This site is designed to foster active engagement with the digital collection, Preserve the Baltimore Uprising. It contains a series of five curriculum sets for classroom teachers, community organizers, camp counselors, and others. The teacher guides, worksheets and supplementary materials provide a basic foundation in the theories and methods of oral history –the collection of first-person stories and accounts that can shed light on the meaning and experience of significant events.
Instructors are free to adapt these materials, enabling students to collect stories on any subject or topic. However, they were primarily designed to facilitate the collection of stories about the causes, experience, consequences, and outcomes of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising and other acts of protest and civil disobedience in Baltimore. Recordings, transcripts, and supplementary materials assembled as part of this curriculum can be uploaded to Preserve the Baltimore Uprising.
Very often, education projects undertaken in class, summer camp, community centers, and local history organizations are limited in scope and impact. Participants learn a skill or acquire information, but the materials they create rarely circulate beyond the classroom. In contrast, this project encourages students, teachers, and community organizers to recognize the contemporary and future use of the stories they collect. Preserve the Baltimore Uprising is a crowd-sourced collection. Local people decide what materials best represent their experiences and everyday lives. The oral histories and other digital materials gathered on the site are primary source evidence that can shape our understanding of life in Baltimore.
The curriculum materials provided here enable teachers, students, camp counselors, community organizers and others not only to continue the collection project but also to define its content, purpose, and value. Together, they can define, explore, analyze, and reflect on the nature of community, the meaning of unrest, and the future of life in Baltimore.
Use the lessons and projects sequentially for beginners. For more advanced students, instructors may choose to implement just one lesson or work at a faster pace by combining elements from several lessons.
