About Learning Materials
Our decision to create learning materials grew out of a desire to activate the oral history archive to ensure these inspiring, powerful, often overlooked stories were heard. These maps, lesson plans, and primers showcase the experiences of resettled refugees in the US in their own words by drawing from our oral history archive. These materials include information about refugees and the US refugee resettlement system, stories about refugees’ religious, ethnic, and cultural identities, and many more themes common across the oral history interviews we have conducted over the past two years.
For World Refugee Day on June 20th, 2020, we prepared a 90-minute lesson plan that educators used alongside interfaith prayer services to extend the intention to welcome refugees with information about them. This lesson included an explanation of who refugees are and how they arrive in the US, an interactive role-playing exercise, and first-person excerpts from our oral history project about refugees’ religious identities.
Developed by our team of alumni researchers and co-created with educators, these materials are being used by secondary schools across the US. We are working with educators from the Cristo Rey Network, Jesuit School Network, Quaker School Network, and other educators to develop lesson plans ranging from one day to two weeks for classes pertaining to theology, world religion, politics, history, and literature.
We continue to look for partners who are interested in using and co-developing curriculum with us for their educational institutions. If you are an educator at a school, places of worship, non-profit, senior center, or other organization and would like to use these materials or customize them to fit your audience, please email Katherine at kkclifto@princeton.edu.