Enslaved.org's resources may be meaningful to your students and useful in your classroom. This page describes suggested uses for content on site and offers a selection of original lessons using the site's resources. A few lessons are available now, but more are forthcoming from our teacher partners who will be hard at work during the summer recess in 2022!
Stories provide secondary tellings of the lives of enslaved individuals. Suitable for secondary language arts and social studies classes in both U.S. and Global/World history, the narratives in this section include valuable pedagogical tools, timelines, and directions to sources for further reading. Stories can function pedagogically as source texts that you can adapt to teach a wide range of argumentative and analytical skills, including summary and synthesis, comparing and contrasting, connecting primary and secondary sources, narrative voice and reader positioning, among others. Likewise, you can use the narratives in Stories to develop hands-on skills among students by asking them to map out events and movement, or to create interactive digital timelines that present individual events in the larger historical context. Among the most important of the tools in Enslaved.org for developing students historical literacies are our
Controlled Vocabularies. These didactic glossaries can both help instructors define terms and develop students lexicons for working with Stories.
The narratives in Stories have been selected partly for their alignment with curriculum. They explore topics such as colonization, gendered experiences of enslavement, labor, capitalism, and race. The Stories provide a humanistic perspective to historical events that you may teach in a broader national or global focused course. Each Story also includes a timeline that is useful for connecting the individual story to larger moments and developments in history and across geographies of enslavement.
Sample lessons using Stories include:
Datasets and accompanying
visualization tools provide opportunities for students to learn how to read datasets and make sense of aggregate information in various ways. Among the tools you and your students will find on Enslaved.org are data summaries such as graphs, and percentages. You may wish to work with students using these tools as a way to develop their data literacy.
Students can also use our interface to sort and filter data entries by year, location, names, etc. These resources may be used for history courses as well as for economics, mathematics, and information literacy lessons.
Current lessons using datasets and visualization tools include:
The
Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation publishes articles that provide historical context and methodological discussions for collected data. Instructors can assign the reading of a data-focused article in conjunction with the exploration of a dataset as a methodological exercise in the relationship between quantitative and qualitative study, to discuss and analyze processes of data extraction and archival research, or as a deep exploration of slavery from a specific source or place. Instructors can additionally use Enslaved.org's
Controlled Vocabularies and
Statement of Ethics to frame discussions on methodologies and data extraction processes. Utilizing JSDP articles is especially suited to students in higher ed.
Lessons using JSDP articles are currently under development.
If you've taught a lesson using Enslaved.org resources and would like to submit it for possible inclusion on the site, please email us at
Enslaved.org@gmail.com.
Materials on Enslaved.org's education page have been reviewed by both scholars of slavery and classroom educators. Thank you to Steven J. Niven, Trevor Getz, and others for reviewing resources.
