Bringing History and Media Education to New York Middle Schools
Students in an East Flatbush middle school learn the Created Equal: Sound, Image, Story curriculum. Image courtesy of the Jacob Burns Film Center.
With funding from the NEH, the Jacob Burns Film Center partnered with the Brooklyn Historical Society to establish Created Equal: Image, Sound, and Story. The program expanded the impact of the NEH-funded documentary series, Created Equal, by bringing history and media education to middle schoolers in Brooklyn, New York. In the first year, the program reached 160 students in seven eighth-grade classes, all of whom attended under-resourced schools. Since 2016, the program has expanded, reaching more schools in both Brooklyn and Westchester County.
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At the end of the Created Equal program, students present their documentaries in a public screening. Image courtesy of the Jacob Burns Film Center.
Created Equal: Image, Sound, and Story provides professional development for teachers, helping them integrate history with media arts in their classrooms. The program encourages students to think about history through the lens of contemporary activism and social movements. They examine historical images and then stage their own photographs, listen to civil rights protest songs and write their own music, and watch Stanley Nelson’s documentary Freedom Riders before creating their own short documentaries. The process culminates in a film screening, in which students share their work and talk about their processes. For the students who participate in the program, Created Equal does more than provide an opportunity to learn the skills required for media production and storytelling: it allows them to think about current events within the context of social movements and to thoughtfully engage with American history. They come to see themselves as media makers who are agents of change.
Created Equal: Image, Sound, and Story is now an established program of the Jacob Burns Film Center and the Brooklyn Historical Society. It will also reach beyond the boundaries of New York State, as the organizations collaborate to create and share an online version of the curriculum. This program is also a methodology for integrating media arts with other social movements.
