 Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us and welcome to our presentation, Teaching Hard Histories for Racial Healing, the Lynching in Virginia curriculum. In our session, we will share the challenges and complexity of grounding our teaching and curriculum and social justice work. And in our presentation, we will explore how the project center student agency and authorship will discuss the role and purpose of publishing content openly and reflect on the importance of sharing our work with a wider community to cut across the oppressive disciplinary silos that make up our current system. So who are we? We are a multi-disciplinary team from James Madison University. The Teaching Hard Histories for Racial Healing project is the culmination of all of our work and efforts, which are in different phases. The initial research and digital scholarship project, Racial Terror in Virginia, is the result of John Luca Defasio's research and teachings on lynchings in Virginia. Throughout that project, Kevin Hugg, director of digital projects, supported the development of the database, the website, and data visualizations that are now being used as the basis for the lesson plans that JMU masters of teaching students are developing. One of those students is Alia Stone, who we hired as a curriculum development project coordinator and as part of the core team. These students were enrolled last spring in a teaching methods course with two college of education faculty, Ashley Jaffe from social studies and Mary Beth Consien from English. As the curriculum project took shape, our team reached out to other library staff for their expertise. Elaine Kay and Nicole Wilson, who are instructional designers, and Kirsten Lodinia, who is a digital project specialist, were added to the core team several years ago. We also work with Liz Thompson, the open education librarian on the parts of the project. Now that you have met the team, let's see how the various parts of the project fit together. This is the visual framework we use to clarify the role of critical digital pedagogy in developing an interdisciplinary project focused on community engagement, social justice, and activism. Throughout the presentation, we will share specific examples of how critical digital pedagogy, or CDP, is leveraged as a framework to make decisions at multiple levels of the project, including course design, team purpose and makeup, finding resources, and developing workflows. Each circle represents an aspect of the work that came together to construct the teaching hard histories for racial healing project. As we work together, it has been critical to honor the labor experiences and needs of the various stakeholders and project requirements. For example, the lifecycle of the racial terror website started well before the curriculum project and continues to develop at the same time our team is growing the hard histories project. By centering the teaching hard histories for racial healing project without erasing or consuming the individual circles, we can better demonstrate how our team has used the tenets of CDP to make choices for each individual circle as well as the project as a whole. Two of the key tenets that influence the project are the need for many voices and a commitment to open publishing. In this first section, we will provide context and details about the experiences and work in each circle. Over the past several years, John Luca has led a research project called Racial Terror, lynching in Virginia, which encompasses the years from 1866 to 1932. This digital project examines one of the darkest yet almost forgotten pages of American history, the lynching of thousands of people in the US South between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s. While a small number of victims of mob violence were white, lynching was essentially a form of state sanctioned terrorism against African Americans. In fact, very few lynchers ever faced trial and almost no one was ever indicted for these crimes. Lynching was a key institution in the preservation of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. This project on lynching in Virginia started as a data collection effort as well as a pedagogical tool for undergraduate students. In the spring of 2017, John Luca taught an advanced research course during which six senior JMU students collected and organized hundreds of articles from historical Virginia newspapers detailing all the known lynchings that occurred in the Commonwealth. The website John Luca compiled with the help of Kevin Hegg, an undergraduate research team, tells the story of the 115 known lynching victims in Virginia. Moreover, the racial terror website stores and makes available more than 600 historical newspaper articles reporting about these lynchings. In addition to being a pedagogical tool to spark conversations about racial violence, collective memory, diversity and inclusion, this project also serves as a way to honor the memory of those who died without the benefit of due process in a land that takes pride in being a nation of laws. In the original framework, you may have noticed that the library's support is outside of the three circles and is also included in the faculty development circle. We wanted to highlight the role of our digital projects team, including instructional designers and not only providing technical support, which has been critical for the success of the project, but also leading the coordination and organization of the work while still centering equity in the process. As one of the instructional designers on the team, I focused on facilitating meetings, building connections and relationships, and pulling in other team members or colleagues to grow the team and work. One example of the benefit to this work is the creation of flexible norms for meetings. By documenting our work in multiple ways and by ensuring that all voices are elevated, the team has been able to better articulate our story. Despite all kinds of twists and turns, we have been able to make significant progress on developing this critical curriculum, supporting our faculty, students and the teachers doing the hard work and advocating for institutional support to support the project financially. The group has discussed many times the value we have found in leveraging instructional design, collaboration and relationship building throughout the process. In the fall of 2020, Dr. Kansyan and I designed and implemented a racial terror lesson plan assignment in our graduate level social studies and English methods courses. The courses included 48 master students who wrote approximately 25 lesson plans using documents from the racial terror website. Each lesson plan highlighted one of six thematic cases found on the website, including the case of Shedrick Thompson, which will be shared by us today. The person who created this particular lesson plan is Allie Stone, Curriculum Development Project Manager, which will be shared later in the presentation. The lesson plan assignment asks students to use multiple established curriculum frameworks such as the College Career and Civic Life or C3 Framework, the Inquiry Design Model, IDM, and the Virginia Standards of Learning to support the framing and development for their lessons. The goals of the lesson plans were to change the narrative of how US history is currently taught in Virginia, to transform social studies in English teaching and learning, and to develop a framework for and methods that center equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice in middle and high school classrooms. With these goals in mind, the social studies and English graduate students use the Inquiry Design Model format to create inquiries that told the story of one individual who was the victim of lynching in Virginia. Students use documents, narratives, and graphics featured on the racial terror website to construct their narratives. They also use poems and music on the theme of lynching with excerpts from adolescent literature to address contemporary themes of police brutality and racial injustice. Our team consisted of seven graduate students, three outstanding students from both English and social studies, with Alia Stone at the head of the team. They met frequently to select the strongest, most powerful lesson plans from the ones submitted and to refine and polish them into lessons that subvert the narrative and focus on the fight for justice and equity. They agreed to format the lesson plans into inquiry design models, a format that half the team had not yet had the opportunity to work with. Through workshopping, peer review, and teamwork, they were able to seamlessly transfer each lesson plan into the IDM. The work that we have completed is the culmination of the efforts of multiple talented educators, and we feel that it is truly representative of JMU's ability to turn out justice-oriented education professionals. Throughout the course of the project, our group has wrestled with, explored, and committed to the importance of this work being shared as an open resource. And as we prepare this conference presentation, we are still grappling with the challenges of publishing openly as an act of activism for students who are now looking for jobs and education in a political environment where DEI work can be seen as an asset or a liability. As we work through the choices of where to publish, how, when, and what it means to share this content openly, we center our conversations around the values of openness and the role of CDP. In recent years, a diverse group of voices has come together under the tenets of Open Scholarship and CDP to build a shared understanding of how these frameworks can influence our work. One key distinction between CDP and other approaches to education is the insistence that teaching is political. We cannot separate education and politics. This core tenet is directly exemplified in the Teaching Hard Histories for Racial Healing Project. Its members are connected to state-level bodies that legislate education practices and state-level commissions that are confronting racist policies, memorials, and history. We are all members of a state institution with a responsibility to engage in political and civic work. Our students are going from JMU into communities where they will teach in a highly politicized atmosphere. Rora Boss states that because of its historical roots and critical pedagogy, CDP and those that ascribe to this work hold values that are anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and anti-fundamentalist. The project team continues to hold these values and make sure that each decision and aspect of the project aligns with them. In Morrison Stommel's 2018 press book, An Urgency of Teachers, the author state that CDP upholds values that centers its practice on community and collaboration requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries cannot be defined by a single voice, have use in application outside traditional institutions of education, open and network educational environments, must create dialogues in which both students and teachers participate as full agents. These quotes are from Chapter 1. The work of CDP also demands that we consider the equitable distribution of power in all aspects of our work. For this project, that consideration was intentional and explicit in each of our individual roles in the design of coursework and in the development of student project teams and more. So what does CDP look like in action? From the beginning of the racial terror website, Jean-Lucca has welcomed others to engage with the research on Virginia lynchings in creative and scholarly ways. This has allowed the production of new knowledge including the development of curriculum materials for high school teachers. The education faculty who taught the methods courses reflected deeply on how power is distributed in their own classrooms and what this meant as they framed the project for future teachers. The learning experiences of the pre-service teachers and graduate students were grounded in authentic and open authorship and also served as an opportunity to explore and evaluate the role of open resources in our current education systems. As a team, we have developed workflows that respect schedules. We have honestly acknowledged power relationships and distributed the labor needed to move the project forward in a way that leverages each of our skills, our experiences and access while always including all voices and acknowledging all contributions. So once they decided to publish the lessons plans under open licenses, the next practical question was where to publish? We discussed several options including publishing the lesson plans on the main project website. In the end, we decided to publish in the OER Commons for several reasons. OER Commons is a highly traffic site for people who are searching for OER. It offers an easy publishing platform via their open author tool and finally it allows for easy collaboration among a large team like ours. On this slide, you can see an example of one of the lesson plans. We are working on publishing the content to OER Commons right now. The platform itself offers everything we're looking for in terms of making the content accessible and also allowing us to clearly map the material to specific learning standards. Before we publish the content, we want to wrap up an important discussion within the team about the online identities of people who helped create the material. The question we need to answer is how do we safely share content that is unfortunately considered controversial by some? Liz Thompson and Kirsten Lodino worked together to provide a workshop for the students that walked them through the necessary steps to prepare their content for publishing on OER Commons. The instruction included information about using templates to create a uniform look for the content, a primer on Creative Commons licenses and guidance on how to choose which license to apply their content as well as information about what publishing content on OER Commons entails and why the platform was being used. Students were able to use this workshop to ask questions about the platform and Creative Commons licenses in order to gather the necessary information to make informed choices for how to share their content. John Luca approached the digital projects team in the spring of 2016 requesting quote a website for a class project unquote. Our team frequently responds to such requests. We create and manage around 100 new class websites each year. These are active typically over the course of the term and sometimes we're used in subsequent years. John Luca's website has been active and growing now for almost six years. If you have a browser open, please follow along with my guided tour of the website. It is located at sites.lib.jmu.edu forward slash VA lynching. The URL is on the slide you're now looking at. This is a WordPress site hosted by a campus press. The landing page, as you can see, contains an introduction to the site and a word cloud of Virginia counties. If you click on one of the counties you will see a list of lynchings that took place in that county. There are a few key features of the website that we would like to highlight as they support teaching and scholarly uses of the site. An important feature of the site is commenting. While comments are moderated, everyone is invited to participate in conversations around the content presented on the site. Moderation is used to prevent spam and inappropriate contents. John Luca accepts almost all contents. Probably the most important page on the site is the victims page where each victim of a Virginia lynching event is listed along with basic information about that victim and the lynching. The victims table is sortable and filterable by any of the column headers you see. Users can also download the table as an Excel or CSV file and use it in their own research. Behind the scenes, data that is used to populate the victims and articles tables is stored in Google Sheets and connected to air tables. Air tables are then embedded in the website. Air tables provide an easy way for visitors to interact with data sets. Visitors can drill into more details associated with a particular lynching event in several ways. From the victims table you can click the link in the read more column to retrieve more details about the lynching and its victim. The details page contains details of a particular victim and the associated lynching event. In addition to demographic information about the victim and general information about the lynching event, visitors are invited to read a short narrative about the lynching and review primary source documents, mostly historical newspaper articles related to the lynching event. These newspaper articles are aggregated in a Google Sheet and shared in an embedded air table on the articles page, which I invite you to explore on your own. The final key feature of this website is an interactive data visualization dashboard. This dashboard was authored in Tableau and then embedded on the website. As you can see, if you click on the data vis link at the top of the website, the map and bar chart are directly connected to the Google Sheet that stores the victim's lynching data. When that data is updated, the visualizations are automatically updated. Visitors to the dashboard can explore the distribution and demographics of the lynching events, both spatially and temporally. The controls on the right side of the dashboard allow the user to filter the data by sex, race, and decade. The time slider across the top offers users the ability to drill into a specific date range. I will end this section of the presentation by noting that the website also holds news and events related to the website and John Lucas Research and essays centered on lynching in Virginia. Most, if not all of these essays reference data presented on the website. Future plans for the website include a page that will hold the directory of lesson plans with links to the OER Commons platform. On the screen, you'll see reflections from our whole team. We chose to share these as a way to include all of our voices and experiences thus far with this project. Overall, each team member has learned, found ways to contribute that are meaningful, and recognized the incredible value in this critically important work. We are all committed to the success of this project because we believe in the power of amplifying stories, truth-telling in history, and education as part of racial healing. As we keep moving forward, we continue to look for venues to publish and share our work across multiple disciplines. We are exploring new funding avenues, and the next phase of the project includes the development and funding of a professional learning opportunity for local teachers who will integrate this work into curriculum and into their classrooms. The core team is building partnerships with local schools and teachers. We are conducting an ongoing needs assessment to determine what would be most valuable and supportive for in-service teachers. Part of our goal is to be sure that we can compensate the teachers for the time and work required to adapt and implement these lessons. Not only is a way to value their work and time, but also an important part of building allies in a project centered on activism and social justice work. We also continue to refine our goals, expand our team of collaborators, evaluate our work, and find new ways to use the lessons and provide development opportunities for teachers and teachers in training. Thank you for viewing our presentation. We invite questions from you all at this time. We also have the contact information provided for the various members of our interdisciplinary team.