Come to the Water: Infusing African-American History into Curriculum

Come to the Water: Infusing African-American history of San Francisco into classrooms is a three-week teacher institute which visits some of the sites of significance.

Led by historian John William Templeton, author of Come to the Water: Sharing the Rich Black Experience in San Francisco, Cakewalk: an historical novel about the unsung creators of jazz music and Our Roots Run Deep: the Black Experience in California, Vols. 1-4, the institute provides an infusion strategy for grades kindergarten through post-secondary to use local landmarks, personalities and events within any discipline.

Registration includes those books plus the pedagogy study Black Heritage as Gap Closer, presented as a keynote to the California Council for the Social Studies, and the public television documentary Our Roots Run Deep: the Black Experience in California.

The cultural scaffolding acts as a psycho-social intervention. Templeton is also co-producer of the new documentary A Great Day in Gaming: From Queens to Silicon Valley: The Gerald A. Lawson Story and curator of Freedom Riders of the Cutting Edge, which debuted at The Tech Museum of Innovation.

Sessions take place from 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesdays beginning September 13. Templeton was featured Sunday, June 26 in Profiles in Excellence on the ABC affiliate KGO-Channel 7.

He was the featured speaker for the Victorian Alliance monthly meeting on Wednesday, June 29 at Hannibal Lodge No. 1, the 159-year-old Prince Hall Masonic lodge founded in 1852 as an outpost of the National Underground Railroad.  It is one of five local black organizations founded before the Civil War that Templeton describes in a context statement of African-American historic sites in San Francisco.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•