Resource Collection February 5, 2025
Expanding Origin Stories, Empowering Learners
The Pulitzer Center connects educators and students to The 1619 Project resources and to one another, expanding and sustaining the influence of a journalistic project examining some of the most complex issues of our time. Our program partners have developed resources and learning models to support educators in expanding student understanding of United States history, developing students’ critical thinking skills, and cultivating empathy and community in their classrooms and school communities. This collection includes units from educators engaging with students at all age levels, elementary school to adult learners. These units demonstrate the many ways including a diversity of voices and experiences in history instruction can engage, empower, and affirm students.
-
Students explore how cultural identity is informed by history through engagement with “The 1619 Project," and ultimately create Altered Books to reflect what stories they think should be amplified.
-
Students explore the power of narrative, learn about the free Black people who established farms in the Adirondacks through primary source exploration, and write their own drafts of local history.
-
Students research significant and often overlooked moments of American history and communicate their findings through art by creating data visualizations.
-
Students will learn about the history of race in the early American colonies, discussing the start of slavery in Virginia and the treatment of Native Americans in New England.
-
Students engage with the history of Black American ingenuity, intelligence, and diligence in their community through a study of Durham's Black Wall Street.
-
In this project-based unit, scholars explore early African civilizations, analyze the history of enslavement in America, and research the impact that abolitionists made in ending enslavement.
-
Students examine the commodification of the labor of enslaved Black Americans, explore their contributions to the formation of American democracy, and examine arguments for and against reparations.
-
Students reflect on histories of enslavement, analyze enslavement systems, and use a Structured-Academic Controversy protocol to argue for how the history of enslavement should be taught.
-
Units
A Children's History
Students conduct research to create children’s picture books about underreported, or historically “erased,” topics in the teaching of U.S. history.
-
Students read historical and contemporary texts. They analyze how the authors reconcile the ideals in the founding documents with slavery, and how they use rhetorical devices to strengthen arguments.
-
Students learn and write about Black history and culture through the lens of Afrofuturism, which creatively illuminates past and present realities, and imagines liberated Black futures.
-
Students create artistic memorials honoring enslaved Africans after exploring the origins and development of the Atlantic Slave War, forms of control used by enslavers, and forms of Black resistance.
-
Students connect themes from The 1619 Project to historical and contemporary stories from Long Beach, cultivating a richer context for personal, local, and national culture and community.
-
This mini-unit reveals hidden histories of the systematically excluded by exploring the geography of West Africa and creating masks in the spirit and essence of West Africa.
-
Through the study of primary source documents as well as the experiential learning in the community garden, students will be asked to reimagine how stories about slavery are told.
