Roots: Teaching the African Dimensions of the History and Culture of the Americas through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

FAIN: FV-50148-07

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4625)
Joseph Miller (Project Director: March 2007 to June 2009)

A five-week summer seminar for fifteen school teachers on the African context of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The 2008 version of ROOTS updates successful Seminars (2004, 2006) and proposes to enable teachers to pursue original research and/or develop curricular materials on trans-Atlantic relationships involving Africans in the 16-18th centuries (the "era of the Atlantic slave trade"). It focuses on the human strategies in Africa of engaging Atlantic commercial impulses, the human experiences of uprooting, isolation, and eventual enslavement for those taken across the ocean, and the human meanings and memories of Africa among the survivors in the Americas. The 15 participants will integrate these humanistic perspectives, and the most current work on both Africa and the African-American, into their own projects during the seminar in Charlottesville, VA. Planned outcomes include the production of curriculum materials so Seminar participants may teach these subjects more effectively and develop presentations and perspectives to offer colleagues in broader professional contexts.