Healing the Wounds

,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.