Amend the Monuments! Retelling Reconstruction

Sharing student work warms my public historian heart I also love when the work we do runs parallel to the national conversation about history.
We investigate challenging topics in 8th grade social studies but we also strike a balance.
If I were to tell you that students were going to design a history park to help their fellow Americans re-learn the hidden history of Reconstruction you might be puzzled. Hopefully you'd be curious and with 8th graders curiosity is all I need. They stuck with me through this project and their final product showed creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills. They used primary source evidence and engaged in some urban planning. They all found joy in this process. When is the last time ANYTHING about the history of America's Reconstruction Era after the Civil War got you excited about history?

Grounding: Our essential question for the unit: Did Reconstruction give power to the people who had felt powerless?
We always ground our projects in an anchor text or menu of texts. We read and annotated: Separate Beginnings about freedom colonies in Texas, The Other '68: Black Power in Reconstruction - at various reading levels on Newsela then we watched Many Rivers to Cross Episode 3.

Skill Building: We annotated, learned to source evidence and draw conclusions

Assessment: Every student annotated the Reconstruction section from a 1940s textbook with the intention of arguing with the text using evidence from our anchor texts. 
I pulled excerpts from this American History textbook and students were assessed through a silent conversation - again using text evidence to argue with a text, while building on each other's answers.

Transfer of skills: The 1940s textbook demonstrated the power of education and of biased history. We watched a short video from Vox on the history of Confederate monuments. We also watched Titus Kaphar's TED talk in which he advocates for amending monuments.

Primary sources: iCivics has a fantastic interactive DBQ that tells the story of the Freedman's Emancipation Monument in Washington D.C. Based on three primary sources, we answered the question: Who gets to decide the meaning of a monument?

Career Connections: We watched a video about public spaces and then developed criteria for a good public space by reading what urban planners think about when designing public spaces. (Urban planning has a predicted 6% job growth rate in the next decade)

The project: Our client, Frederick Douglass, asked in the 1870s for another statue to be added to Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. that showed the active role freedpeople played in emancipating themselves and claiming their freedom. We loved the Mary McCleod Bethune statue added in the 1970s but wanted to tell the hidden stories of those forgotten to history. We discoved that through voting, education, hard work, community-building and resilience, Black Americans claimed their equality.
Students redesigned Lincoln Park as a public space where visitors to Washington DC could learn and play, come together and connect. 

Relevance? I discovered that my vision for a history park is actually happening in Chicago. I worked for the Chicago History Museum for three years and their history trail will undoubtedly be fantastic. https://www.chicagohistory.org/history-trail/
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