Descendant Collaboration: History & Practice

Descendant Collaboration: History & Practice

Register for this course now, for free, by clicking here. 

From course host, and Executive Director of James Monroe's Highland, Dr. Sara Bon-Harper:

"Descendant collaboration has been occurring in various forms in Virginia for decades, and this micro-course provides a review of descendant collaboration as practiced across a range of historic sites and institutions across the Commonwealth.

The course focuses on places with histories of enslavement. It reflects an expansion of efforts in recent years to provide better-informed historical narratives at historic sites and museums, and to create more equitable collaboration in the direction and oversight of these institutions.

It introduces and reflects on the all-important Rubric created by participants in a symposium held at Montpelier with the National Trust in 2018.  It addresses the most common question I encounter about descendant collaboration, which is about how to get started, and it explores examples of structures and processes that may help collaborators envision ways they can most effectively move forward together.

Descendant collaboration is above all things an approach to healing relationships between institutions and present communities and offers a shared path to telling better history."