Time Out of Joint update - getting ready to roll with The Library of Congress. Teaching With Primary Sources.

It was suggested to us a few days ago that we start publishing blog articles/columns/ideas here as a way to keep folks informed about what we are accomplishing and intending to accomplish. We like that idea. Bey and I are thinking that we’ll start two streams of essays -one about the overall project and ideas about education, and the other a series of posts, interviews, observations coming from the formerly incarcerated members of our team. We are committed to giving voice to formerly incarcerated people and finding ways to make their experiences, good and bad, valuable to others.

More about that part later.

For now, I’ll start writing a series of updates about what we are doing.

The most important development is that we have just received a grant from The Library of Congress. The amount of money is not great - but it will really help with our next step, and of course, having the endorsement and support of The Library of Congress is a huge boost. Not only that, we have now become members of a network of educators who have also received these grants. The grant is called “Teaching With Primary Sources”. What does that mean? It means the library is invested in getting people to use its extraordinary collection of digital resources found at www.loc.gov.

The Library has millions of primary sources and encourages us all to use them, and encourages educators to teach young people the power of critical thinking based on primary source documents. These include letters, photos, paintings, maps, manifestos, memoirs, oral histories, films, music, and more.

This will support our efforts beautifully. One of the key aspects of our project is that it is intellectually ‘open’. By that, I mean that our film is capable of sparking dialogue about a number of topics. Just a few are: Global Shakespeare, Shakespeare & people of color (hats off to Denzel Washington!), prison education, prison reform/abolition, power, manhood, honor, redemption, forgiveness, war, oppression, racism, systemic racism in the United States, family, fatherhood, and of course……love.

We will be assembling a great team of 16 educators. We will teach them our methodology that we call “Shakespeare & Me” (more on that soon) and then break them into 4 teams and each team will dive into the Library of Congress collection and come up with a new study guide that uses primary sources. Right now we are considering these possibilities:

• High School English

  • This one is a broad look at literature and its power to open us up to critical thinking

• High School History / Social Studies

  • Thinking about systemic racism and the role of prisons, and the impact of poverty on education

• Undergrad Shakespeare

  • This one looks at “Shakespeare & Me” - connecting the actions and motives of Shakespeare’s characters to the decisions we make in our lives.

• Undergrad Criminal Justice

  • Considers prison reform / prison abolition / prison education

• Undergrad African American studies

  • Similar to high school topics -but deeper and different Primary Sources

More on all of this soon.

Steve