By KYLE LOWRY
The people, places and stories of the Underground Railroad in Southern Indiana are ready to be discovered.
An Indiana University Southeast Associate Professor of Education, Magdalena Herdoiza-Estevez, has compiled a curriculum guide for elementary and middle school students based on local events surrounding the Underground Railroad in Clark and Floyd counties.
“I’m a big believer in affective learning,” Herdoiza-Estevez said. “We are used to seeing that historical struggle as something that happened a long time ago and far away.
“Recognizing it took place here in our own neighborhood ... it brings the drama close to home.”
Herdoiza-Estevez’s curriculum guide is a learning companion to an interactive CD-Rom produced by the Carnegie Center for Art and History, based on research done by New Albany native Pamela Peters, author of the 2001 book, “The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana.”
“If you can’t take students to do a site visit, you have at least a virtual field trip you can do,” she
said of the materials.
It took about a year for Herdoiza-Estevez and her team of two IUS education students, Andrea Gutierrez and Christina Schotter, to compile books, music and videos to go along with the CD-Rom. Sponsorship for the curriculum guide was given by the Indiana Humanities Council, along with research and grant money from IUS.
The group also received help from Glen Crothers, a member of the IUS history faculty.
A handful of teachers at Parkwood Elementary School participated in a pilot program that tested out the material on fourth and fifth grade students last year.
Todd Bledsoe, a fifth-grade teacher at Parkwood Elementary, was one of the teachers who tested the curriculum and said students were able to easily relate to the material because it highlighted places in their own community.
“They definitely got the message,” Bledsoe said. “They knew where the places were and it hit home.”
Another Parkwood fifth grade teacher, Casey Downing, co-taught the material with Bledsoe and said that she was won over by the variety of materials in the Underground Railroad package.
“It had transparencies, maps, books — it had a little bit of everything,” Downing said. “It had 15 lessons that were all laid out and you could pick and choose.
“It adapts from grade level to grade level and all the standards were there.”
Several different types of visual aids were included in the curriculum guide as a way of giving students an in-class tour of places in Clark and Floyd counties that were used to help free slaves.
“The maps and visuals they know,” Downing said. “The kids were personally affected by what they read.”
Both teachers said they would use the material again in teaching black history.
Four sets of the Underground Railroad curriculum guide and accompanying materials are available for checkout in IUS library.
