Created Equal: Image, Sound, Story (Working Title)

FAIN: GA-255479-17

Brooklyn Historical Society (Brooklyn, NY 11201-2711)
Emily Potter-Ndiaye (Project Director: October 2016 to October 2017)

Created Equal: Image, Sound, Story (Working Title) 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 is developed in collaboration between Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and the Jacob Burns Film Center (JBFC) with an aim to provide students with an integrated framework combining historical inquiry and media arts skills, designed to
support them as they read and interpret current events as part of a larger conversation of American culture, history, and progress. This program provides students with the key tools for living an inquiring, investigative life: contextualizing the past; analyzing the present; and inspiring future generations of social justice advocates.
 
The network of pilot year partner schools was initially made possible, and will continue to grow and expand, through collaboration and support from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities’ Turnaround Arts initiative, which brings arts education programs and supplies to a group of the lowest-performing elementary and middle schools in the country. A second year of funding from the NEH will be used to support the development and refinement of the curriculum, implement an impactful professional development experience, develop students’ media arts and history learning and lay the groundwork for national expansion in future years.