Building Communities of Inquiry: Learning with the Harlem Education History Project
By Nick Juravich
I started with the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) in the fall of 2013 as a newly minted doctoral candidate. Fresh from my exams and starting my dissertation research, I had the unique opportunity to participate in both sides of the emerging project, which today appear on the home page as the book and the digital collection. Despite the embryonic nature of my own project, co-directors Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell invited me to contribute to the inaugural scholarly workshop that served as their first step toward the edited volume. That same fall, I signed up to audit “Digital Harlem Research Collaborative” (DHRC), Erickson’s first HEHP course, a deep, yearlong dive into the worlds of digital, public, and Harlem history.
Seven years on, it’s clear to me that participating in this project has shaped my own scholarship and scholarly community in more ways than I can hold in my head at once. Each “side” of the project turned out to be a multifaceted universe of its own. Those of us writing chapters for the volume gathered for reading groups, presented at conferences, and shared research materials regularly, passing along digital photos from archives, sending PDFs, and making introductions for oral histories. Those of us in the DHRC course did the same with Erickson as our guide: organizing digitized materials, conducting oral histories, and building web-based exhibits.
At the heart of all of these remarkable experiences – and the tremendous volume published this past fall – lay our directors’ commitment to building mutually supportive, critically engaged communities of inquiry. As scholars – from high school students to full professors – we gathered in Harlem, with Harlemites, to constantly test, discuss, and refine our ideas and our practice. The HEHP community has made me a better researcher, writer, and public historian, and it has given me tremendous friends and colleagues whose company and wisdom I seek regularly. In what follows, I want to offer two examples of how participating in the project has shaped the way I think about, and practice, digital public history.
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Whenever I talk about the joys of collaboration in public history, I share a story from that first HEHP course. As part of the class, we all cataloged documents for the project’s digital archive, an admittedly tedious process that involved learning and applying Dublin Core metadata standards and tags of our own design to scanned pages, one by one. Each week in class, we discussed our experience processing these collections, sharing our encounters with all manner of minutia and the occasional moment of revelation.
At one session, a classmate groaned audibly about having to process a series of address lists from local schools. How on earth was she supposed to choose an address to associate with the document? Was she meant to enter them all? And who, exactly, were these “paraprofessionals” whose addresses the school district had collected, anyway?
“Wait!” I said, too loudly, “you have home addresses for paraprofessionals who work at particular schools?!” Indeed, that’s what these lists held, alongside the addresses of their partner-teachers. I had just embarked on a dissertation about the origins and evolution of paraprofessional work in New York City schools. A central argument that proponents made about these programs in the mid-1960s, and which I was beginning to make in my own work, was that they reshaped the social geography of schooling, bringing local adults and their knowledge of communities into classrooms. Staring at me from my colleague’s screen was a rare and wondrous kind of evidence, found in a collection I would never have thought to consult and catalogued by someone who dreaded the sight of it.
Mary Dowery (second from left) with a group of parent aides.
Photo from Mary Dowery’s private collection.
In short order, the lists were reassigned to me. I promptly mapped the addresses and began building a digital exhibit around them. At one of the first public conferences held by HEHP, I presented the maps and talked through them with longtime Harlemite and social worker Mary Dowery, who had advised some of the very first “parent aide” programs for Mobilization for Youth in the early 1960s. Dowery sat for oral histories with two HEHP contributors, Marta Gutman and me, and she helped me think through the logics of locality in these programs. I incorporated her insights and clips from her oral history into the final, peer-reviewed exhibit that lives on the HEHP site today.
Building on what I’d learned from this experience, I took these maps to paraprofessional educators who I’d interviewed for my dissertation. Doing so generated rich conversations, one of which the American Federation of Teachers filmed as part of their 100th Anniversary documentary. In their most distilled and polished form, the insights from this process appear in my chapter in Educating Harlem, along with my beloved maps of teacher and paraprofessional addresses.
From start to finish, “my” work on this topic, then, has been inextricably enmeshed in the broader HEHP community. As a result, my own thinking and writing are certainly clearer. I hope my presentation of the work is also more accessible to, and responsible to, the broader community in which this work took place (and in which it continues today). None of this would have been possible on my own.
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One testament to the endurance of the bonds that our HEHP directors built emerged when I joined the Gotham blog as an associate editor in 2016. Seeking to replicate the collaborative joys of the HEHP, my first pitch to managing editor Peter-Christian Aigner was not a piece, but a roundtable: could I get a bunch of friends and mentors together to write about the history of education in New York City? The reply was in the affirmative, and so in August of that year we published six pieces by doctoral students in Gotham. Three of us – Barry Goldenberg, Jean Park, and me – had met in the Digital Harlem Research Collaborative class, and Barry served as the founding director of Youth Historians in Harlem, the HEHP’s high school program. Lauren Lefty took part in a later edition of the HEHP course and designed a digital exhibit on parent activists Evelina Lopez Antonetty. Mike Glass and Dominque Jean-Louis attended HEHP events and offered us enthusiastic feedback as part of the wider project’s community. Heather Lewis, who I met through the inaugural workshop, and Brian Purnell offered comments.
Having mobilized connections through the HEHP universe, we tried to replicate some of the project’s process and ethos as well. While our timeline was far more abbreviated, we still managed to gather as a group and to share ideas and resources as we wrote. Perhaps the most exciting thing about the roundtable was simply the doing of it; taking our inspiration from the HEHP, we put pieces of our unfinished dissertations out into the world both to say something and to learn something from the responses and conversation they generated.
Two years later, we revisited the roundtable format on Gotham to explore the history and legacy of the 1968 struggle over community control of schools. This project, in partnership with Chalkbeat, proved more challenging in many ways. We were confronting a far better-known and more divisive piece of the city’s history, and doing so with partners on the journalism side who wanted very short pieces (300 words, which most historians would consider an abstract). With precious little time for collaboration, we never gathered as a group. However, we had the HEHP to help us generate cohesion, as four of the participants – Heather Lewis, Jonna Perrillo, Clarence Taylor, and me – had worked on that project as well. If one was inclined to draw a map of history-of-education projects and gatherings in New York City over the past decade, I suspect a substantial number of roads would lead back to Teachers College and the HEHP.
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In my experience, then, the HEHP is greater than the sum of all of its (impressive, multi-phase, multi-faceted) parts, because those of us who’ve moved through it in one way or another have been welcomed in to a community of inquiry and have come out converts to this way of doing history. It is, to be sure, a labor-intensive, painstaking way to work; in some cases, it means typing one address after another into a metadata form. For my own part, I’ve found that time and energy are more than worth it, and that the collaborative process has the potential to yield insights and interventions that few of us could generate alone.
There have been a great many joyful things about this project since 2013, from big events to classroom conversations to the publication of exhibits and resources and, as of this fall, the volume itself. All of these have built on and, in turn, strengthened the remarkable community of inquiry that Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell began building back in 2013. It is a generative world of scholarship that will continue to support and inspire many of us for years to come.
Nick Juravich is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a former Gotham editor. His research interests include labor history, public history, urban history, the history of education, and the history of social movements in the twentieth-century United States.