An Unvarnished View on History: How Museums Can Support Inclusive School Education
This article originally appeared on the Institute of Museum and Library Services website.
Unvarnished is a journey of six organizations coming together as a learning cohort to shed light on histories of systemic racism in their communities, as evidenced by real estate and sundown town practices.
Funded by an IMLS National Leadership Grants for Museums award to Naper Settlement in 2017, our project’s process and findings are not only a model for the field, but also produced a virtual exhibit, Unvarnished: Housing Discrimination in the Northern and Western United States and an accompanying teacher guide and curricula that will be released this spring.
As part of this project, we also fielded considerable research on audience attitudes to inclusive history, including with educators. As our society has become increasingly polarized, history and social studies teachers are finding themselves in the crosshairs. How and what they teach is being questioned and, in many states, legislated, often making history the most contentious subject taught in school. For educators already struggling with the daily rigors of the classroom amid a pandemic, this additional scrutiny is exacerbating stress levels. Read more...