Conflict in Virginia Places and Past
Every student who graduates from Longwood is required to take a senior-level writing intensive course, either ENGL 400 or GNED 400, both of which are essentially the same thing. The difference is that the topic area for the class varies depending on which (usually English) professor teaches it. There are a considerable number of professors who teach these classes, so the topic could be vastly different from section to section and from semester to semester.
I structured my entire four year plan around being able to take GNED 400 with Dr. John Miller, the professor outside of my department who made the biggest impact on me as a student at Longwood. Dr. Miller co-taught this class with then-history professor now-provost Dr. Larissa Fergeson. We focused on conflict in Virginia over the years and how that conflict has been remembered and has affected relations among citizens today.
What made this class so appealing was the several field trips and guest speakers we had the pleasure of experiencing throughout the semester. Learning about places you could actually see and issues that affect people you can actually meet or might even already know makes the learning experience so much more poignant.
I almost did not take this course when I learned that the topic would be so Virginia-history-oriented; I was beginning to feel that Longwood was coming pretty close to “overdoing it” for me on the Virginia history thing. (Longwood is conveniently located such that Civil War soldiers marched right by the north end of campus on their way to Appomattox where the war officially ended and that the Civil Rights Movement began at the south end of campus at the Robert Russa Moton School where Barbara Johns led the walkout that spurred the Brown v. Board of Education court cases.) Despite hearing a lot about Virginia history throughout my time at Longwood, I still felt that I did not understand much about it. I was fearful of appearing uninformed, uncultured, and also of making a fool of myself because I knew so little. But I quickly realized that these reasons were the exact reasons that I NEEDED to take this class. And I was right.
One of the most interesting topics we focused on during the course was the different perspectives of people with strong feelings–on both ends of the spectrum–about confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. We also role played town meetings and spoke from the perspectives of many different people in different positions and from different backgrounds based on what we had learned about the Civil Rights movement and the education lock-out in Prince Edward county in the ’60s. It made the effects those events still have on residents today come to life for all of us.
We spent a great deal of the semester discussing how monuments, museums, and anything else used to preserve history play a role in perpetuating and shaping public memory and, possibly more importantly, public emotions and relationships among different groups of people today (racial and ethnic groups, religious groups, etc.). As is best practice in education and particularly in CHC classes, in an effort to give us multiple means of expression of what we had learned, one of our assignments was to write a post to add to our class’s blog on the impact a specific Virginian monument has had on public memory. My roommate suggested I research a statue of Abraham Lincoln, my favorite president, and his son Tad that is located at Tredegar Iron Works. To read my post, click the link below. You can explore my classmates’ posts as well by using the navigation options on my post’s page.
