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By: Uriah Thomas and Eva Wharton

Description: We have conducted interviews from youth, families, social workers in education & other systems, in addition to community contributors to center their narratives of their own lived experiences in education while navigating the foster care system. Specifically, the youth who are minoritized across racial, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ethnic intersections who have lived experiences no one wishes upon another human – and yet, I have personally experienced the most overwhelming love and unconditional acceptance by them. The foster system we know today began in 1853, and comes from a long line of othering, deficit lenses, and erasure.
It was not until 1997 with the Adoption and Safe Families Act, providing Reasonable Efforts and Safety Requirements for Foster Care and Adoption Placements that foster youth gained more focus on their health and safety concerns as a 1st priority - rather than simply reunifying with biological parents, to maintain traditional norms of family we adhere to. However, that did not, and does not guarantee their agency in their own lives – especially in educational institutions. Youth in care often are told they must move placements in the middle of their school year. They can be moved to a completely different county, or state without their consent. Too often, due to the erasure of their lived experiences – they must start over again, and again. For example, a youth who moves placement in the 11th grade, may be deemed a freshman at their new school in the same year – setting them back, with less hope towards completion again without their voice or consent.
We have centered the voices of the youth and service contributors who are navigating their lived experiences every day with joy in their hearts, to ensure their survival, they have no choice
Too often do folx hear about the youth in care, and those who serve them as negative contributors to society via mass media and in schools, who either announce and make visible how they are different, their deficits or tokenize them. With this project, we have sought to make space to affirm their voices and do so with their own words. We do this in hopes of creating more allies with understanding, for those who are traditionally made invisible, going unseen but have so much to say, so they may continue to rise in their power. 

By: Thea Clarkson, Jessie Argraves, Jordan Taitingfong, Andrea Carreno Cortez, Meryl Haque, Kia Parrish-Haim, Nicole Fyten

Description: This resource is intended for education and beyond as a learning platform for anyone with the desire to learn about, teach, and/or distribute resources surrounding Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) disability in education. Included are multimodal resources categorized by preferred mode, to create connections, share histories, and promote accessibility. For the purposes of this project, we define history broadly, recognizing that the Disability Justice movement is ongoing. As a result, we incorporate relevant recent and present sources alongside those from further in the past. We think it is important to draw attention to the lack of resources in the past as this is likely due to erasure of disabled histories. We had many sources to choose from, and narrowing it down was difficult. However, we narrowed down the sources we thought would be best for educators and the sources that prioritize and highlight minoritized voices.

By: Jess Moses, Daisy Lemus, Darby Millard, and Robert Alamillo

Description: For this project, our group considered how one might go about constructing local histories, using Levins Morales' "Historian as Curandera" framework as a guide. We wanted to put Levins Morales' principles into action as we searched for resources that could be used to build medicinal local histories. 

To think about how this process of identifying sources and resources to write local histories might differ for different types of communities, we intentionally chose two distinct local histories. Specifically, we explored the experiences of Indigenous youth and communities in Seattle Public Schools and the LBGTQIA+ community in Capitol Hill. As we suspected, we found that some of the types of sources (such as minutes from meetings, institutional websites) overlapped and were accessible for both communities, but others were very different (for example, many oral histories have been collected on the LGBTQIA+ community in Seattle, and can be used to identify histories of Capitol Hill, but these don't exist in the same way for the Indigenous community in Seattle Public Schools).

We hope that this project serves as a guide for those seeking to construct healing, medicinal local histories. Please feel free to add to the "Additional Resources" tab as you explore the Padlet.

By: Grace Deery-Schmitt, Erin Nishijima, Maria Lee, and Cristina Sofia Barriot

Description: Educational seminar on racial scripts and counter-scripts.

By: Samantha Weiman and Audrey Harris

Description: These lesson plans each span at least 1-2 instructional days. They are intended to be taught in a unit on Civil War & Reconstruction. We wanted to complicate dominant and/or narratives simplistic narratives of the time period by taking a relational approach to various points in the historical time period.