File photo from June 9, 2022. McDaniel High School in Portland, Ore., is one of 60 schools selected to help pilot a new AP African American Studies course. The class has been in the making for the past 10 years and Maurice Cowley is the first educator in Oregon to be able to teach the subject to high schoolers.
Elizabeth Miller / OPB
Across the country, high school students are testing out a new course focused on African American history and culture. Advancement Placement African American Studies is currently being piloted in 60 schools across the nation, including right here in Oregon.
Maurice Cowley is helping spearhead this new course at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland and is currently the only educator in the state teaching the course. He says what makes this course special is that Black history isn’t just a brief lesson, but the entire course.
“This is our lane and we have a whole year to talk about the Black experience,” he said. “We don’t just have to cover it real quick as a microcosm of everything else.”
Cowley currently has 30 students enrolled in the course, the majority of whom are Black. He says for them learning about the seminal moments that shaped the Black experience from a teacher who looks like them has been incredibly impactful.
“They’ve reflected that it’s really nice to learn this history from somebody who’s Black, as opposed to someone who is really apologetic for what’s happened,” he said. “We’re still here and we’re thriving and … it’s good to be us.”
Because this is a pilot course, many of the students taking this class will not be given the chance to take College Board’s AP exam at the end of the year, and possibly earn college credit, depending on their results.
But that still didn’t deter students from signing up for the course, given its uniqueness, according to Cowley.
“African American Studies puts something at the center of the curriculum that is not at the center of any other curriculum,” he said. “People want to know the different parts of our society and how they work together and what their experience has been like.”
For the course, Cowley chose to cover a variety of topics from Mansa Musa, Egyptian empires and the Great Migration, while also incorporating lessons about the Albina neighborhood and the Vanport Flood of 1948 that helped shape the Black experience in Oregon.
Back in February, College Board faced some backlash and controversy when it made changes to the course curriculum after criticism from Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis.
This led to the removal of content from scholars associated with critical race theory, Black feminism, the queer experience as well as removing the Black Lives Matter movement from the formal curriculum.
On Monday, the College Board announced that a committee of academics will review materials and make official changes again in the coming months, after receiving criticism from scholars.
Cowley said that he knew this was a pilot course and expected some changes.
“The people who I’ve encountered at College Board, the people who I’ve known to be part of the process, I’m going to choose to trust,” he said.
Next school year, the pilot is expected to expand to hundreds of other schools, with the first AP exams for this course offered Spring 2024. And by Spring 2025, the AP African American Studies exam is expected to be made available as an option all high school students could elect to take, according to a timeline released by the College Board.
Maurice Cowley joined OPB’s Think Out Loud to discuss the new AP course. You can listen to the full interview here: