurricular activities. Now, as a parent and an educator, by no means load their plate down to where they can’t breathe. But let them know that there is a greater world. My daughter picked up violin this year. And that has been a huge shift in her mentality, because she’s so intrigued by that. Having this instrument her hand versus having that phone in her hand, she found something she wants to do.

Encourage their talents. If you see something, if they love to read, encourage that love of reading, I can’t encourage mine enough to read. If you see that they love to draw, encourage that. Anything that they find interest in this outside of that realm on the phone, encourage it because you never know where it can lead them to.

I think about my little sister who always loved to doodle and draw and was always getting in trouble in school for wanting to doodle and draw and her artwork. She had that one teacher, actually who is now my art teacher at the school that I work with, that encouraged that love of it. Now my sister’s an art teacher. So you never know what those little talents and interests they have, where they can go with it.