THE OWN YOUR HISTORY LEADERSHIP COURSE
OYHL provides in-depth modules covering “the U.S. history we all need to know.” OYHL empowers students to make a difference in their communities—or the country.
Modular
OYHL develops leaders and citizens with greater awareness. They both “own" our hard history and feel empowered to work for a future that fulfills the Promise of America for all at last.
OYHL is adaptable to be a full-year elective, a semester elective, or enrichment components of an existing survey or elective course.
Each module integrates experiential historical learning, examination of related contemporary issues, and personal leadership development.
Powerful, necessary subjects
Americans are divided because we deny our historical skeletons—core parts of our history that are contrary to our national ideals. OYHL confronts denial and leads to ownership of a deeper understanding of both American greatness and our history of inequality, xenophobia, poverty, discrimination and injustice based on color [“race”], gender, ethnicity, and LGBTQ status.
A better future
Combining “ownership” of all our past with personal development, OYHL develops more aware, productive, strong citizens who are prepared to work to achieve the American promise of justice, inclusion, and equal opportunity for all—all colors, all genders, all sexual orientations. They are more conscious about living in a diverse society and having power to create a better future and seek reconciliation in each’s unique way.
SAMPLES FROM AVAILABLE MODULES
I. Inheritances
Inheritances, Awareness and Leadership: -- How the past affects me and my future.
*Personal connection to history - examination of how past choices (“history”) have shaped all important aspects of our lives (family circumstance, schools, street, neighborhood, etc.).
II. Inspiring leaders
Eleanor Roosevelt -- American pioneer: “Leadership from the side”
* A challenge to FDR: role play in a White House meeting concerning a 1941 Afro-American March on Washington to end defense industry job discrimination.
John Lewis -- Young bold leadership for civil rights.
* Role-play: SNCC and the early 1960s civil rights movement confronting Jim Crow.
Cesar Chavez—A Latino leader for migrant rights.
* Making farmworkers visible: Understanding La Huelga and the 1960s Delano grape boycott and strike.
III. Hard history
A Nation of Immigrants: Past, Present, Future
* Why they came: Twelve immigrant stories, 1609-2000.
* Developing media literacy: Journalists reporting an immigration story since 2000.
American Apartheid: Segregation Outside the South, 1920-1960
* Focus on housing and redlining policies:
--A family confronts housing segregation in Chicago: A Raisin in the Sun
--Online mapping of persistent residential segregation, 1930s-1960s.
* Inheritance and privilege walk activity: looking at inherited inequality.
The “Other America”— Poor and Working Class Whites and Identity Politics, 1890 - present
* Let us Now Praise Famous Men: the lives of 1930s white sharecroppers and their grandchildren.
*Project on science and “race”—creating awareness in our language.
American Women Under the Law: from “protection” toward equality and ownership
* Seneca Falls Declarations: 1848, 1998
* Cases determining women’s property and personal rights, 1880s-1970s
* Ownership of women’s bodies: then and now
LGBTQ+ Rights
* Introduction: colonial Philadelphia, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin
* Benchmarks: The trial of a closeted gay professor for “lewdness” in Massachusetts in 1960; revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders in the 1970s; the leadership of Billie Jean King; and marriage equality since 2010
* Project on transgender individuals serving in the military