Webinar On-Demand: 1619 Impact on Students and Classrooms

Part of the ‘1619’ Impact Showcase, including "1619 Impact on Educators and Instruction," and "1619 Impact Through Community Engagement.” 

In this educator panel from The 1619 Impact Series, grantees Dr. Tamyka Morant (Community, Herencia Compartida, and Action), Kayla Cato-Piersaint with Norka Blackman-Richards (The Demands of Equity in Higher Education), and Staci Smith with Nia Lundkvist (The Kings' Legacy: 1619 Anthology) present projects that engaged students through direct instruction both during school and in out-of-school settings. View this webinar to learn more about the strategies and tools they used in their work.

Key Highlights:

• In her reflection on the impact of being able to translate some 1619 materials into Spanish and utilize a Spanish version of Born on the Water for her school community, Dr. Morant said, “The use of bilingual resources and visual thinking routines created space for deep engagement and differing perspectives. It also created more equitable partnerships between home and school because home adults now had access to the same information and training as the school adults, and the learning was cognitively demanding for both of them. […] This year, for the first time, we had families present the projects that they created. And it was really powerful to see the student learning and the families learning together about the same topics publicly displayed in the school.”
• Norka Blackman-Richards spoke to the impact of the project on students in the SEEK program, “The summer program has been around for almost 60 years and the focus has always been on math, English, and college advising. Adding The 1619 Project  was an innovation that had never been done before. […] What we found in the end is that students became confident. They were able to tag themselves in a history they didn’t understand before, and now they had a connection to it. They were able to experience pride. […] I feel that I found a missing link. After years of running this program, this was the missing link that I needed to give students that umph to not just move forward into the semester but to move forward with confidence.”
• The 1619 Project assisted the Kingmakers of Oakland team in their goal of helping students dispel myths about slavery. Nia Lundkvist shared, “The rationale behind this was to equip them to combat these myths [about slavery] not only with the truth, but the evidence of the truth to be able to say: I know that myth is not true. I know why it's not true. I know where the true narrative comes from and I can tell you a story that embodies that true narrative, which is where our creative piece comes in.”