Outreach for the Week of 3/11

Essentially, outreach this week was minimal due to us being on spring break. However, this week we were able to connect with several students and discuss their Black History Month projects. We extended the deadline to March 17th to allow for students to submit, seeing as the week contests were due coincided with the week of midterms.

Many students that Tierney and I spoke to over the course of spring break discussed some of the challenges that came with them completing the project, so we decided to remove the video presentation part of the project. We also discussed with them some of the challenges regarding issues with them submitting their projects. Overall, many of the students were saying that they were struggling with what it meant to do a “deep dive” of the project.

Over the course of this week, we have planned to meet with Dr. Worth Hayes and Dr. Lisa Bratton to discuss how judging for this contest will take place. We also have Dr. John Tilghman and Jessica Halsey as student judges, and they will also be briefed on this information as well.

We discussed the competition specifics, and they were all briefed on how the contest will be judged. We also had them put together sample slides to see how they individually would complete the project.

Additionally, I worked on the social media calendar with Tierney to see how we would promote the archive on the Instagram. We also decided to implement outreach into various history classes including Black Aesthetics and Global History Since 1650.

Tierney and I worked together to determine how implementing presentations into several lower level classes would help with overall engagement and understanding. We also began to develop a curriculum that could be started in regards to getting more people to be involved with The HistoryMakers from the beginning of their tenure at Tuskegee, so that the engagement on campus will already be present and will help us to gather more Black History Month Competitions overall.

Lastly, we discussed how the Black History Month contest is going. We have decided to extend the deadline again due to students having trouble doing a deep dive into the archive, and will now be working the entirety of next week to get as many submissions as we can, since many of the registrants are now attempting to complete the project.