Background
In 2019, Spring Hill College applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks grant to support teacher training on the history of Africatown. The workshops represent an outgrowth of a documentary that workshop project co-directors professors Ryan Noble (SHC) and Joél Billingsley (University of South Alabama), along with Kern Jackson (University of South Alabama) and Rob Gray (University of Bergen), began in 2018 titled “110: The Last Enslaved Africans Brought to America.” The documentary traces the journey of the Clotilda and concludes with the death of Cudjo Lewis in 1935, one of the last living Africans transported aboard the Clotilda and one of the founders of Africatown. Professors Noble and Billingsley translate the substance of the documentary and the insights that they have gleaned from it into the workshop for teachers.
The workshops were intended to be a five-day workshop in Mobile, AL. Due to the pandemic, the workshops were converted to a virtual format. The approach to bringing Africatown to the teachers virtually includes videos of the most prominent locations in Africatown, stories told by descendants, residents, and historians, and educational perspectives of the integration of instructional strategies. A five-module curriculum with interactive lessons supports the framework and content development of the workshop.

Workshop Objectives
Provide participants with the skills necessary to teach hard history. Hard history describes any aspect of the past with the potential to prove traumatic and upsetting for educators, students, and/or their parents.
Strengthen participants’ ability to teach according to the inquiry-design model. Under the inquiry-design model, teachers craft lessons centered on a set of questions, identify resources for students to draw upon in answering those questions and then organize activities wherein students make use of those materials to tackle the questions.
Provide culturally responsive teaching strategies and demonstrate multicultural competency. Teachers share and provide approaches to respond to students in ways that promote learning and are sensitive to all learners.
Train teachers to be increasingly aware of various dimensions of difference among their students as they prepare curricula, teach, and design activities and assessments. Diversity, equity, and inclusion provide an appropriate integration to the modules and inter
Examine the appropriate language for educators to use when discussing slavery and serve as an opportunity for teachers to practice offering instruction on facts with which they and/or their students may be uncomfortable. Tools such as a glossary and consistency in the curriculum provide an avenue for the use of appropriate words and
Serve the larger endeavor of creating authentically diverse and inclusive curricula that incorporate and expose students to an array of perspectives and make students of all backgrounds feel represented.
