3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Maryland had the largest pre-Civil War population of free African Americans who were intent on creating the educational means necessary to maintain their own freedom and uplift. Education and land ownership was tantamount to securing standing in society and to forging an early, even if fraught, sense of social citizenship and its benefits. In this course, students will support the research efforts of a local Maryland school house museum to develop immersive, experiential learning and engagement tools. Drawing on material and documents specific to the museum such as objects, curricular texts, original letters, newspaper accounts, experiences of the first teachers, and contemporaneous accounts of teaching in Freedmen’s schools, students will engage in a speculative history that will serve as the foundation for creative reenactment of freedom education in early 1800s Maryland.