I’d like to introduce this project here the way I often do in person. I start by reading the following:

Then I flip to the next slide, showing a group of thumbnail-sized images, as many as thirty of them. The people depicted are young and old, appearing in real photos or as digital avatars. The postures of some are stiffly academic, while others appear relaxed and joyful. When I present our work, or when others on the project team do, we want it to be clear that we are part of a broader effort involving many.Footnote ²

I write today with the same commitment—recognizing what many have contributed, taught, and made possible in the NYCCRHP. Our work is just one point on the map of “community-engaged” projects in history of education featured in and beyond this HEQ forum. My reflections on the project here come from my experience; others might tell the story differently.

Working on the NYCCRHP has helped me see, more robustly than I had before, that no singular or monolithic “community” exits, that communities shift over time, and that “community engagement” inherently is a varied and dynamic endeavor. To illustrate this point, I will trace one theme that emerged in our project based on the contributions of a particular set of community members, how these contributions reverberated through a few phases of shifting collaborative work, and finally how it is motivating work in connection with yet another community of people.

The genesis of the New York City Civil Rights History Project was a request from a few youth organizers in New York City to a few historians, asking for help to address a problem they observed: Not enough young New Yorkers got to learn about how their schools came to be so unequal, and how their predecessors—students, parents, community advocates, teachers, and others—tried to work for educational justice. What could we as historians do about this? It was a compelling request that pushed me and other collaborators into action.

The students’ request was paired with a concern. Young people needed access to the history of their city’s schools; just as crucially, they needed their teachers to handle this material, and their students’ relationships to it, with care. The history students wanted access to was not distant or foreign. It was instead immediate, local, and personal. This history is inseparable from the deep frustrations and injustices, as well as the opportunities and accomplishments, that students experience each day in their own schools. It would likely prompt emotional responses from students. The students we were in dialogue with were unsure that their teachers were prepared to teach these histories with the needed care. It was possible, the students imagined, for a teacher to do harm while presenting patterns of racial and class and disability segregation, or community struggles for bilingual education or better resources, or times that activism failed. This concern wasn’t an abstraction; it was based in the students’ experiences as working-class and poor young people of color in the city’s schools.

The adult academics and educators in the room might have arrived at this same concern through our discussions, but these cautions carried particular power when voiced by young people with direct knowledge of what was at stake. In this way, the knowledge that students (and ultimately other parent, community, and educator activists) brought to the project helped define the NYCCRHP.

There is not enough space here to consider all of the ways that the concern students shared with us infused our collaboration over the years, but I can highlight a few points. Their words were among the reasons we placed a note on the front page of our website, asking visitors—including teachers and students—to register the varied emotional impact of the histories the site contains and to engage them with care for themselves and others. The same theme influenced how we shaped a series of “close reading videos” in which collaborators talked through their reading of a selected primary source on the history of educational activism in New York City and explored its meaning to them. Community meetings devoted to the curation of materials considered whether some sources were too painful to include, and whether we had given enough space to resistance and joy as well as to oppression. The project team conducting research and writing, in my observation, felt the emotional impact of our work as well. We sometimes stumbled in navigating this terrain. In retrospect, students’ early insights alerted us to a complex reality that pervaded the project.

In more recent phases of our work, members of the project team have moved from building the NYCCRHP as a digital teaching resource to fostering ways for NYC teachers to learn from and plan to make use of this resource.Footnote ³ Increasingly, we draw attention to affect in this work. We encourage teachers to register how they experience—emotionally and physically as well as cognitively—the empowering and the dispiriting history of our city’s schools.

Similar work could, hypothetically, have grown from more solitary research endeavors—but in our case it did not. For that I am grateful. I feel humbled to know that many communities want to learn, share, and make use of their histories of education, even as doing so remains deeply complex work.