Prof. crowdsources 'Charleston syllabus'

Following the events of the Charleston shooting, Professor Chad Williams of Brandeis University turned to Twitter for help in creating a Charleston Syllabus.

Williams started with the idea on his own Twitter account with the #CharlestonSyllabus hashtag. Williams initially got the idea from Marcia Chatelain, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, who created a #FergusonSyllabus following the events in Ferguson, Missouri, last year.

Together with his colleagues Kidada E. Williams, Keisha N. Blaine, and Christopher Cameron, Williams started crowdsourcing materials for the syllabus.

The purpose of the syllabus is to serve as a “living collection” of books, news, poems, films, or any other teaching materials that can provide historical context into the Charleston shooting.

The syllabus is still taking sources from Twitter, with over 15,000 tweets using the tag thus far. It is not only located on Goodreads, but also on the African American Intellectual History Society’s page, which is ran by William’s colleague Christopher Cameron.

“So much of our conversations about race are rooted in emotions and feelings and not knowledge and facts,” Williams said, in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. “What I was hearing on the news lacked historical substance.”

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @LadyLiberty94