September 2008 — News
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NURFC Tackles Slavery Education Through K-12 Digital Media Program
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The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, an organization focused on historical and contemporary slavery issues, is expanding its reach through a new agreement to distribute educational videos electronically to K-12 schools. Through the Safari Montage video on demand platform, NURFC will make its standards-aligned educational content--digital media and supporting materials--available to students and teachers across the country.
The Freedom Center (or NURFC) is a museum and organization that provides resources on historical and contemporary slavery. Through its new digital media program, the organization will deliver a range of programming targeted toward four subject areas: American History, Global Issues, Civics, and Social Studies. The content is aimed at students in grades 7 through 12, and supporting teachers' guides are being made available for the programming. Supporters of the program include Ariel Capital Management, the Ford Foundation, and the General Mills Foundation.
This digital media initiative is an attempt to push its educational content beyond the walls of NURFC's physical building in Ohio, according to Ernest Perry, chief technology officer for the Freedom Center, who explained the goals of the initiative to in an e-mail interview.
"We have two major goals that our e-learning strategy is designed to achieve," said Perry. "Firstly, we are ambitiously pushing beyond the walls of our institution to take the core themes, concepts, and inquiry-based approaches to learning guiding our on-site student experience to a much broader audience. We have used the Underground Railroad as a starting point to teach the enduring importance of securing and preserving Freedom, and evaluating our roles as agents within this struggle, to hundreds of thousands of students and educators who have visited us since opening our center in 2004. Technology provides us with a platform for engaging an even greater audience in the Freedom Center experience by eliminating the barriers of time, geography, rising fuels costs and shrinking school budgets for field trips, etc. It also facilitates a more individualized approach to learning, which really is what the Freedom Center is all about--transforming individuals and connecting them with other like-minded people who find common cause as members of a global community committed to the principles of Freedom.
