Tackling an essential question—How do we create learning experiences that support, challenge, and inspire our students to create a more perfect union in Idaho and in America?—educators from the Boise State Writing Project gathered for an institute focused on exploring dispositions of democracy and developed Document Based Inquiries (DBIs) that fit in existing units of study across the curriculum and gave students opportunities to be citizen historians. The project helps teachers and students tell fuller and more diverse stories of our national and state experience—and to recover silenced or untold stories and their implications.
Project Resources
EMPOWER Your Teaching Towards a More Perfect Union This website showcases the work of Idaho teachers involved in an institute focused on Dewey’s notion of conversation and the current cognitive science: our purpose and deep commitment is to foster more open inquiry and dialogue in schools around the issues that have historically preoccupied us as Americans—and more locally as Idahoans. The purpose is to learn to teach and think historically, to promote civic engagement through the humanities, and to appreciate the deep history of American conversations—and of Idaho in the context of national conversations.
Document-based Inquiries Teachers in the institute developed Document-based Inquiries (DBIs) that can fit in existing units of study across the curriculum. DBIs focus on finding a variety of primary sources (including historical documents, interviews, photographs, artwork, and stories) and developing or recording new ones (by creating historical research instruments, conducting interviews, or recording stories). DBIs position students as citizen historians who develop new understandings and then justify and represent them. In this case through the development of multimedia museum exhibits that can be shared in both digital and physical forms. The teaching units will focus on “contact zones” of American history that have played out in Idaho, i.e., on contended topics where different interests and perspectives collide.
EMPOWER your Teaching EMPOWER is a mental model that captures how experts in all fields apprentice learners into expertise as well as findings from across the learning sciences.
The Chicago Area Writing Project focused on rebuilding capacity and programming after the pandemic shutdown. Their project was an extension of a pre-pandemic initiative supporting youth writing for civic engagement with a new focus on empowering teachers to create and share their own writing to make a social impact within and beyond their classrooms. They focused on writing for civic engagement as educators around issues of civic life, writing for positive change in our schools/communities, and connecting the profession of teaching to our wider socio political context.
Listen to this interview with CAWP director Kristine Wilber to learn more about this project along with a short walkthrough of the online guide that was created.
In this special Write Out broadcast you will meet a poet-Ranger team of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument including Alabama State Poet Laureate Ashley Jones, Magic City Festival Earth Poet Nabila Lovelace, and Park Ranger Kat Gardiner. They will share their work with youth and other community members exploring the intersections of poetry, prose and place.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 | A Books-to-Parks Initiative: Books-to-Parks connects award-winning children’s fiction to the real geographic and historical settings where they are set.
During a special Write Out broadcast, Outdoor Afro leader Leandra Taylor led a group of us through a process of creating and customizing journals to use for nature writing. See her presentation below.
In the full video broadcast, you can also hear from National Park Service Ranger Alanna Smith about using journals to also document and explore historical events.
A science notebook is a tool to help you with your own work. What are some needs notebooks help their keepers meet? What can a notebook help YOU (and your students) do?
Join I Was A Kid author/illustrator Karen Romano Young along with teachers and National Park Service Rangers for this special Write Out event focused on making and using Notebooks in STEAM.
Timestamps:
00:00 Presentation by Karen Romano Young
22:58 Park Ranger Kristin Lessard from the Weir Farm National Historical Park introduces the range of science careers and pathways that are available via the National Park Service
26:50 Bridget Ye, a NPS intern/science communications assistant at the NE Coastal and Barrier Network, shares her science notebooks and writing
The Schoodic Institute, based at Acadia National Park, is a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service whose mission is to inspire science, learning, and community for a changing world. Writing and communication is a vital part of the work because information makes a difference, and communication inspires people to think about nature and how they take care of each other and the planet. And with so much misinformation out there, it is more important than ever to create and share good, true stories of science and these require collaboration and diverse perspectives.
Watch this Write Out event with science writer Catherine Schmitt to learn how she approaches her writing and the ways that Schoodic Institute and National Park Service are supporting inclusive science writing. Catherine is joined by Park Ranger Amber Kirkendall from Homestead National Historical Park who also shares about her experience with historical writing, leading outdoor writing programs, and Write Out.
It’s a cold March day in New England. Fifth grade students, families, and teachers, shuffle into the Riverbend Farm Visitors Center in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, unbundling from their canal trail walk with Ranger Kevin. On the trail, they learned about the slow and uncomfortable pace of travel in the 1800’s and how canals were essential, for a time, in moving raw materials and goods to and from the early textile mills along the Blackstone River.
In this room, they will experience another harsh reality of life that accompanied American innovation– the brutal working conditions of adults and children laboring in America’s textile factories. The room is set with four assembly line workstations, each equipped with a stack of construction paper, one ruler, one letter stencil, two markers, an ink pad, and a “quality approval stamp.” Here, students role-play as mill workers in the fictional “Slater Stencil Company.”
Students are counted off in groups of five, and they take their places at each of the assembly lines– one cutter, one stenciler, two colorers, and one quality approver per station. Ranger Mark, who is role-playing the Slater shift manager, instructs students to produce high quality letter tiles using the materials provided in the most efficient way possible. As students get the hang of this piece work process, Ranger Mark bombards them with demands to work faster, work harder, and work better–– even while he fires workers off their lines and withholds wages (paid in company scrip) due to the company’s alleged financial troubles.
Park volunteers who have been lurking in the room with parents and teachers hand out fliers about labor organizing. They tell the workers that they don’t have to put their own needs behind those of the shift manager and the mill. They float ideas about better working conditions and better pay. They talk about solidarity with those workers who have been fired. They call for a work stoppage and enlist the remaining workers to form a picket line chanting, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”
Connecting With and In Our National Parks
Over the last year, the Science in the Park Grant, funded by the Ganz Cooney Foundation, supported partnerships between The National Park Service and The National Writing Project. Locally, park rangers from The Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park, faculty from The University of Rhode Island Harrington School of Communication and Media, and teachers from TIMES2 STEM Academy in Providence, RI partnered to design place-based science learning experiences for young people and their families.
The overarching goal of this partnership and the resulting programming was to cultivate the next-generation of Blackstone River stewards. This pilot program sought to raise youth awareness of the BRW’s historical, socio-cultural, ecological, recreational, and economic value as well as to prompt ethical, action-oriented approaches to conservation. To realize this goal, we designed a series of immersive science learning experiences for elementary school students to undertake with their teachers and parents in the BLRV park. These activities included walking and mapping existing mill villages, designing and building cardboard box mill villages, role-playing factory workers on an assembly line, testing the soil and water of the river to understand the environmental impact of industry, and using design thinking and simulations to generate solutions for removing environmental waste. These immersive experiences provided opportunities for young people, families, and teachers to connect science and technology to social and cultural concerns and to practice participatory, community-engaged science and science writing.
Schools, Factories, and Efficiency
The American Industrial Revolution was born in the Blackstone River Valley which spans from Worcester, Massachusetts to Providence, Rhode Island. Entrepreneurs like the Browns and Slaters bought land at key points along the Branch and Blackstone rivers to harness their extraordinary water power. They built both the textile mills and a series of all-encompassing villages for the workers who would labor in these mills. In the span of a decade, the nature of American life was radically altered as families moved into mill villages and learned the pace and time of assembly lines and shift work as opposed to the pace and time of the seasons and the harvest.
During this same time, the character of American schools was changing, too. Rigorous scientific management principles, born on the factory floors, were integrated into schools. Following the assembly line model, school administrators sought to break down the mammoth task of educating a rapidly diversifying public into smaller actions that could be performed by a differentiated school workforce. Students were divided into grade levels, and in the grade levels, students were further differentiated by academic achievement. Each task or action could be measured, analyzed, and studied to find the most productive means to reach a desired end, and, ultimately, schools and teachers were measured by their ability to efficiently produce capable workers for the industrial marketplace.
“School is a factory. The child is the raw material. The finished product is the child who graduates. We have not yet learned how to manufacture this product economically. No industrial corporation could succeed if managed according to the wasteful methods which prevail in the ordinary school system.” –E.F. Shapleigh, 1917
Over a century after Shapleigh advocated for a factory approach to education, we are still dealing with this legacy of industrialization in educational programming. This is true in both formal and informal learning contexts. Schools continue to place unwarranted value on standardized testing and incrementalist “growth.” Similarly, informal learning institutions such as museums and parks all too often take a one-size-fits-all approach to educational programming. You know the drill–students watch the video, take the tour, eat their lunches, and exit through the gift shop. These visits focus on historical or cultural content delivery as opposed to designing participatory learning opportunities that focus on learner interests, authentic inquiry, and place-based connections with nature, history, culture, and others in their communities.
Connecting Learning
The national conversation about education, however, is shifting. The public is less concerned with “ achievement” as defined by standard test scores and more interested in questions of equity, engagement, relevance, and schools as spaces to imagine more democratic futures. We are no longer training students to do piece work on factory floors; instead, we are cultivating creative problem-solvers who can generate their own ideas, communicate and collaborate with others, and adapt to rapidly changing workplace, home, and civic contexts.
As purposes change, so should practices. To think about how we design responsive learning contexts that build individual and community capacity, we can turn to the Connected Learning framework. Connected Learning is a research-based agenda that helps educators in formal and informal contexts to reimagine learning in a participatory culture. Based on learning principles that privilege student interest and passion and peer networks for academic, economic, and social achievement, Connected Educators design experiences that are:
Openly networked, where responsibility for learning is claimed by people and institutions beyond formal schools;
Production-centered, positioning learners as makers, not just consumers;
Designed to foster shared purposes, including opportunities for intergenerational making and learning
The Ganz Cooney Foundation spark grant provided us a unique opportunity to connect our National Parks as key partners in science and technology learning. What’s more, it provided the National Parks an extended opportunity to work with teachers and university faculty to design and test innovative science literacy programming. At BLRV and other sites, this work expanded the programming repertoire as National Parks have traditionally focused on historical and cultural education and interpretation. And while building these inter-organizational partnerships is never easy or efficient, they are essential in designing transformative learning experiences that thread through young people’s in and out-of-school learning.
Early in our partnership building, we spent time mapping our assets across organizations. For example, we identified physical spaces across the BLRV park nodes which were conducive to organized outdoor learning; identified rangers who had particular expertise with the history of innovation, with the mechanics of the water wheel, with soil and water testing kits, etc.; leaned on Americorp Vistas like Tammy Boyd (without whom this project would not have been possible) who had extensive experience with science curricula development and project planning; and tapped particular park volunteers who might be interested in facilitating different activities. The elementary school teachers identified curricular priorities, learning challenges, particularly in their engineering curriculum, as well as timing opportunities. They chose to focus on fifth graders who were participating in standardized science testing and scheduled field trips around testing sessions so that students would experience science as something more than a set of multiple choice questions. University faculty capitalized on their expertise in science and technical writing as well as experience in designing Connected Learning environments to promote open-ended inquiry and engagement. Students were presented a menu of options for the kinds of experiences we could offer in the park, and they, too, identified their interests and priorities, helping us to develop a responsive programming plan.
In this work, we recognized young people and families as active knowledge makers– using the tools, technologies, and thinking practices of community-engaged scientists. We designed provocative programming like the toxic rice challenge and assembly line simulation to activate emotion as a key component of transformational learning. And it was clear from student and parent responses that we struck an emotional chord. Students wrote passionate persuasive letters to Ranger Mark arguing for the changes they needed at the Slater Stencil Company, and each time the bus pulled into the park and Ranger Mark came out to greet us, they pointed and exclaimed,
“Hey, mistah! You’re the one that fired me!”
Parents and teachers who joined Uxbridge trip also shared their reactions to the assembly line simulation, noting the currency and relevance of this experience. Labor disputes among unionized teachers, non-union school leadership, and the city were taking center stage at that time, and students were struggling to understand these tensions. During this time, parents, teachers, community members, and administrators engaged on a weekly basis in open discussions and debates about working conditions and the future of the school. Somewhat serendipitously, the assembly line programming provided a historical lens for understanding labor organizing and the difficult but necessary negotiations among stakeholders.
Connections and Missed Connections
One of the most challenging aspects of this partnership was bringing parents and families into full participation in the park. In this high needs urban school setting, families found it difficult to take time off to attend events and we failed to understand that effectively communicating with families means more than finding the appropriate media such as Facebook pages, emails, texts, or fliers sent home with students. It also means attending to language diversity and making communications, invitations, and programming information accessible to families whose primary language is not English.
Despite these barriers to access, families did attend and participate in the Science in the Park programming. We were excited to see parents taking leadership roles in facilitating activities, especially the toxic rice challenge that prompted students to consider the delicate nature of removing toxins like heavy metals from the Blackstone riverbed. In this activity, student groups were matched with adult partners– either parents, park rangers, or teachers– and challenged to remove a bucket of rice from a “toxic zone” using only ropes and therapeutic stretchy bands. Participants were challenged to keep all body parts out of the 5’ “toxic zone” radius and used design thinking prompts to figure out how to collaborate with their team using only the materials provided. This activity proved quite a challenge for classroom teachers and students; however, several parents were quick to think of design solutions, and despite language barriers, shared their engineering prowess through hands-on instruction and technical illustration. For us, this underscores the importance of designing activities that incorporate direct practical experience as well as multiple modes of meaning-making and communicating knowledge for diverse audiences.
From Lines to Networks
As our program year draws to a close and we reflect on our work in this grant cycle, we are considering the value of thinking beyond linear models for learning in our institutions. Assembly-line thinking served its purpose in 19th century factories and schools; today, however, it serves us better to think about education as a series of networked experiences. Networks criss-cross time and space to bridge school, home, and community contexts as well as indoor and outdoor classrooms. Networks enable us to travel together on sideways paths that cut across content areas and disciplines as well as to imagine learning opportunities that cross generational, cultural, and institutional divides. These networks cannot be produced on an assembly line. They can only come about by connecting our interests, curiosities, dreams, and desires which are always already linked to places and the people who inhabit them. This is the crux of connected teaching and learning, and it has been a pleasure to practice it with others in our National Parks.
“National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”–Wallace Stegner, 1983
Little Rock’s Central High School, located in the middle of Arkansas’s capital city, is known for its rigorous academics and high achieving students. The school’s stunning Gothic Revival architecture has earned it the title of “the most beautiful high school in America.” But, Central High School is also distinguished as a National Historic Site because of the school’s important role in the nation’s fight for civil rights and equal education after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education. The brave efforts of the Little Rock Nine, the first African American students to integrate the school, are still widely known, in part due to Will Counts’ Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalism of Elizabeth Eckford’s harrowing walk through an angry mob as she tried to enter the high school.
The Little Rock Nine (Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Thelma Mothershed, Jefferson Thomas, and Terrence Roberts) were not the only students to participate in the civil rights movement. Historical records show us that youth also participated in the marches from Selma to Montgomery, the sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, the wade-ins at Biloxi Beach, the pray-ins in the Birmingham campaign, and the bus rides during the Freedom Summer. Teachers, principals, and students joined lawyers, doctors, railroad workers, beauticians, clergymen, bricklayers, housewives, and people of every background to fight for equal rights.
How might we use this history to empower our students with the knowledge they need to affect positive change in their own communities today?
Connecting with the story of Little Rock Central High
When Little Rock Writing Project (LRWP) director Greg Graham heard in early 2018 that the National Writing Project and the National Park Service were offering mini-grants to support local writing project sites connecting with National Park Service sites in their area, he knew that the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site offered an ideal opportunity for such a connection. With support from the NWP national office, Greg began to form a relationship with the staff at the site.
Greg also knew former LRWP director Heather Hummel (a creative writing professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock) provided a logical link between area teachers and the Little Rock Central High School story. When Heather moved into the Little Rock Central High School neighborhood, she started digging into local archives to learn more about its history. The research turned into poems like “Fact of a Hand-Sewn Child-Sized Klan Robe,” and “Elizabeth Eckford’s Walk Toward Central High School,” both of which were nominated for national prizes. The research also began to change the way she taught creative writing. She worked with her students to curate a digital resource, Black Lives Matter: A Poetry Reader, which featured contemporary poets responding to the Black Lives Matter movement, including work by Rita Dove, Juan Felipe Herrera, Claudia Rankine, and Danez Smith. The next semester, it served as the textbook for her course on the poetry of protest.
Greg and Heather met one day to discuss possibilities. While sharing a plate of steaming dumplings, they got fired up by the idea of bringing teachers to Central High School to learn more about the stories of the Little Rock Nine, and plan out ways to infuse their classrooms with more deliberate action around social justice issues. The story of the Central High School desegregation crisis provides our local teachers and students with a profoundly important narrative for how students have changed–and can continue to change–the world for the better.
Greg and Heather knew many teachers were thinking, like they were, about how to bring social justice issues into the classroom. However, they also discovered that many local teachers hadn’t visited the Central High School National Historic Site, or considered using it as a teaching resource. They wanted to change that. As a result, they arranged a day for teachers to gather at the Central High School National Park Museum to map out individual plans for integrating a social justice unit into their curriculum for the following year. The workshop was open to all teachers in the area who wanted to develop a plan for integrating social justice into their teaching. As part of the day, participants explored the Central High School civil rights museum, toured the Central High School Historic Site, and heard the captivating storyteller and park ranger, Randy Dodson, tell the story of the desegregation crisis.
We All Have Skin in the Game
In the Central High School museum, there is a quote by the Little Rock Nine student, Melba Pattillo Beals, who said, “Each morning, I polished my saddle shoes and went to war.” It is a heartbreakingly powerful image: a girl polishing her shoes the way a soldier might polish his boots. If we can learn the history so that we can tell it in a way that we embody it, our students will feel it, and understand it, in a much more personal way. Artifacts like Elizabeth Eckford’s photograph, or bits of dialogue like Melba Pattillo Beals’ statement about her saddle shoes, translate history into a multidimensional story. Resources like the Central High School National Historic Site make this research fairly easy, and online archives, like the Will Counts Photography Archive, can provide a wealth of documentary materials.
The trick is that the artifacts should feel tangible. An object that you might hold in your hand, or a photograph you find in your grandmother’s attic, for instance. A single line of dialog that wakes you up. If the artifact is too unwieldy, or too abstract, it’s too hard to hold onto. You want to look for artifacts that make history feel close for a moment, and become something personal.
If students take those artifacts and build something with the information they have learned, it will clarify those possibilities even more. Students might work together to create a Tiki Toki Timeline, or develop a self-guided historic tour of a neighborhood, like the Arkansas Civil Rights History Mobile App, or even a creative project like a video poem–perhaps one inspired by Cortney Lamar Charleston’s “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” Ideally, the learning projects do double the work if they can be shared in some way with others, displayed in the community, or made evergreen so that future students can add to it.
In The Activist Learner: Inquiry, Literacy, and Service to Make Learning Matter, Wilhelm, Douglas, and Fry suggest, “They (the students) need to recognize that the issue framed in the existential question is something socially significant and that they personally have ‘skin in the game.’ This means not only knowing that they are affected by the issue, but also knowing they can participate in better understanding and addressing the issue.” A concrete learning experience like our visit to Central High School can remind us that we have skin in the game, and it can create a bridge to possibility. And that makes the work of the change-makers become real–for the students and for the writing they produce. Then, collectively, we might begin to wonder and challenge ourselves: What other possibilities can we imagine?
Respect
During our time working together, the teachers came to the conclusion that learning about social justice was ultimately connected to learning about respect. Learning about respect is equalizing. It can also clear a pathway for better outcomes. In The Reckonings, an essay collection on justice, Lacy M. Johnson reflects, “Someone once told me that his grandmother told him that an injustice is anything that gets between a person and their joy. I don’t know if that covers all of what an injustice is, but I like the idea that justice is anything that makes way for joy, that makes the condition of joy a possibility again.”
The question is, how do you teach respect in the classroom? This was the question we asked the teachers at the end of the day. In order to puzzle it out, each of us wrote for a while, trying to define respect for ourselves. Then we shared our definitions, and worked together to build a collective credo. “Respect is ground zero, the starting place, the jumping off point,” the credo declares, “Respect is a verb. Respect is recognizing we are all human and we all have a story.” (You can read the entire credo and writing prompt below). Each participant left the workshop with a curriculum plan and a small stipend to purchase educational materials from the museum bookstore.
We also left feeling inspired. Emily Hester, an eighth grade English/Literacy facilitator reflected on the day and said, “It gave me the fresh ideas and perspectives that I need to push through and make these final months of the school year meaningful.” We agree. At the end of the day, we had found our call to action, and we all felt hungry to hear more of those stories. Mixing history and storytelling leads us toward meaningfully engaged learning and writing, and it provides a way to put the social justice teaching model into action: together, teachers and students want to search for ways to repair what is broken and make way for better.
Dream days of fond delight and hours
As rosy-hued as dawn, are mine.
Love’s drowsy wine,
Brewed from the heart of Passion flowers,
Flows softly o’er my lips
And save thee, all the world is in eclipse.
There were no light if thou wert not;
The sun would be too sad to shine,
And all the line
Of hours from dawn would be a blot;
And Night would haunt the skies,
An unlaid ghost with staring dark-ringed eyes.
Oh, love, if thou wert not my love,
And I perchance not thine—what then?
Could gift of men
Or favor of the God above,
Plant aught in this bare heart
Or teach this tongue the singer’s soulful art?
Ah, no! ‘Tis love, and love alone
That spurs my soul so surely on;
Turns night to dawn,
And thorns to roses fairest blown;
And winter drear to spring—
Oh, were it not for love I could not sing!
—Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park, located in Dayton Ohio, celebrates the dual history of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Wright Brothers. As classmates, Paul and Orville wrote in their botany sketchbooks and the Wright Brothers printed Dunbar’s first newspaper. Like the intersection of their friendship, the solar eclipse provides an intersection of writing and science. During his career, Dunbar wrote “A Madrigal” featuring the line, “all the world is in eclipse.”
In this video, Ohio Writing Project director Beth Rimer invites us all to join in the fun and gives a walk-through of the set of resources gathered here:
Blackout Poetry (PDF): Use Dunbar’s “A Madrigal” to create an original poem through blackout or erasure poetry. Share your poem too! You can also blackout “A Madrigal” digitally via the Shared Sky project.
Teachers from the Redwood Writing Project participated in a year-long study group where they discussed scholarship, texts, and resources focused on untold local histories of Humboldt County and California. Engaging with historical archives and institutions, University scholars, and partners from local Indigenous communities, teachers took a deep dive into topics of interest and studied their county while developing a community amongst themselves that crossed grades and disciplines. The project culminated with the creation of classroom units on topics including Civic Engagement and Civic Journalism, Effective Use of Primary Sources with An Emphasis on Art and, Indigenous Funds of Knowledge.
In this interview, Anne Hartline walks through the full set of lessons plans and resources created and published by the team. She provides details about each lessons’ context while also suggesting ways that teachers from different parts of California and beyond might use them.
Related resources
Civic Engagement and Civic Journalism: Lessons and Resources
The lessons in this collection were cultivated from the resources presented during our larger group meetings, and are designed to encourage students to engage with their communities and take an active role in civic life by many means of engagement, including but not limited to, civic journalism.
Effective Use of Primary Sources with An Emphasis on Art: Lessons and Resources
The lessons in this collection are designed to encourage teachers to incorporate primary sources, especially visual images and resources, into their U.S. History lessons. Many of the lessons can be adapted for use in 4th grade through high school classrooms.
Indigenous Funds of Knowledge: Lessons and Resources
The lessons in this collection were developed under the guidance of recognized retired educator Page Matilton who is a Natinixwe (Hupa) member. The development of both units involved extensive research, and both contain a wealth of primary and secondary sources.
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