Using Stephen Tuck’s scholarship

Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists, and to get her pupils thinking hard about the conceptual focus of change. In facing the daunting challenge of planning a time-hungry, complex enquiry, Osborne realised the power of Tuck’s approach, using the micro experiences of individuals to highlight the macro political and social restrictions which black Americans faced. This article shares the careful thinking behind a series of graphs, devised to plot the process of change both within and across historical periods...