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Learning to Remember: A Black History Month Learning Journey
This year Black History Month began with a song. A jazz concert on the campus of Wayne State University by the Marcus Elliot quintet on February 1st. A song that made my breath catch in my throat for the range of emotion that it covered. And then he told us the name of the song: Learning to Remember. The music had perfectly reflected struggle of learning, the discomfort of figuring out, the challenge of not knowing what you should have known, or maybe what you couldn’t have known. The intentionality of remembering, of going back to what was to understand anew what is and what could be.
Learning to Remember has become my theme for Black History Month this year. In part because the song taught me something I’m still working though. In part because I lead an organization with learning in its name, so noticing how learning is referenced has become a practice for me.
The Institute of Learning Innovation (ILI) celebrates its fortieth year this year. I am the new leader, following the founder. My job is learning to remember things that I was not present for so that those collective memories can shape our future contributions. And while learning usually involves some amount of struggle, this practice and skill of learning to remember is so much more: it is what connects our past with our present with clear eyes.
As a white American woman who grew up in rural Michigan, I don’t have my own early memories of Black History Month to remember. But my job as a white American woman is to remember things that I was never formally taught so that I can contribute to building a collective memory that can shape our future. It is important to remember that history is not neutral – and signs of its politicization in this 250th year since the Declaration of Independence was signed are ever present. Remembering Black History is critical to the honest and accurate telling of American history, and my journey of learning to remember Black History is fascinating and rich and helps me understand the world around me with more clarity.
My process of learning to remember has been shaped by mentors and mentees, by curating my social media feeds to intentionally learn from Black leaders in all my areas of interest, by the books they’ve suggested, by fiction as much as nonfiction. It is also shaped and enriched by cultural institutions that were built to be keepers of memory, like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History , a national treasure, and a hometown visit for me in Detroit.
The fact that self-directed process is how so much learning happens in fact the reason why the Institute for Learning Innovation exists- to support and advance the learning that happens across the lifespan outside of formal educational spaces. And this kind of learning is both critical to our multi-racial democracy and to our collective memory of the past and imagination for the future.
Our team at ILI is made up of folks from different academic backgrounds, and so as part of our own learning to remember this Black History Month, I invited the team to share stories of Black leaders in our respective fields. Here are some of our highlights:
Eve Ewing’s book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, came out last February. It is meticulously researched and beautifully written, telling the story of education in America- and how systems were designed with different intentions for white children, Black children, and Native American children. Dr. Ewing is a sociologist and poet, a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. In her book, she points us to a vision where community based educational spaces – sites of informal learning – hold the promise for a more just and equitable learning experiences and systems that support young people and communities.
“I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Ewing last year when she came to Detroit on her book tour. I devoured her book and although not all of it was new to me, reading this history in one place had a profound impact on me. It shapes how I think about the promise and potential of informal learning to build more just futures.” – Kimberly Robinson , CEO
Betty Reid Soskin, the legendary National Park Service ranger at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park, was the oldest serving NPS ranger in the US at the time of her retirement in 2022 at the age of 100. In her work planning for the park, she was quoted saying, “What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering.” Ms. Soskin’s life and work underscored the importance of ensuring that public history and current decision making reflected a fuller range of lived experiences. Her work both emphasized the necessity of diverse perspectives and modeled how to include them. In parks, museums, and other community spaces, expanding whose voices are centered is essential to building more accurate and inclusive histories.
“Ms. Soskin influenced much of the way I thought about my work on the National Park Science Challenge project, which involved collaborating with youth living around urban national parks. We met regularly to find ways for them to tell their stories and advocate through counter storytelling. With young people, we asked, ‘who gets to narrate public memory and whose footprints walk across the trails?’, a lesson from Ms. Soskin’s work with the National Park Service. When young people see themselves as active participants in history, not passive recipients, their role and ability to contribute becomes clearer.” – Monae Verbeke , Director of Evaluation
Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington on Coast Salish homelands. He is the author of several books, including Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Dr. Paris’s work has helped shape the field’s understanding of culturally sustaining pedagogy, an approach that calls on educators to not only recognize but actively sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of the communities they serve. His work continues to influence educators and researchers across formal and informal learning settings, including ours.
“His work on culturally sustaining pedagogies has had a real impact on how I approach our work. In a current project we have been exploring what it means to apply culturally sustaining approaches to informal learning settings, specifically Family STEAM programs. His scholarship pushes us to truly center the values, knowledge, and lived experiences of the communities we work with and challenges us to design informal learning spaces where people feel a deep sense of belonging and where their ways of knowing are not just welcomed but sustained. These ideas continue to shape how we collaborate with partners, build community, and imagine what meaningful, culturally sustaining learning can look like in practice.” – Debbie Siegel , Senior Researcher
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History is science communicator and scholar who has played a major role in making space science accessible to the public through books, television, and lectures, inspiring curiosity about the universe across generations. Most people have not studied astrophysics in school but have learned astronomy content from how it is presented in public forums. He raises the bar for how astrophysics is presented in broader culture, leading first with scientific facts and not necessarily what is popular or what other people want to hear.
“My first academic field was astrophysics and in college I had the opportunity to meet and work with one of my idols as I spent the summer after my junior year of college as a research intern in his department. He was generous with his time and getting to listen to him explain things and break concepts down with humor was like having a front row seat to a masterclass in public speaking. It was also helpful for me to have at that stage in my learning journey, a role model who was straddling a few different discrete academic fields and forging his own path as that was something I envisioned myself doing and didn’t really have a good sense of how to do it.” – Elysa Corin , Senior Researcher
Karen Pittman is often referred to as the ‘godmother of positive youth development’. Across her 50-year (and counting) career focused on children and youth she has helped to shift the national conversation about young people from risk and prevention to a more asset focused approach. Her work seamlessly blends lived experience and research evidence about young people. She founded the Forum for Youth Investment with the mission of ‘changing the odds that all children and youth are ready for college, work, and life.’ and is famous for coining catch phrases that help to motivate action like, “Problem free is not fully prepared” and “Fully prepared is not fully engaged” – she has been a visionary leader in the youth development field for decades and was named the recipient of the NEA Foundation’s 2026 Outstanding Service to Public Education Award.
“I had the privilege of working for Karen for several years, having a front row seat to her brilliance and passion for changing the odds for young people. She continues to be a mentor and friend who in equal measure will invite me into her home at a moment’s notice and/or give me a list of things to read that expand my learning and imagining about the future of youth development.” – Kimberly Robinson , CEO
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