Join Monument Lab for a roundtable with educators from around the country to discuss ways of teaching and engaging the National Monument Audit. The panelists will discuss the ways classrooms – especially K-12 classrooms, college courses, and arts and cultural spaces – can participate in extending the learnings from the audit.

The roundtable will be led by Monument Lab’s Associate Director of Public Engagement Patricia Eunji Kim, and features panelists educator Dr. Cierra Kaler-Jones, Rabiya Kassam-Clay, and Ah-young Kim. Discussion with Q&A to follow. Registration required.

This event will be a live and recorded Zoom Webinar. Closed captioning will be made available during the event.

The suggested donation for this event starts at $1 with an option to contribute any additional amount to support Monument Lab's mission. Support Monument Lab at https://monumentlab.wedid.it/.

Panelists:

• Cierra Kaler-Jones, Ph.D. (she/her), Director of Storytelling, Communities for Just Schools Fund and leadership team, Zinn Education Project
• Rabiya Kassam-Clay (she/her), Social Studies Teacher, Marshall High School in LAUSD and Founder, Flux Institute
• Ah-young Kim (she/her), Manager of School Visits, Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Patricia Eunji Kim, Ph.D. (she/her) (moderator) is Associate Director of Public Engagement, Monument Lab and Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, New York University

Panelist Bios:

Cierra Kaler-Jones, Ph.D. (she/her) is a social justice educator, artist, and researcher based in Washington, D.C. Her research explores how Black girls use arts-based practices as mechanisms for identity construction and resistance. Over the past ten years, Cierra has learned alongside preschoolers, K-12 students, college students, and adults. With her roots in dance and arts education, Cierra has also taught classes on U.S. history, public policy, and social change & leadership. She is the Director of Storytelling at Communities for Just Schools Fund and serves on the Zinn Education Project leadership team. @_cierrajade_ & @zinnedproject; www.cierrakalerjones.com & www.zinnedproject.org

Rabiya Kassam-Clay (she/her) teaches social studies at Marshall High School in LAUSD. She has been a teacher for fourteen years in Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles. Rabiya earned a M.S.Ed. in Secondary Social Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching repertoire includes world history, United States history and government, composition, and literature. Rabiya coached teaching fellows with Breakthrough Collaborative, and founded the Flux Teacher Institute which provides fresh and seasoned teachers with tools and collaboration to adapt best practices for remote learning potential. She has presented for the National Council on Social Studies and published with Rethinking Schools. Rabiya writes curriculum including for 1919 by Eve Ewing and There are Trans People Here by H. Melt. Rabiya is currently leading workshops on source evaluation, sketchnoting, and public spaces. She is a lifelong devotee of science fiction and poetry, and a proud member of the House of Representatives of UTLA. @fluxteacherinstitute @welcomebrilliantminds

Ah-Young Kim (she/her) is currently the Manager of School Visits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With 21 years of experience in museum education, she currently oversees school group programs and has been an integral member of multiple special exhibition teams, developing educational programming and teacher resources, planning and implementing community engagement initiatives, creating content for digital interpretation stations and labels, and helping with fundraising. She is passionate about facilitating a collaborative working environment within the museum and in partnership with the community and is invested in providing the best experience to museum visitors.

Patricia Eunji Kim, Ph.D. (she/her) is an art historian, curator, and educator based in New York City. She is Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Associate Director of Public Engagement and Editor at Monument Lab. Dr. Kim’s research and teaching use methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory from antiquity to the present. She is currently writing the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of Hellenistic queenship from western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. Dr. Kim is co-editor of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), a book that features artists, humanists, and scientists to model new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration in the environmental humanities. 

About the National Monument Audit and Monument Lab

The National Monument Audit , produced by Monument Lab in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, assesses the current monument landscape across the United States. Monument Lab’s research team spent a year scouring millions of records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. For our deepest investigations, we focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. The National Monument Audit allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our monument landscape, to pose questions about common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory. The National Monument Audit is meant to inform Mellon’s landmark Monuments Project, a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.”

Monument Lab is a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Monument Lab works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Founded by Paul Farber and Ken Lum in 2012, Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.

As a studio and curatorial team, we collaborate to make generational change in the ways art and history live in public. Our approaches include producing citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, and participatory research initiatives. We aim to inform the processes of public art, as well as the permanent collections of cities, museums, libraries, and open data repositories. Through exhibitions, research programs, editorial platforms, and fellowships, we have connected with hundreds of thousands of people in person and millions online. Monument Lab critically engages our inherited symbols in order to unearth the next generation of monuments that elevate stories of resistance and hope.