Detroit Public School History Museum: Participatory Archiving, Design-Infused History Practices, Cross-Cultural History

• In Event: Truth-Telling and Transformation: Critical, Reparative, and Community-Engaged Historical Methods Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

The national attack on critical race theory, enforcement of banned books, and the results of the 2024 Presidential Election has brought forth a new community model. The Detroit Public School Museum will be an archival and artistic representation of the city’s public schooling. The museum will be a collaborative effort to honor students, teachers, after school programs, principals, and the community. We want to create an accurate story of what DPSCD is now, how exactly it got here, and what it dares to become.

This museum will be a home of history. It will assist every dreamer of public schools and every doer working to ensure our schools are champions of literacy, expression, and kinship. The project will undergo many phases as a “museum without walls” that will include collaborations with the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD), and eventually will land in its own facility in a former school. Thus far, the museum without walls method has existed through history workshops, live archiving scrapbooks, and a mobile museum. Our perspectives are centered within utilizing design and post-traumatic growth, as it is our way of “sneaking in the vegetables.”

After hosting our first “Depth over Breath” history workshop on the 71st anniversary of Brown v. Board decision, feedback from our Latinx audience centered around the lack of their stories within the infamous case. This summer we also hosted a Bengali junior at Wayne State University studying secondary education. We are building a foundation to shift the narrative and dissect the American dream.

The lack of people of color solidarity sprung itself deeply in the fight for Kamala Harris as president. We found many Arab Americans and Hispanic Americans not participating in the democratic process while Black Americans felt blindsided and betrayed. As we tackle this, we have been developing a scrapbook that includes a collective timeline of pivotal moments in Bangladesh, America, and our own migration and education journeys. Our mobile museum will be an extension of our live archiving efforts, a curation around the generation that was bussed following the Bradley v. Milliken case, and an experience that speaks to the spatial experience of socioeconomics of neighborhood schools. History is memory, shaped by those who hold it and determined by how they package and reproduce it.

Authors

• Dannah Elise Wilson, Detroit Public School History Museum

• Mehzabin Kaboo, Wayne State University