This project shed light on the tragic and often overlooked history of the Tulsa Race Massacre by engaging hundreds of students in studying this period and then creating artifacts and displays to showcase what they uncovered.
A Century of Questions: Student-Driven Inquiry into the Tulsa Race Massacre is a project of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project that aimed to shed light on this overlooked, tragic episode in US history—the 1921 massacre in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Through this project, hundreds of students and their teachers have visited Greenwood’s cultural centers, monuments, and museums, and then created artifacts and displays to showcase to their peers the history that they uncovered.
Resources below are designed to support teachers and students engagement in place-based inquiry, composition, and sharing. Resources can be used to study the Tulsa Race Massacre specifically or used to support place-based inquiry in any local community.
Listen to this interview with educators involved in this project to learn how they supported teachers and students to do this work together.
Classroom Library Suggestions: In the video interview above, Shanedra shares the following suggestions for classroom libraries about the Tulsa Massacre with age-appropriate notes.
A Century of Questions Project Design Resources: In the video above, Shanedra shares the following slides (PDF) and describes different design aspects of this project; highlights include:
Framework for building teacher knowledge:
Building a classroom library:
Using local place as “text” with students and teachers; map for visiting the Greenwood neighborhood:
Supporting students to share their inquiries by creating with a range of tools and technologies:
Knowing Your History: Place, Photography, and Poetry: A multimodal photography/writing activity developed by Shelley Martin of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project. Developed originally for Write Out 2021.
This episode of NWP Radio features a conversation with Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, and the editor of Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them.
A resource created to support the coaching of “Make Cycles” that were part of a professional learning offered by NWP called Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration.
Chad Sansing explores the concept of “Digiship” in this classroom and supports his students in using everyday technologies and materials to rapidly prototype, share, and reiterate solutions to the problems and opportunities they see around them and in their own lives.