Curriculum Guides

The Detroit Under Fire curriculum guides on this page are designed for high school and middle school teachers and classroom audiences. (The document-based investigative reports available here are designed for college courses as well as for secondary school usage). The guides are in three categories to engage Detroit Under Fire at different scales. 

Each guide also has a content advisory. Design coordinators at CEDER (Center for Education Desigh, Evaluation, & Research) in the School of Education at the University of Michigan developed these curriculum guides in partnership with Professor Matt Lassiter of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab. Primary credit goes to Darin Stockdill, the Instructional and Program Design Coordinator for CEDER, as well as Alanna Hurd, School of Education graduate student. Thanks also to the Detroit area teachers who tested these curriculur materials during a February 2023 workshop and to those who provided additional feedback.

College and secondary school instructors are welcome to develop their own assignments and modules based on Detroit Under Fire, in particular by using the many original archival documents digitized throughout the exhibit. In addition, our project has designed for curricular purposes the five-part StoryMap series that compiles each section's maps and key research findings of police homicides, brutality, and misconduct. The nine-part series of multimedia investigative reports drawn from the exhibit present this historical research in document-forward, less text-heavy ways and are ideal for college and secondary school classroom adoption. If you do use the Detroit Under Fire exhibit or these supplemental storytelling products in a classroom (or research project), please consider sending an email with feedback, questions, or just a report of the usage to Professor Matt Lassiter, the project director, at mlassite@umich.edu. 

1. Detroit Under Fire Teaching Guide/Research Project Guides (Website Overview)

This is the broadest scale of the curricular guides and includes a website overview guide for teachers and designed research project guides for both teachers and students. 

Note: The guides below are multipage pdf files. Please click on the icon and then click again on the larger icon on the jump page.

Detroit Under Fire Teaching Guide: Wensite Overview and Planning

Teacher's Guide for Research Project/Student Performance Assessment: Creating an Experimental Museum Exhibit

Student Guide for Research Project/Performance Assessment: Creating an Experimental Museum Exhibit

2. Detroit Under Fire StoryMaps Instruction and Reading Guides

This is the middle scale of the curricular guides and includes resources for teachers and students to utilize the first three StoryMaps in the Detroit Under Fire: Mapping Police Violence and Misconduct series, covering the years 1957-1967. These StoryMaps briefly synthesize the materials in Parts I, II, and III of the overall website.

Note: The guides and resources below are multipage pdf files. Please click on the icon and then click again on the larger icon on the jump page.

Detroit Under Fire Teaching Guide and Instructional Materials for StoryMaps (1957-1967)

Detroit Under Fire Student Reading Guide for StoryMaps (1957-1967)

Community Builder: Hopes and Fears (Worksheet)

Confort Zone and Learning Edge (Slide Deck)

3. Kercheval Incident of 1966: Mini-Unit Instruction Guides

This focused mini-unit allows students to engage in a deep dive into the multimediate investigative report, The Kercheval Incident, Detroit 1966: The Police Department's Illegal War on Black Power Activists. The Detroit Police Department received national praise for preventing a riot by Black youth and radical activists in August 1966. This report reveals the origins of the unrest in the illegal police surveillance and systematic harassment of civil rights activists, especially a Black Power organization that mobilized to expose police racism and brutality.

Note: The guides and resources below are multipage pdf files. Please click on the icon and then click again on the larger icon on the jump page.

Kercheval Mini-Unit: Guide for Teachers

Kercheval Mini-Unit: Instructional Slide Deck

Kercheval Mini-Unit: Student Guide and Handouts

Kercheval Mini-Unit: Teacher Answer Key for Student Handouts

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