CD-ROM
Simulation about the Underground Railroad
When we began planning educational materials about the Underground
Railroad, we identified stakeholders and reviewed their needs. First was the Freedom Center itself. We want to teach the history of slavery, resistance to
slavery, self-emancipation, and the cooperation and commitment among people that
made the Underground Railroad possible. We
also want to prepare students for visits to the museums, to encourage them to
consider issues of freedom and social justice in their world, and to improve
their own racial attitudes.
Another set of stakeholders is teachers.
Teachers need help in raising students’ basic skills and in preparing
them for proficiency tests and other forms of assessment. In talking with teachers in focus groups, we discovered that
unless we could help in raising test scores, there would be little time in the
classroom for our materials. Furthermore,
also because of the limited time available in school, it would be important to
produce some activities that students could work through independently.
Then there were informal educators—church youth leaders, camp
counselors, recreation center staff, other kinds of youth program
administrators, and parents. They
need quality materials to engage students and challenge them in positive ways.
Finally, students themselves are important stakeholders. They need exciting and interactive formats for learning,
formats that encourage a high degree of personal identification with content and
provide ongoing motivation to practice skills and succeed academically.
After lengthy discussions with educators in our focus groups and on our
twenty-eight-member curriculum advisory committee, we decided on three
educational packages. The first
would be a set of pre- and post-visit activities, with a teacher’s guide, to
maximize the effectiveness of classroom visits to the museum. The second package would be a traveling trunk or experience
box, containing touchable artifacts, reproduction visuals, books, posters, and
recordings. Through the trunk, we
could bring exhibits to the classroom, when the classroom could not come to the
museum.
The third and most innovative of the packages was to be a CD-ROM
containing interactive simulations of Underground Railroad stories.
We wanted it to engage students in a personal and compelling way, as well
as expand the perceptions that people commonly have of the Underground Railroad.
We wanted to select stories that showed runaways going south and west as
well as north, and we wanted to show the Native American involvement in the
runaway experience.
We are now developing the CD-ROM, and we have a number of preliminary
outcomes to report. First, we
have selected the story of the Black Seminoles as a lead-in narrative.
The story shows how a group of about a thousand runaway slaves and
descendants of runaway slaves stood together with an Indian nation to share a
culture, resist white encroachment, and find strategies for escaping
enslavement. Under their leader
John Horse, the Black Seminoles were on the run for decades, traversing terrain
from South Carolina to Georgia to Florida to Oklahoma to Texas to Mexico and
back again. Periodically losing
numbers of their members to slave catchers, war, disease, and starvation, the
Black Seminoles, albeit at great cost, resisted slavery and the violence that
accompanied it.
Participating in the simulation of the Black Seminole story, students
will complete activities in math, science, reading, writing, citizenship/civics,
and the arts. Through the
activities, students will gain access to action sequences in which they can
directly participate. The
activities each meet five objectives:
· To advance the story. We continue telling the story in all activities, including science and math.
· To build basic skills and reinforce standard curriculum at grade level. Level 1 of the John Horse story is written at fourth grade reading and learning level, and focuses on content taught in fourth grade. Level 2 is written at fifth grade, Level 3 at sixth grade, and so on.
· To use the language and format of proficiency/standardized tests, so as to give students practice in test taking.
· To present artifactual materials, allowing students to examine period maps, documents, newspapers, political cartoons, prints, and other items that might typically appear in a museum exhibit.
·
To encourage critical thinking in decision making on behalf of
characters.
Through successfully completing activity screens, students can gain access to the action sequences, and this structure provides motivation to work through academic exercises. Students can participate directly in the sequences, role playing a character, solving historical puzzles, or electing to take some sort of action. Our next step in development of the CD-ROM is to identify a software firm and begin programming to create the animation in a dramatic, interactive, yet respectful, responsible, and historically accurate way.