Meet the Founder
Sherma A Rismay has packaged several years of research and evaluation into simple, strategic methods for teaching and engaging students in Social Studies. Mrs Rismay earned a bachelor's degree in history and decided to pursue a career in Education. After completing her master's degree in Education she became certified by the state of Connecticut to teach Social Studies to grades 7-12. Mrs Rismay has taught and designed engaging and constructive lessons and curriculum for students from High School and Midde School. The BluePrints came about to expand on the very limited impact in one classroom and needed to package these strategies to be available to everyone. This gave birth to the BluePrints.
Sample BluePrint
On April 30th, 2019 a bill supporting the inclusion of African American Studies in Public School Curriculum (HB 7081) was presented to Connecticut legislatures. The need for this bill stems from a recognized lack of consistent information regarding the contributions of African Americans in the American story. In a sense education represents the final frontier of the civil rights struggle in this country. But new research indicates that the problem may lie in the story itself; because its inherent inaccuracies stem from a time when the Black voice was excluded from the courtroom, the school house or any national forum in this nation. When the restrictions were lifted, the dye was cast and the narrative and perspectives of White Nationalists fixed. The problem with this story, is that the African American identity remains trapped in a continuum of ever evolving forms of captivity in a "caste-like" culture of people who through slavery, conquest, or colonization have been involuntarily incorporated into a society…Ogbu (2003)[1] For nearly a century we’ve struggled to root out discrimination without realizing that it was literally what we were teaching.
The American Story is told from this singular perspective, that White Imperialists captured Blacks and brought them to the Americas to work as laborers, because Whites were unaccustomed to that type of hardship. The voices, opinions and stories of everyone else must be minimized or distorted to maintain this angle. Just as the industries or business men driving this demand for such a large workforce are also generally obscured or ignored. This prevalence of a particular angle is due in part to structural racism, which has attempted to discredit any counter arguments or have characterized Black scholarship as “Afrocentric.” The singularity of the dominant narrative also fails to meet state or national standards for teaching History which requires that students be able to construct and communicate claims using evidence from multiple sources, while acknowledging the strengths and limitations of the arguments. Thus this initiative to include the Black perspective, strives to go beyond the traditional Black subjugated presence and to truly examine the American story from a fresh, democratic and more diverse perspective.
[1] Tuckman, B. and Monetti, D. (2013). Educational psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. P. 143
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