Webinar On-Demand: '1619' Impact on Educators and Instruction

Part of the 1619 Impact Showcase, including "1619 Impact Through Community Engagement," and "1619 Impact on Students and Classrooms.” 

In this educator panel from The 1619 Impact Series, grantees Abigail Henry (The 1619 Project Teaching Lab), Deborah Bertlesman and Valerie Reppi (The 1619 Summer Institute), and Dr. Kimberly Ferrell and Maha Casey (Cultivating and Elevating Consciousness) present projects that engaged other educators with 1619 materials and resources to inform their curriculum and instruction. View this webinar to learn more about the transformative learning spaces they curated for other educators.

Key Highlights:

• As a part of her presentation on The 1619 Project Teaching Lab she facilitated, Henry reflected on the work she did to support a Black deaf educator working with deaf students, “She talked about how, [she’s] good at teaching hard-of-hearing students, but no one is really assisting [her] on how to teach Black students more about Black history, given their needs. And so what I did was on that very last day, I created a short lesson on the history of Black deaf people and then I also made a connection to Isaac Weddard, who's mentioned in Nikole Hannah-Jones' opening essay on democracy. His story has really captivated me, the way in which he was blinded just a few hours after returning home and serving in World War II. We looked at the ways in which Black people have shown resilience, despite having disabilities, and I just learned a lot about Black ASL [and] the double marginalization a lot of deaf Black people experience, and it's made me think more deeply about how to better support them, their students, and their needs.”
• Dr. Kimberly Ferrell shared on behalf of the Cultivating and Elevating Consciousness team about their process creating a campus-wide lecture series to engage their full community with 1619 themes and materials. “We collaborated with the student organizations, academic departments, [and] local advocacy groups to broaden outreach and create an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere to encourage participation from all members of our campus community… We started with a strategic plan. Then we created a larger committee to help create a kickoff conference to draw in large numbers of students, faculty, staff, and community members as an investment to the overall project of a campus lecture series...”
• “We wanted to define what anti-racist inquiry means in teaching practice, which is not something that is often addressed in the literature,” shared Deb Berltesmen in her framing of the goals and objectives of the 1619 Summer Institute project. “We see a lot of work about anti-racist practice, right? We see a lot of work about inquiry, but often when people are talking about anti-racism, it still is like, let me teach you about anti-racism and giving people definitions and facts and information, but not always necessarily engaging in inquiry-based work. So we wanted to figure out what that meant. We spent time doing that through the 1619 project, then teachers built lessons to implement in their classrooms."