Building Learning Communities 2011

Public history, a movement involving collaboration and community activism, challenges communities to extend boundaries. Civic activism and digital storytelling collide in this powerful public history project linking urban and rural students in Louisiana.

Denise Altobello and Jenny Velasquez, teachers at Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans join forces with Meredith Melancon of the public charter high school in Bunkie, Louisiana, to shed light on Solomon Northup, a New York free man of color, whose 1841 kidnapping led him through the slave exchange in New Orleans to 12 years as a slave.

Traveling between rural Bunkie and New Orleans’s Treme, America’s oldest African American neighborhood, students collaborate: 

• to create a digital museum highlighting Northup’s story in state-supported rest stops along Louisiana’s African American Heritage Trail
• to create digital stories for the New Orleans African American Museum of jazz history, cultural collaboration and civil rights activism

    Such public history opens the doors to museums whose walls can no longer contain their stories.