,When you focus on student voice and ensuring that your curriculum is relevant no project stays the same from year to year. 
As progress is made to take down confederate monuments, rename schools, and rethink the ways our curriculum supports racism, I've been thinking about a project we did back in 2017. I've always been so proud of the work my students did.
We investigated monuments from across the country and asked 
"Why are they still there?"
"Why is there so much emotion and anger about taking them down?"
Our focus for the year was conflict and compromise so our project-based unit focused on understanding the conflict of the war and how it was remembered. Then students worked to create a compromise in the form of a new monument or work of public art.
This unit was almost three years ago but I remember the fantastic work these kids did.
We moved beyond men on pedestals.

• They created doorways for people to walk through
• They used symbols like broken chains
• They created monuments with water for reflection
• They included cotton, rice, tobacco and indigo in their monuments to bring to life the cash crops that required on enslaved people for centuries.

My favorite monument was a table. Seated at the table were a variety of figures. Confederate veterans and union veterans. Freedmen and their children. Visitors were invited to sit at the table too. I don't have a picture of this proposed monument anymore but we talked about the ways conversation can end conflict. I think I suggested questions that could be embedded into the table to encourage conversation. 

In addition to the table idea, this is another student example not because they are perfect or because I did everything right. I'm modeling vulnerability and sharing. I also think I want to try this again this year because this was engaging, relevant, and very effective.

​Conversation would be great right now, wouldn't it? Even a zoom conversation could do us all a lot of good.

As I puzzle through how to create a hybrid-friendly or digital-learning friendly curriculum that will engage students, I'm revisiting these ideas I generated to keep diversity and equity at the forefront of my mind.

Our classrooms are the small spaces Eleanor Roosevelt spoke of where children seek equal justice, opportunity and dignity without discrimination.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places–close to home–so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal dignity, without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Chair,
United Nations Commission on Human Rights

Changing curriculum to tell a more inclusive story begins with vulnerability. Any transformation begins by admitting all that we don't know.
History education is the story of humanity - not the mass of humanity but the experiences of individual humans. It is irresponsible and unethical to look at a diagram of the transatlantic triangle trade and discuss human beings as a trade commodity. An inquiry can start there but it must be only a beginning.
In my eighth grade classroom we start our inquiry with data - the journeys of slave ships and the massive amount of humans stolen from Africa pouring into South America, the Caribbean and North America. Then we look at those ship manifests - at the names, the gender, the ages and the countries of origin. Who were these people? 
Geography is the next step. Africa is a continent, not a country. This one essential fact is a starting point that leads us to explore rich cultures, history, and traditions in addition to physical features.

Context is absolutely essential to history. So beginning with the humans and all they were stolen from, we can investigate slavery on the North American continent. 
We focus on the stories of 8 individuals to understand in what ways they triumphed over slavery. I challenge students to dig into the humanity of each individual to tell their story and understand the perspective using primary sources whenever possible.

Part of that humanity is love. Marriage for enslaved people was illegal but that doesn't mean marriage and partnership did not exist. As an educator who strives to create a brave space I want to model vulnerability and admit that I need to do more work to include nonbinary stories and to not center the narrative on cis-gendered couples. At this point in time we focus on understanding how these individuals, with the support of their partners or motivated by separation from a partners, triumphed over slavery or did not. 
We come across perilous questions when students suggest that "Phillis Wheatly's life wasn't that bad. Her owners treated her well and she wasn't beaten." 
I've found that the best answer for these kinds of apologies for enslavement, however unintentional, is to return to basic human rights: Phillis was kidnapped from her home in West Africa, survived being treated like cargo and was OWNED by another human being for the rest of her life. She was a human being and she was treated like property. She had no freedom to make choices about where to go and what to do and how to live her life because her humanity was denied by her owners.

Simple truths are the foundation of learning. Start with humanity and you can't go wrong. Constantly return to humanity and you build empathy. I believe it unethical to ask students to empathize with someone who owned slaves. We analyze the context that made slavery economical and the ways our government allowed slavery to continue and expand for hundreds of years.

These 16 names are a minuscule fraction of the people who were enslaved in the western hemisphere. We need to say their names. Their lives mattered and still matter today.
Harriet Tubman and Nelson Davis
Caroline Quarrls and Allen Watkins
Phillis Wheatly and John Peters
Solomon Northrup and Ann Hampton Northrup
Robert Smalls and Hannah Jones
Dred and Harriet Scott
​Frederick and Ann Douglass
Joshua Glover and Ann Glover
​
artwork: "Many Hands" by Dawline-Jane Oni-Eseleh available at amplifier.org