Visions Club at Environmental Charter School’s Intermediate School in Fall 2023 featured “Fantasy Character Design,” a precursor to our new “Mystical Metamorphosis” learning track. Students learned how to work with FX makeup and wigs, crocheting their very own wigs from scratch. They invented characters to personify, dressed up as them for a professional-level greenscreen portrait session, and recorded a backstory for the character on our iPads. In December 2023, the portraits were printed and posted within Assemble’s gallery on Penn Avenue, representing the first time our Offsite program was featured in an Unblurred event. The gallery was interactive, with iPads also available for visitors to listen to the recorded stories for each portrait. Many Visions students visited the gallery, and proudly showed off their portraits and audio stories to friends and family.

Afrofuturism was by far the most popular learning track requested by offsite partners in 2023. Our Afrofuturism curriculum, introduced in 2021, highlights the significant contributions of African and African-diaspora scientists, technologists, engineers, and artists to our current society and their place in the future, despite a long history of erasure. It follows the Sankofa principle, looking to the past to inform the present and shape a brighter future. Over half of our partnerships involved teaching Afrofuturism lessons directly (e.g., Hair Pride, or African-style djembe drum-making). The rest of our lessons–like all Assemble lessons–are also rooted in Afrofuturism, incorporating social justice concepts, diversity of representation, and inclusive teaching methods. In discussing the popularity of Afrofuturism, Assemble’s Offsite Programs Manager Ja’Sonta Roberts said, “being that there's such an assault on identities right now, we see the importance of making sure that that is continually folded into educational settings. So with Afrofuturism and the push for more diversity, for representation, this particular learning track brings all of that: from pride in self-identity to recognition of technologists, scientists, mathematicians, artists that have contributed to our modern day everyday life, and also being able to project ourselves into the future and seeing that we belong in these specific spaces as people of color. So it really is resonating.”