Urbane 19th century San Franciscans lead off NPS teacher workshop

Templeton is the opening speaker for the Golden Gate National Recreational Area's four-day teacher institute. Dissonant Voices: Dialectics of Place is designed to demonstrate to teachers the efficacy of place-based learning.  

The author and filmmaker will draw from his books Come to the Water: Sharing the Rich Black Experience in San Francisco and Cakewalk: an historical novel about the unsung creators of jazz. Cakewalk covers the period between 1906 and 1921 when African-American entrepreneurs dominated the waterfront entertainment scene in San Francisco so successfully that they had a members-only Colored Entertainers Club at the base of Columbus Circle near the current site of the Pyramid Building.

ReUNION: Education-Arts-Heritage is an educational television network delivered directly to classrooms which provides culturally-responsive instructional content for the Common Core Standards geared to African-American youth.

Other titles by Templeton include Our Roots Run Deep: the Black Experience in California, Vols. 1-4. He also contributed "African-Americans in the West" to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African-American History.