Description
People Want to Know follows a group of students as they study the defining event in their community’s history – a 1930 lynching that was once captured in some of the century’s most iconic and disturbing photographs. With ambitions of contributing to public understanding, the students got down to create a choice of online resources about the lynching. As they encounter troubling information and imagine how best to present it to others, the students come to better consider the complex ethical ramifications of historical work and to more fully appreciate why their learning matters. Through the stories of these students, their teacher, and an writer re-immersed in the town of his own childhood, the book develops an approach to curriculum in which students create products of value beyond the school walls. In a time of educational standardization, when assignments and assessments steadily fail to deliberately engage the ethically charged and in the community particular contexts of students’ lives, Robert M. Lucas proposes that we see learning in their creation and appreciation of public value. The book will be of particular interest for courses in curriculum studies and in history and social studies education.