There's this museum in Cape Coast, Ghana.....

In July 2022, I met a handful of teenage historians. They were (and still are) members of the history club at Academy of Christ the King in Cape Coast, and they were (and I suspect still are) fierce learners.

Together, the students, their teachers, and a small US contingent of educators and college students spent the next couple of weeks developing a new and shared understanding of the power of collective learning and knowledge production.

For those interested in the nuts and bolts of the project and the findings, there will be journal publications that speak to how the project informed our collective understanding of Youth Participatory Research (YPAR) and methodologies in teaching history. These methodologies both inspire future historians and deepen our understanding of how constructivist pedagogy and practices strengthens our collective understanding of the past.

However, this reflection is my moment to pause and move beyond research and publications to celebrate the “wow” of what’s possible when people come together in-person to ask each other: What’s something we should be curious about together?

We got curious and ended up with a local museum.

When we [think every stakeholder already mentioned above] got curious together, spending multiple days in a sun-filtered corner classroom on the third floor, the end result was a student-inspired and designed museum. The process we went through had every participant breaking down assumptions of what is known and what is valued as meaningful in local and national history. And, as those assumptions broke, new avenues of inquiry about the local past were discovered, and new histories were documented. Those histories needed sharing. Thus, the notion of the museum was conceived, funded, and launched.

We each had a role to play in the launching of the museum, and each of us will have a slightly different version of how it came about. After all, isn’t that how historical memory works? We each experience a process through our own lens and remember the moments that matter most to us in ways that support our hopes and serve our personal purpose. And, even with intentional time built in to foster shared understanding, ultimately, we each preserve a slightly different narrative. Together, our collective memories, if documented by each of us, will hold our mutual truth: the roles we played, the vision we have, and the narrative of how it came to be.

Stepping back to state the obvious, through this process we were reminded that when history is “told by the victor” or the “oppressor” there are many versions left undocumented and unshared and a mutual truth remains elusive. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche takes a deeper dive into this in her renowned Ted Talk: The Danger of a Single Story.

Creating a museum takes initiative and conviction. After our time together each of us had a little bit of both. The Headmistress of Academy of Christ the King felt inspired to allocate the requested space and had her own personal understanding of its community potential. The local students understood that they, themselves, were keepers of local knowledge and their insights worthy of the literal space they would take up in the new museum. And each and every person involved in the project took away new understandings of how to learn, teach, and co-create spaces for human reflection, growth, and agency.

As a DEI practitioner, I am often asked: how do you teach someone about racism, sexism, ableism, “all the -isms” so that they can move beyond them. My answer lies in the experience shared above:

We must experience the power of shared meaning-making and get curious together about the versions of the past that shape our understanding of today and what’s possible in the future. We must break down the assumptions we have about one another based on incomplete and inaccurate agreed-upon social histories. We must broker the truth together and each find our place in wondering together what’s possible if each of us want to contribute to capturing history and sharing it so that we can learn from one another’s versions?

Note: This learning journey would not have been possible without the indefatigable leadership of Prof. Trevor Getz, SFSU (in partnership with his teaching post at Stanford during winter quarter 2022) and the incredible partnership of key educators Fredrick Ariyah, History teacher at Academy of Christ the King and Tony Yeboah, PhD candidate, Yale University.