Middle Passage Curriculum Development
Lafayette High School Multi-Media Laboratory
View the Student Created Pages
The following material is the product of an assignment made by Mr. Steve Tatum, one of the Middle Passage Project curriculum consultants, to his Multi-Media class at Lafayette High School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Each student chose a specific component of the transatlantic slave trade and created a web page, each of which was then related to the work of their student peers through a home page. While much of the work involved compiling information from existing internet sites and images, most of the participants wrote the narratives that accompany their individually researched pages.
As with all student work, there were some problems. For example, many of the students borrowed images from sites that used the magnificent drawings from Tom FeelingsÕ book Middle Passage, without giving appropriate credit. In defense of the students, I should say that the sites where they found the images often did not credit Feelings properly. In a case where our website visitor encounters breathtaking middle passage images in pencil, charcoal and half-tone water color, one might safely credit my late good brother and dear friend, the recently departed artist, Tom Feelings. He was one of a kind, a generous spirit and a man of rare genius.
As the curriculum development project advances, another website and CD will be developed. The future product, as shown in the accompanying diagram, will be professional and interactive, with a curriculum component for educators and an interactive component for students.
