Institute Schedule & Curriculum

Curriculum Overview

To meet a growing interest in learning how to incorporate diverse perspectives into traditional K-12 curricula, the Institute will use Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1622) as a case study in decolonizing historical narratives and recentering Indigenous voices. Teachers will engage a range of other primary sources, including oral history, landscapes, objects, and written documents, to critically examine and decolonize Mourt's Relation to understand how the lives and voices of Indigenous people emerge from the text.

Each day will begin with a warm-up session led by Co-Directors and featuring in-depth analysis of one of the Institute’s core resources followed by a series of exercises that will teach participants how to decolonize that resource. These exercises lay the foundation for the day’s discussions, hands-on living history activities, or field trips, while providing teachers with sample activities they can bring back to their classrooms to engage students. Expert faculty seminars will provide important historical context and pedagogical insights that build on previous conversations, discuss assigned texts, and provide new insights. Afternoon sessions will fully immerse teachers in the application of the morning’s material to a decolonizing case study featuring an object, person, document, or historical landscape. Evening activities include special living history programs and public lectures.

Institute Schedule

Sample Daily Schedule

9:00am - 9:30am Warm-Up Activity

9:30am - 11:00am Faculty Seminar

11:30am - 12:30pm Decolonizing Case Study

12:30pm - 1:30pm Lunch

1:00pm - 3:00pm Hands-on Learning workshop

3:00pm - 4:30pm Small Group Discussions/Reflections

4:30pm Personal Reflections/Advising

Institute Framework

Sunday, July 24

Institute Co-Directors and Plimoth Patuxet Museums leadership welcome teachers with a Taste of Two Cultures dinner featuring traditional Wampanoag and 17th-century English dishes.

Monday, July 25

Co-Directors will provide an overview of the Institute’s goals and objectives. Plimoth Patuxet's Deputy Executive Director and Chief Historian Richard Pickering will introduce the Institute’s core text, Mourt’s Relation. To underscore the power of words in shaping perception, Co-Directors will work with teachers to build a shared vocabulary and parameters for respectful discourse. The teachers will end the day with a guided tour of the Museum’s main living history exhibits.

Tuesday, July 26

Co-Director Cedric Woods and Mashpee Wampanoag Outreach Coordinator Darius Coombs will explore New England’s diverse Indigenous people and their civil and cultural structures from time immemorial. Nitana Hicks Greendeer will lead a conversation about best practices for culture-based education and culturally-appropriate curriculum models, and teachers will analyze traditional Indigenous primary sources to explore new ways of understanding and looking at place and time in their classrooms. After dinner, as night falls on the Wampanoag Homesite, teachers will reconvene to continue discussions in a traditional bark-covered home (wetu).

Wednesday, July 27

Co-Directors and Linford Fisher will explore how the arrival of European fisherman, explorers, and traders in the late 15th century impacted Indigenous political, economic, and cultural systems. Teachers will decolonize Samuel de Champlain’s 1605 map of Port St. Louis (Patuxet) and a brass point from the Museum’s Indigenous archaeological collection to deepen their understanding of these early encounters. After lunch, teachers will explore landscape as a primary source while walking the original sites of Plymouth Colony and Patuxet with PPM staff.

Thursday, July 28

Vicki Oman, Richard Pickering and Dr. Carrington-Farmer will explore the complex motivations—spiritual, economic, and political—and the risk involved in the Pilgrims’ departures from Europe. Teachers will pay particular attention to how these 17th-century worldviews influenced the ways English colonists perceived and interacted with Indigenous people. Understanding these perspectives is crucial to the afternoon’s decolonizing case study which explores the first face-to-face encounters detailed in Mourt’s Relation through the eyes of Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore; Tisquantum (Patuxet Wampanoag); and widowed Mayflower passenger Susannah White.

Friday, July 29

Teachers will decolonize the iconic story of Tisquantum teaching the English to plant corn. They will explore both corn and herring as cultural and material objects that provide a window into worldview and daily life. Analyzing Plimoth 8-Row Flint Corn and a 400-year old Wampanoag stone hoe, Dr. Woods and PPM’s Miller Kim VanWormer will explore the role of corn in Indigenous communities with particular attention to gender roles in 17th-century Plymouth and Patuxet and in contemporary Wampanoag communities today. Darius Coombs and Stephen Mrozowski will discuss Wampanoag traditions of fishing and how archaeology can reinforce oral tradition. After lunch, teachers will spend time in the Museum’s living history exhibits experimenting with cultivating and processing corn using traditional tools and techniques.

Saturday, July 30

Teachers will board the ferry from Plymouth to Provincetown and join Museum staff, Darius Coombs, and Institute Co-Directors for a driving tour of Cape Cod featuring Indigneous and colonial landmarks through the eyes of the Pilgrims’ three voyages of discovery in November and December 1620, as documented in Mourt’s Relation. The tour will also feature cultural monuments from Mayflower’s 300th anniversary in 1920 and discussion about how communities choose to commemorate and celebrate their history.

Sunday, July 31

Rest day. Teachers have the opportunity to explore downtown Plymouth, visit the Museum's downtown exhibits including the Plimoth Grist Mill and Mayflower II, work on their final projects, or hit the beach!

Monday August 1

Teachers will explore themes of collaboration and conflict in colonial written documents such as Mourt’s Relation. Julie Fisher and Dr. Carrington-Farmer will lead a workshop on analyzing written documents using paleography before teachers decolonize the alliance of 1621, a key moment in the political and diplomatic relationship between Plymouth Colony and the Pokanoket Wampanoag. Teachers will explore the alliance’s implications for colonial and Indigenous leadership.

Tuesday August 2

Teachers will decolonize a written account of the First Thanksgiving. Darius Coombs and Vicki Oman will discuss Wampanoag and English traditions of giving thanks to inform teachers’ close analysis of the feast’s only eyewitness account which was published in Mourt’s Relation. In the afternoon, teachers have time to work on their final projects with support from Institute Co-Directors and the K-12 Leader.

Wednesday August 3

Teachers will travel by bus to the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island to meet Executive Director Lorén Spears and discuss how the Narragansett people are using their museum to reclaim Indigenous spaces and stories. Ms. Spears will also discuss working with tribal historians and language experts to decolonize and annotate Roger Williams’ A Key into the Language of America (1643). Teachers will meet with Cassius Spears, a Narragansett tribal leader and food sovereignty advocate, for a discussion of food and foodways as tools of cultural reclamation. In the evening, teachers may attend a public conversation about archaeology and Indigenous communities. Panelists will include archaeologists David Landon, Rae Gould, and Stephen Mrozowski as well as Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) David Weeden.

Thursday August 4

Christine DeLucia will explore decolonizing memory and how stories about our nation’s history can be tools of both cultural erasure and resilience. Teachers will revisit downtown Plymouth to decolonize the memory landscapes built for the tercentenary of Mayflower’s arrival in 1920 with particular attention to the role of Indigenous voices and perspectives. In the afternoon, teachers will have time to work on their final projects with support from Institute Co-Directors and the K-12 Leader.

Friday August 5

Final presentations. The Institute will conclude with dinner and a Plymouth Harbor sunset cruise.

Saturday August 6

Farewell!

Daily Reflections

Given the emotional and complex nature of this subject matter, ample time will be set aside for personal and small group reflection. Participants will be asked to log daily reflections in an internal blog accessible through Ancient Stories, New Neighbors’s private Google Classroom. Blog posts will enable participants, faculty, and staff to engage with one another’s work and share their insights in a more informal setting and begin to formulate ideas and garner feedback related to their final projects.

Group Discussions & Final Projects

Throughout the Institute, teachers will participate in small group discussions that focus on ways the ideas and approaches acquired through seminar discussions, hands-on activities, and field trips can be used to identify and apply lessons from these 17th-century narratives to 21st-century issues in their own communities. These may include:

• 1. Integrating historical or cultural subject matter into STEM/STEAM instruction,

  2. Employing the arts to explore the challenges of building new communities with people from diverse backgrounds,

  3. Using diverse data sets to explore questions of perspective and how history is created,

  4. Utilizing Institute sources to create guided inquiries.

For their final project, each participant will create a lesson plan, classroom activity, or curricular framework that explores different perspectives on an historical event and pose questions for further inquiry. based on one of these conversation topics to help their students better understand the events of the 16th and 17th centuries and pose questions for further inquiry. Teachers will share their lesson plans on the final days of the Institute. Six months after the Institute, teachers will submit a final version of their project as well as a written statement summarizing their experience implementing and adapting the plan to meet their students’ needs.