Metairie, Louisiana

Project Title: Walking Tour Of The "Make It Right" Neighborhood
Rebuilding New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina

Seventh and eighth graders, from the T.H. Harris Middle School in Metairie, Louisiana, studied the impact of Hurricane Katrina through two different lenses – remembering and rebuilding. In “Remembering Hurricane Katrina,” students created digital stories about their personal experiences with the storm.   Using a slide show to evoke memories, students were asked to remember their own personal experience.  In focusing on rebuilding, the students created a digital walking tour of the Make It Right neighborhood in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.

Harris students have been documenting the recovery and rebuilding of the New Orleans area from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee breaches since 2006.  The project focuses on how Katrina disrupted the lives of the people in the area and changed their community.  Over one million people were affected by the hurricane. The students reflected on what happened in the city of New Orleans, just six miles east of their school, the damage the hurricane caused, and the rebuilding of the neighborhoods. They took more than 600 pictures to document the destruction they saw – the canal breach, piles of debris in every neighborhood, houses with holes in their roofs, missing walls, and the devastation of the Lakeview area. The result was an ongoing project at the school. Students summarized what they had seen and learned, told stories of the residents’ plights in their own words, documented the recovery of the area, and summarized how it changed their lives.

Lesson Documents