The Untaught History of Afro-Latinos
This summer the AGSL K-12 Fellowship went virtual! Our Public Services Librarian worked with four awesome teachers in the Milwaukee area as they developed curriculum for their upcoming school years. To see the projects and lesson plans, check out the AGSL’s Resources for Educators.
Hello! My name is Arleth Villagran and I am a Spanish teacher for MPS at Pulaski High School in the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I started my fellowship in June and have been working on my project ever since, my finished project for the AGSL Fellowship is a StoryMap on Afro-Latinos. I incorporated the resources that AGSL provided to me by researching the database on information about Afro-Latinos, I was able to find a wide variety of information in the database. Anything that I had trouble finding, I was able to contact Georgia Brown (AGSL Librarian) and she was able to provide me with resources that I couldn’t find. Afro-Latinos is a topic that rarely gets covered in Spanish classes in the United States and it is a topic of high importance if you are trying to understand the history of Latin America.
My finished project will help my students understand and be aware of the untold stories and history of Afro-Latinos. Often we think of enslaved Africans and we think of the United States, when in reality more enslaved people were taken to Latin America than the United States. I think it is important for my students to understand this and to be able to know history that often does not get taught in World History classes. Since we are virtual for at least the beginning of this school year, I think that a StoryMap would work well with us being online. StoryMaps allows you to easily navigate information so that it is easy for students to browse even if there isn’t a teacher physically there to help. I will also expect for students to practice their close reading skills and answer text-dependent questions as they read along. It would be really interesting to see students completing a StoryMap! With the Afro-Latino unit, I try to show at least glimpses of the documentary “Afro-Latinos the untaught story” since it is important for students to see that the stories can be directly connected to people. This fellowship was truly a challenge for me, I chose to use StoryMaps as my final project because I had never heard of it before and it truly taught me a lot. As educators, I think it is important for us to expand our knowledge and be able to use different resources available to us. By learning how to use StoryMaps, I can now teach my students how to use it too!
American Geographical Society Library 