Honoring the Voice of Clementine Hunter: A Guide for Comprehensible and Relevant Lessons

Abstract

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 81, NO. 1 | 23 81 No.1 HONORING THE VOICE OF CLEMENTINE HUNTER: A GUIDE FOR COMPREHENSIBLE AND RELEVANT LESSONS By David Campos When I first heard that this BHB issue was focused on counternarrative, I thought of honoring Clementine Hunter. It has been thirty years since her death (January 1, 1988), but her voice—to me, at least—lives on in her more than five thousand pieces of art scattered throughout the world. As I contemplated how to present Hunter to students, I thought about two aspects. First was the core of counternarrative, that notion of voice, otherwise known as the expression of thoughts, feelings, or point of view, and more importantly, how giving voice is allowing a person to express their ideas when they may not otherwise have such opportunities. Essentially, honoring a person’s voice is acknowledging that a person’s ideas and contributions matter because they offer different ways of thinking and knowing, which contributes to unique perspectives on life issues. Clementine Hunter painted her experiences from her memory (some would describe her as a storyteller by way of her art). Of course, historians can help us understand what life may have been like for the grandchildren of people who were enslaved on plantations, but Hunter’s voice (her paintings of life on a plantation as she lived it) offers an authentic perspective on what it was like to live and work in the post-slavery, pre–Civil Rights era. The second aspect I thought about was the idea of making lessons comprehensible and relevant to strengthen student engagement. In this article, my expectation is that readers will learn how they can honor Clementine Hunter (that is, present her voice to students) through a lesson that is comprehensible and relevant. In her book The Power of One: How You Can Help or Harm African American Students, author Gail L. Thompson underscores that African American students are eager for classroom teachers who make the curriculum comprehensible and interesting.1 She and many others espouse that when teachers pique students’ interest and engage them in meaningful lessons that are challenging, students are more likely to invest their attention in the matter at hand and learn. Alternatively, boredom sets in when lessons are comprised of lackluster lectures that require silence and restraint, which can engender disinterest and lead to minimal participation and uncooperative behaviors. In the latter case, hardly any learning occurs. “You are merely teaching to the walls!” Thompson adds, when teachers do not make an effort to design lessons that captivate students’ interests.2 To model how to make lessons comprehensible, let’s use Clementine Hunter as a topic, not only to attract and lure students, but to honor her voice through the medium of her artwork. Hunter was a modest artist who worked most of her life as a manual laborer on a Louisiana plantation before earning fame for painting. To a large degree, her work has served as a documentary on the life and times of plantation servants during the post-slavery, pre–Civil Rights era. Using the materials found in Exhibits 1, 2, and 3—which can be easily reproduced— students can read about Hunter’s contributions to history as teachers use critical thinking questions to guide them to make connections between her life and theirs. More importantly, with the theme of counternarrative in mind, teachers can underscore how giving voice to Clementine Hunter (i.e., exploring her paintings) is a different way of thinking about plantation life in the mid-twentieth century. Making Lessons Comprehensible One important quality of a lesson is that it has to be comprehensible. This means that the lesson and materials have to be clear and easily understood by the students. A comprehensible lesson can be achieved by using techniques that move beyond a lecture comprised of PowerPoint slides. Of course, some time should be devoted to direct teaching where teachers present vital information and define terms, demonstrate skills, explain concepts, use examples and non-examples, and so forth, but the lesson should not be entirely a teacher monologue. Instead, the teacher should create interest and arouse student curiosity by first telling a relevant story...