2020 People’s History Curriculum Group Meetings
Caneisha Mills, Nicole Clark, Jessica Rucker, and Tiferet Ani at the February 29 working group session at the Teaching for Change office.
January 25, 2020
Professor Greg Carr, chair of Africana Studies at Howard University and a scholar ally for the group, spoke about the approach he and colleagues used to writing curriculum — outside the textbook — in Philadelphia. He also described the concept of citizenship in U.S. history in light of the #1619Project and this election year. (See video.) This was followed by a group discussion of social justice teaching objectives and curriculum about monuments. The group met at Roosevelt Senior High School (DCPS).
February 22 and 29, 2020
Participants picked one of the two dates to meet in small groups at the Teaching for Change office to share and discuss lessons they were working on.
April 18 and May 9, 2020
The group shifted to meeting via Zoom and shared ways that they were bringing people’s history online. Two of those stories were documented and posted at the DCAESJ website.
Shifting the Curriculum to What Matters Most to Students During COVID-19 by Gregory Landrigan
Reflecting on Government Response to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19: A Distance Learning Assignment by Jessica Rucker
July 11, 2020
The session began with participants creating a collective poem, “What I have learned from the global uprising against racism. . .” Following that, participants selected from among the following small group lesson presentations:
Mitigating the Impact of the Coronavirus on Vulnerable Communities: Creating Policy by Andre Gilford
Resisting dominant narratives lessons: monuments and memorials and their functions and legacies and having students create community art projects by Victoria Moten
Online unit on Akwaeke Emezi middle school book PET by Zo Clement
Racism, Resistance & Resilience in the 1920s: Historical Interpretation by Tiferet Ani
August 22, 2020
Nicole Clark opened the session with a few rounds of trivia, using an online format she developed for her students and their families. (This was so popular that is became a regular opening for the working group sessions.) Then participants chose one of the lesson small groups below to both experience the lesson and give feedback to the author.
Still I Rise by Jessica Rucker. A mini-unit on themes of identity, visibility and representation, power, patriarchy and sexism, resistance, and resilience through a Black Queer Feminist lens. The goal of this unit is to use students’ lived experiences, as well as informational and literary texts, as a foundation to help them understand the impact of male supremacy/patriarchy and sexism and its impact on women, non-binary folks, and men.
Constitution Project Based Learning by Mollie Safran. Students imagine how they would have created the U.S. Constitution differently with a more diverse representation of the people living in America at the time of its creation.
October 10, 2020
Following People’s History Trivia led by Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, participants selected from two sessions:
Writing with Digital Archives by Mary Phillips, who modeled the lesson for feedback. She described it as follows: “Writing with Archives facilitates critical thinking in my course Black Panther Women and Gender Politics. Students interpret digital archives on the Black Panther Party. They are asked to consider the rhetorical strategy related to the author's purpose, target audience, language used, and significance as well as the historical context.”
Limestone of Lost Legacies by Karen Lee and Lauryn Renford. They shared a lesson that will be used in conjunction with a magazine that they produced to tell the story of the five slain teens that are memorialized on the Limestone of Lost Legacies that went up in 2019.
November 7, 2020
Tiffany Mitchell led the group in people’s history trivia, followed by small group discussions of the question:
“How are you shaping your curriculum remotely to highlight the power of everyday people in the struggle for justice?”
Then Caneisha facilitated a dialogue with guest speaker Jessie Hagopian on “Teaching for Liberation and Black Lives.”
(Each member of the group receives a copy of the Rethinking Schools book co-edited by Hagopian, Teaching for Black Lives.)
Caneisha then invited the participants to begin the process of refining the working group’s statement of purpose.
December 12, 2020
Dasia Smith opened the session, welcoming the new members. The group participated in a lesson on COINTELPRO, led by high school teacher and lesson author Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Julita Brown-Dunn talked about her experiences with Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action in years past and invited reflections from participants about their plans for the week in 2021.