Created Equal: Image, Sound, and Story (grant for professional development to help teachers teach civil rights history)

FAIN: GA-250130-16

Jacob Burns Film Center, Inc. (Pleasantville, NY 10570-2232)
Edie Demas (Project Director: January 2016 to May 2017)

Created Equal: Image, Sound, and Story is an interdisciplinary professional development program that trains and supports
teachers as they implement a curriculum designed to inspire middle school students to learn the history of a seminal
moment of the civil rights movement, understand the power of people and the media to advance social change, and
share their own story about racial justice through the creation of multimedia arts projects. Created Equal: Image, Sound, and
Story is designed in collaboration between the Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) and Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS).
As project leader, JBFC will draw on its mission to equip and inspire students of all ages to become active viewers and
inspired creators of visual media. BHS's vision for student-as-historian programming complements JBFC's approach.
BHS will provide teachers with essential strategies, content, and pedagogy to engage students in inquiry and research
with original primary sources. The mentor text will be Stanley Nelson's documentary film, Freedom Riders, about the
diverse group of young civil rights activists—black and white, young and old, male and female, secular and religious,
northern and southern—who took the civil rights struggle out of the courtroom and onto the streets of the Jim Crow
South in 1961. Through additional primary sources and first hand access to leading scholars of the Black Freedom
Movement in America, teachers will be well-equipped to contextualize Freedom Riders against the longer arc of
American history. Students will be empowered as historians, storytellers, mediamakers, and social activists as they
grow to understand how the past and the present are connected, shaped, and shared.