Student-Led Virtual Field Trip of Montgomery's Civil Rights Landmarks
Help me give my students the opportunity to create and conduct a full-day virtual field trip experience centered on Montgomery-area landmarks. We especially need funding for lunches to keep the students fully energized and engaged throughout the day.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
Last year, an out-of-state school reached out to explore a partnership with our Center for Law, the legal services career and technical education program that I lead at our school. With a renewed sense of energy after months of virtual learning, our students created and conducted our first virtual field trip experience centered on Montgomery-area civil rights landmarks. My students demonstrated an immense amount of empathy for each other while they worked together virtually to produce projects that were important to them personally and vocationally as future legal services professionals.
One student in particular exemplified the strength, resilience, and empathy of my Center for Law students last year when she overcame her fear of speaking through her talent for poetry -- performing her poem for students and teachers, she gave powerful voice to how deeply important the right to vote is to her and her fellow students.
My students are creative, and when they come across an obstacle, they view it as an opportunity to use their creativity to overcome the obstacle. They care about making a difference in the world, and they are determined to learn how they can make a difference in a purposeful way.
My Project
Field trip opportunities for students to explore their own community have been obliterated due to the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to curb the spread of the virus. Further, while schools across the country have faced budget cuts and shifted resources to cover pandemic-related costs, in under-resourced communities such as Montgomery’s, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified pre-existing financial conditions that had already resulted in strict budget limitations on field trips in years prior to this pandemic.
This project will give my Center for Law students a way to explore and share with each other the significance of the landmarks of their own community’s civil rights-related events.
They will learn and share with each other how the events represented by these landmarks have shaped local, national, and world history and that are influencing the cultural climate that Booker T. Washington Magnet High School students experience today.
As the students gain a deeper understanding of the related historical, present, and projected legal trends that have impacted civil rights issues, they will create hands-on art projects expressing their reactions to the issues that their community’s cultural geography landmarks represent. This will provide an opportunity for the students to practice self-awareness and self-expression.
Finally, as my students share this project with our partner high school in California, they will create a connection with these other students based on understanding how local community history is linked to civil rights issues on a national and global scale.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Dr. Bowles and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.