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Getting deep with Tara Roberts!

Becca Horowitz

What a gift it was to hear Tara Roberts in conversation with Ebony! Tara’s stories of diving into history—literally and figuratively—remind us how powerful storytelling can be in helping students connect with the past and with one another.

We know you’ll have creative ways to bring this conversation to life in your classrooms. To spark your thinking, we’ve lined up a few discussion questions below, but don’t feel constrained by them!

  • What background knowledge or framing do students need before engaging with the history of the transatlantic slave trade?

  • Which of the resources (the Into the Depths podcast, discussion guide, virtual field trip, or materials / lessons from OER Project) are you interested to try out in your classroom?

  • How can we help students make connections between Roberts’s work and broader historical themes like global interconnection, resistance, or the legacies of slavery today?

  • How can storytelling, like Roberts’s, help students find deeper meaning in history and connect with the human experiences behind it?

Top Replies

  • +2

    When covering the slave trade it can be easy to lose the human element because of the enormity of the event. Storytelling, like Robert’s, humanizes and makes this more real for students. It was interesting…

  • +1

    I loved Tara Robert's emphasis on the rich lives of enslaved people as PEOPLE, not statistics. The statistics are staggering, but each of those numbers is a person, and that is how we humanize history…

  • +1

    Teaching slavery starts with teaching students that every culture had slavery. The deeper meaning in history is finding the people who fought against slavery and changed our view of slavery (Gregory of…

Parents

  • Before discussing the trans-Atlantic slave trade I give my students a lot of context to explain how and why this trade grew with Africa being at the center of it. I make sure to emphasis first what the trade in enslaved peoples looked like before: that Africa had a long history with the slave trade dating back to the Greeks, that enslaved peoples were trafficked both in East Africa via the Swahili Coast to the Middle East and through the Trans-Saharan trade network during the Middle Ages, and Europeans had a ready access to enslaved Africans because of the trade posts set up by the Portuguese along the African coast, and that enslaved African peoples were a common sight in many Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cities. 


    I then talk about the discovery of the New World and how Europeans immediately began to exploit it for resources. I make sure to emphasize the enslavement and the rapid population decline of the indigenous peoples caused by European cruelty and disease. I explain for the most part white settlement was generally a slow process to the New World especially to colonies that were aimed at growing cash crops and mining. The need of an exploitable labor force fell to Africa and the importation of European firearms to Africa led to the rise of powerful states whose economy relied on selling enslaved peoples to the Europeans. 

    With these factors in mind I have my students use the C&CoTime skills to differentiate by the sheer scale of the trade and the massive loss of life the trade caused simply for profit. It is really important in my mind to emphasize both the statistics and the personal stories if the victims in this trade so the students can feel empathy for the topic and understand its scale. 

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  • Before discussing the trans-Atlantic slave trade I give my students a lot of context to explain how and why this trade grew with Africa being at the center of it. I make sure to emphasis first what the trade in enslaved peoples looked like before: that Africa had a long history with the slave trade dating back to the Greeks, that enslaved peoples were trafficked both in East Africa via the Swahili Coast to the Middle East and through the Trans-Saharan trade network during the Middle Ages, and Europeans had a ready access to enslaved Africans because of the trade posts set up by the Portuguese along the African coast, and that enslaved African peoples were a common sight in many Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cities. 


    I then talk about the discovery of the New World and how Europeans immediately began to exploit it for resources. I make sure to emphasize the enslavement and the rapid population decline of the indigenous peoples caused by European cruelty and disease. I explain for the most part white settlement was generally a slow process to the New World especially to colonies that were aimed at growing cash crops and mining. The need of an exploitable labor force fell to Africa and the importation of European firearms to Africa led to the rise of powerful states whose economy relied on selling enslaved peoples to the Europeans. 

    With these factors in mind I have my students use the C&CoTime skills to differentiate by the sheer scale of the trade and the massive loss of life the trade caused simply for profit. It is really important in my mind to emphasize both the statistics and the personal stories if the victims in this trade so the students can feel empathy for the topic and understand its scale. 

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