Her Students Asked About Police Shootings. So She Created a Guide for Them.

In the fall of 2014, Patricia A. Matthew’s students started asking her why Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, had been shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Ms. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, didn’t have the answers. So she did some research: How had racial tensions reached a boiling point in Ferguson? She quickly came across news stories and additional research on topics closely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, including differing police treatment of white and black suspects and New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy.

She compiled her research into a two-page handout that started with a list of black people shot and killed by police officers. The handout also listed statistics, keywords for further research, and writers and websites to read for more information. She left copies of the handout on her desk, and taped the two pages on the outside of her office door.

Those two pages eventually became a 48-page course reader that would be shared with more than a hundred instructors around the world. The story of how that happened shows how one professor turned a feeling of righteous obligation into a teaching tool — and a demonstration of how impressionable students often take their fears about a volatile world straight into the classroom.

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Talking about the country’s racial divide was never written into Ms. Matthew’s lesson plan. That conversation arose organically among students who stayed after class to talk to her, even after she posted the handout on her door. At the end of the class, she would hang around, always clarifying that students should stay only if they wanted to.

A handful did stay, Ms. Matthew said, and students who weren’t in her classes would often come into her office after reading the handout posted outside. Most of the time, students were confused, Ms. Matthew said. They didn’t understand how young black men kept getting shot, especially when news coverage revealed the men had jobs and families; some were pursuing an education.

Though most of her students were white, Ms. Matthew, who is African-American, said her students of color were the most curious. (According to university statistics for 2015, Montclair State’s undergraduates are 49 percent white and 12 percent black.)

“Generally speaking, they are trying to understand what they’ve been told with what they’re seeing in the news,” Ms. Matthew said. “Some want to separate themselves from the people who were shot.”

Making the Reader

In between speaking with students, Ms. Matthew shared links to news stories or investigative reports as they were published with Laura Jones, at the time an associate professor at Montclair State, and Lee Behlman, also an associate professor of English there. The group shared links via Gchat, but as more black men were shot by police officers across the country, Ms. Matthew said they felt compelled to do something more.

A few months later, Ms. Matthew and her two colleagues organized a campus event to help people better understand the Black Lives Matter movement, she said. Together, the group also took Ms. Matthew’s two-page handout a step further by creating a 48-page “course reader” on similar topics to contextualize the event.

“We wanted to provide something to sort of give them one way to come up to speed before the event and then a way for professors and teachers to continue the conversations afterward,” said Ms. Jones, now at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

For the most part, the course reader is filled with articles that the professors found on the online community informally known as Black Twitter, not traditional academic papers, Mr. Behlman said.

And the authors are mostly black journalists who straddle the boundary between public intellectual and journalist, like NPR’s Gene Demby and The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, he said.

The articles were purposely chosen to capture and explain what students were already experiencing or were curious about, like ProPublica’s piece on school segregation in Ferguson and a Vox essay on what it means to be a Black Lives Matter activist, Mr. Behlman said.

When an email invitation for the event was sent out, the group couldn’t even attach the reader, Ms. Matthew said. It was too big for the campus server to handle. Instead, the group mentioned the reader in the invitation and told attendees to email if they wanted a copy before or after the event.

The professors emailed the reader to a handful of faculty members who asked for it, she said. Ms. Matthew and her colleagues didn’t think about using the reader after the event.

Then, days after Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man, was shot by a police officer in Tulsa, Okla., in September, the course reader took on a new life. In 18 tweets, Ms. Matthew explained some of the struggles she faces when students ask her about the police shootings. She concluded her tweets by offering to email her course reader to other instructors whose students were asking similar questions.

16. Last year colleagues and I put together a little coursepack I’ll be sharing w/students who are interested. Hit me up if you want it.

— tricia matthew (@triciamatthew) September 21, 2016

Since then, she’s mailed it to more than a hundred faculty members. Ms. Matthew said she had gotten so many requests for the reader that Ms. Jones had started helping her distribute it.

Although Ms. Matthew said it’s too soon to say how the reader is being used, one thing is clear: Students are demanding to learn about today’s continuing fight for civil rights. Students still ask her about the shootings, and she wants to equip other professors to respond to the students’ curiosity, even if it isn’t in the lesson plan.

‘This Additional Burden’

Ms. Matthew said she had never set out to write an academic guide to the Black Lives Matter Movement. She just wanted to give people who attended the campus event additional resources.

“There are scholars and specialists and academics who are trained to curate this sort of reader, and to bring it into a classroom, and I’m not,” Ms. Matthew said. “I thought of it as a resource for my colleagues to refer to and share with their students.”

Deciding on what pieces to include was simple, Ms. Matthew said. The three instructors never held a meeting, instead discussing the reader by email and chat.

Although creating the reader was collaborative and fairly simple, Ms. Matthew and her colleagues were still working beyond the bounds of their job description. Tasks like that are all too familiar to minority professors, who report taking on extra work to support students and faculty of color, usually without institutional support, said Nyasha Junior, an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible at Temple University.

“The problem becomes when there is an expectation of black faculty to perform this additional burden,” Ms. Junior said. “You can’t expect people who are also grieving and also hurting to be the ones who have the resources available to help students.”

Ms. Matthew said she had made sure to list the reader in her annual report on her duties, and singled out her colleagues for the help they had provided. Still, she said she’s lucky, and acknowledged that minority faculty members at other institutions may not have received the same departmental and institutional support that she did.

A Second Life

Tina K. Reuter, director of the Institute for Human Rights at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one academic who received a copy of the reader after she reached out to Ms. Matthew on Twitter.

As a new resident of the Deep South and an instructor in a upper-level human-rights course, Ms. Reuter said she’d found the reader helpful to contextualize current social movements and to field students’ questions.

When one of her classes was covering genocide, Ms. Reuter said, the students asked if the recent police shootings of unarmed black men could be considered genocide. That conversation helped her realize there was a need for students to talk about racial tensions and social justice, even in her international human-rights course.

After perusing the course reader, Ms. Reuter said, she asked a professor in the university’s African-American-studies program to facilitate focus-group discussions outside of the classroom for students. “It seems like there’s a lot of need or the feeling of ‘we never talk about this’ among the students,” she said.

More than just educating her students, Ms. Reuter said, the reader has inspired her to do extra work to help students understand the Black Lives Matter movement and to recognize that all professors, not just minority faculty members, have to do this type of work.

Helene Williams, a senior lecturer in the University of Washington’s Information School, said she’s using Ms. Matthew’s course reader and Twitter thread as an example in her graduate-level course in library science.

She’s also raising examples like Ms. Matthew in her class: How can professional or academic librarians respond to a library patron who’s asking questions about police shootings or the Black Lives Matter movement?

Her class places a heavy emphasis on social justice and equity, and she wants to prepare her students to be able to respond quickly to racial tensions as librarians, whether they make more resources available to library patrons or archive tweets from influencers like Ms. Matthew, she said.

“The students really seem to appreciate being able to talk about these issues and then, in the library-science setting, looking at how they can put this into action,” Ms. Williams said. “I kind of feel like we’re back in the ’60s in some ways, except that now we’re putting it right into the curriculum.”

For now, Ms. Matthew said, she’s happy to create an additional resource for instructors to use or build on, and she’s not sure how or if the reader will have long-term effects.

The reader has made its way to many instructors and students, she said, but one stuck out in particular. After Keith Lamont Scott, a black man, was shot in Charlotte, N.C., a high-school teacher in the area emailed Ms. Matthew for a copy of the reader, she said. In an email thanking her for it, the teacher described how tough the days after the shooting were, but because of the reader, going to school was a bit easier.

“This is its second life,” Ms. Matthew said. “I guess I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for a while, but this is not how I thought it would unfold.”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.