What were your social studies classes like? Perhaps the phrase "social studies" takes you back to dusty textbooks filled with information that did not seem applicable to your life.
MKE Roots is a program designed to change all that. A project from Marquette University's Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach, MKE Roots, is designed to help Milwaukee-area teachers incorporate local history into their social studies curriculum. The program places an emphasis on history from Milwaukee's communities of color and an emphasis on going out to visit physical locations, as opposed to learning strictly from the textbook.
To do this, 25 teachers took part in a weeklong seminar in late June to tour Milwaukee's historical sites, making stops at the 16th Street viaduct, Forest Home Cemetery, America's Black Holocaust Museum, and various other locations throughout the city.
Cepia-Grace Buchanan is a Milwaukee teacher looking to bring more local history into her curriculum. She says that her civics education was limited to classroom studies.
"It was just the book. Nothing but the book," Buchanan says.
This is the problem MKE Roots is trying to solve, according to project director Dr. Melissa Gibson. MKE Roots began as a continuation of a credit-recovery program she led with St. Joan Antida High School shortly after the pandemic. Her students had failed social studies when the school was not holding in-person classes and Gibson says getting them out of the classroom ignited their interest in social studies.
A few years later, after collaborating with community historians and writing up a grant proposal, MKE Roots was born. Gibson says the program is founded on the idea that by educating Milwaukee teachers about their hometown, the more likely their students will find ways civically engage with their community.
"Our hypothesis is that by engaging young people through their teachers ... that their understanding of themselves and their communities will be transformed," she says. "That will lead to some kind of measurable change in achievement in, particularly in their history and civics knowledge."
The extent of the program's impact will ultimately be tested in the upcoming school year, but Buchanan is already making plans. Her existing curriculum includes a unit where students choose a historical figure to learn history through that figure's lens. Now, her students will do the same thing but with a local focus.
"They'll choose the person from Milwaukee: Vel R. Phillips, Father Groppi, Dr. Coleman, you know, there's so many names that I've learned," she says.
"So they'll study that person, learn about that person ... because they do not know the history of their city. Just like I didn't."
