Partially supported by a NULab Community Collaboration Grant.
The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac is an open-access digital educational and curriculum resource project dedicated to celebrating the history, people, and movements of Black and African American communities in Boston before 1900. The student-created digital exhibits facilitate dynamic and engaging connections to the cultures, places, and people who played vital roles in Boston’s Early Black history. The almanac developed out of final projects created for Professor Nicole N. Aljoe’s Northeastern-Boston classes on “Early African American Literature” and “Literary Representations of Black Boston.”
The project has been working informally with several Boston Public schools teachers over the years. During the past two years, in cooperation with an advisory board of four BPS teachers and input from the BPS Director of Social Studies and History curriculum planning, Dr. Angela Hedley-Mitchell, project manager Savita Maharaj (NU ’22, now at Brandeis PhD’27), developed curriculum materials for use in K-12 classrooms. Some of that material was beta-tested by the advisory board members and shared with small groups of BPS faculty in three 2-hour workshops over the past year. This grant was used to strengthen the utility of the curriculum materials for K-12 classrooms and in order to support the preparation for two professional development workshops to be offered during AY 2023-24 for K-12 teachers on how to use the EBBDA website materials and digital tools in their classrooms.
Persons Involved:
- Nicole N. Aljoe, Director
- Savita Maharaj, Project Manager
- Tieanna Graphenreed, DH & Accessibility lead
- Yana Mommacova, Back-end lead
- Juniper Johnson, Digital Tools lead
