Through the Main Street, Carolina program, the Lab is partnering with the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government’s Civic Education Consortium in a pilot project to add K-12 lesson plans to Main Street, Carolina online sites.

This fall, Civic Education Consortium Project Director Christie Hinson will develop two lessons plans keyed to the N.C. Standard Course of Study for 8th grade North Carolina history.  One will be added to the Preservation Durham Tobacco Heritage Trail site, launched in spring 2011.  The second will  be developed as a part of one of four new Main Street, Carolina projects undertaken by graduate students in Robert Allen’s Fall Term 2011 seminar on digital humanities/digital history.

This partnership grew out of Christie’s participation in the Fall Term 2010 offering of the course.  She was a member of the team that worked with the City of Durham’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to produce “Historic Parrish Street,” a virtual walking tour of the downtown Durham neighborhood once called “the Black Wall Street” because of the concentration of African-American financial institutions centered there.  Christie developed a lesson plan based on the project and circulated to teachers throughout the state via the Civic Education Consortium’s website.  To date, more than 1600 teachers have downloaded the lesson plan.