From Story to Agency, Students as Co-Creators of Learning
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: When the Outside World Enters the Classroom, Teaching in the Middle of History
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,200 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’ve been exploring what happens when powerful, often emotional events enter the classroom — moments that demand our attention and humanity.
In our first newsletter, we focused on making space for Big Feelings, pausing to hold space when the world barges in through a headline, tragedy, or charged conversation.
In our second, we examined the importance of guidelines and guardrails, not to restrict dialogue, but to create safety and structure for deeper learning.
Last week, we turned toward literacy as liberation, sharing educator Septima Clark’s story to show how identity-based literacy connects history to lived experience — affirming who we are and empowering us to shape our own lives and stories.
This week, we turn theory into practice.
We ask: What does it look like when students become co-creators of their own learning?
And how can classrooms — or homes — become spaces where identity isn’t an afterthought, but the starting point of curiosity, empathy, and civic engagement?
A Story From the Classroom: The Oral History Project
Years ago, when teaching a unit on immigration, my colleagues and I wanted our students to understand that this wasn’t just a sterile chapter of history or a policy debate on the news. We wanted them to see migration and movement as part of the human experience — something that connects us all to the larger human story, in varied ways.
We engaged our upper elementary students in a weeks-long Oral History Project — a unit that existed in our curriculum for years and evolved each time we taught it.
Much of that evolution came from co-creation — students shaping the learning alongside us.
Before exploring immigration today, we anchored ourselves in broader historical and geographic contexts, guided by questions such as:
Who lived here long ago? How did they arrive? Who lives here now?
Across time and place, what push or pull factors encouraged or made movement necessary?
How do people shape place — and how does place shape them in return?
These questions opened space for conversation about movement, belonging and home — how cultures, families, and individuals carry migration stories, sometimes across neighborhoods or states, sometimes across continents and oceans.
To deepen understanding, students became researchers and storytellers.
With permission and guidance, they interviewed people who had lived experiences of immigration: family members, neighbors, teachers, friends, community members.
As a class, we co-created questions to map each interviewee’s journey. Students then created storybooks, illustrated and written as a mix of quoted transcription and their own words, to preserve and celebrate these stories.
At our culminating celebration, the classroom filled with voices, laughter, even tears as students shared dozens of stories — a living archive of movement and resilience.
There was no single “immigrant story.”
Each narrative carried its own fingerprint, its own arc, its own resonance.
One student, after interviewing his mother, reflected, “I never knew my mom went through that.” He had learned that, at six years old, she served as her family’s translator between home and school — a revelation that reframed how he saw both his mother and himself.
That moment captures what this project was really about. It was identity-based literacy in action — students learning to read the world through the lives and voices of others, while also locating their own experiences, identities, and perspectives in those stories.
So what may this teach us?
When students help build their learning — when they co-create the questions, the structure, the meaning — history and current events stop being distant or abstract.
They become part of the living human story, one they can take part in actively shaping.
Four Ways to Bring Identity-Based Literacy Into Your Classroom (or Home)
Reflecting on that project — and on countless classrooms that build identity-based literacy as a foundation — a few patterns stand out. Whether you teach history, science, or art, these principles hold across subjects and grades.
Start with Stories
Ask: What’s the story we tell ourselves about ourselves?
Invite students to share personal or community narratives— through oral storytelling, family traditions (honoring there are many types of families), or stories of migration and belonging. Storytelling affirms voices and identity. Stories remind students that they are not outsiders to learning; they are its source, its energetic center.
In the Oral History Project, the stories weren’t “extras,” they were the curriculum — the vessel through which students learned skills, from writing, to interviewing, to empathy.
Co-Create Windows and Mirrors
Ask: How do I connect to the story of others?
Design your curriculum with intention so students encounter both “windows and mirrors” — glimpses into experiences different from their own, and reflections of their identities. Invite students to help select texts, visuals, or media that expand representation — some that sound like voices from their world, and perspectives that also challenge their assumptions.
Through the Oral History Project, for example, students chose whose stories to document, and as a result, the class library grew richer — layered, multilingual, multi-generational.
Cultivate Identity as Foundational — Not As An Add-On
Identity is already in the room — in every student, every teacher, every lesson, every question we ask or forget to ask.
The work isn't to add identity, but to acknowledge and affirm it as a design principle from the start.
When planning, we can ask: Whose knowledge does this center? Whose voices are missing? What calls for amplification? (For a deeper dive into this approach, see this model from Humanizing History.)
For our immigration study, we began locally — in our own city — before expanding globally. We foregrounded Indigenous history as the foundation for understanding all movement on this land. The local-to-global lens grounded the abstract in the personal, making it more tangible.
Teach Literacy as a Tool of Liberation
Literacy is more than decoding words — it’s how we interpret and map the world, how we count and recognize patterns of power and possibility.
Across the globe, there are models of education that frame literacy as a pathway to liberation. Last week, we discussed how Septima Clark’s Citizenship Schools centered literacy as a form of civic power. Building on that idea, invite students to explore different knowledge systems, languages, and ways of knowing — from the Dalit-led education movements challenging casteism in India, to Hawaiian language immersion programs, like ’Āha Pūnana Leo, which aim to revitalize Indigenous language, knowledge, and identity.
These approaches remind us that reading and writing — and other forms of literacy — are also acts of reclaiming, of restoring agency and expanding who gets to tell the human story.
Reflect and Act
As you look ahead, consider:
Rather than memorizing or absorbing ideas, where can students help shape what they learn?
Whose stories are missing or underrepresented, and how might you bring them in with care?
How might co-creating learning help students see themselves as meaning-makers — moving from observer to co-participant?
We can start by asking ourselves:
How do we write ourselves into our own history — and help our students or children do the same?
Identity-based literacy begins with noticing who we are — our big feelings and our shared stories.
It thrives when identity is our foundation and we keep both safeguarding and celebration in mind.
It flourishes when we co-create an experience rooted in a shared value: to see ourselves and one other in our full humanity.
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