Digital Document
The ABC's of Systemic Racism Interactive Poster
Learning Gap and Instructional Needs
In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, it became apparent that many people in the U.S. do not understand the concept of systemic racism or the history associated with it in the country. There are so many examples of how this has shaped our society, it is shocking that it has not been taught in schools for so long. Even adults, who were taught in schools that suppressed this information, need somewhere to start beyond what they read debated in the news or social media. I created this ThinkLink interactive poster for an educational non-profit organization in my school district. This instrument could be used with adolescent and adult learners, administrators, counselors, teachers, and families.
I especially wanted this to be useful to teachers and students in middle and high school classrooms. I wrote the descriptions at a middle school reading level, and the links for further research are more at a high school level. I also wanted to make it accessible to students with special hearing or visual needs. The descriptions have an immersive reader button, and the quality of the AI reader and sound is very good. Many of the links go to videos from credible online sources, most of which have transcripts and/or captions.
Instructional Strategy
The main purpose of this document is to spark curiosity and interest in further reading/research based on choice of topic. Because digital documents are best put to use if learners can interact with them, and older students especially want choice to guide their inquiry, I used hover-over links to further information for each term. Middle-school students, for example, could just start with learning the basic meaning and example for the terms they choose, while older learners could follow the research links provided for a few topics they want to study further. The poster can also be printed as a visual reminder of the lesson to hang in the classroom.
Visual Design
Designing this document as an ABCs poster highlights that we are just beginning to teach students this reality in our schools and visually demonstrates how many examples there are to learn.
I used Black and yellow, representing Black Lives Matter, and- avoided other primary/stark colors that would complete with those. When you click on a letter/example, a box opens up with a description and link - I used a black background with yellow text because that was better in terms of harsh contrast than the reverse - however, that might make it harder to read for students with visual impairments.
Visuals are dominant because this is meant to be a poster that can be printed out as well as a visual menu of options for students to click on for more info and links. Unlike what I would normally do, I did not create a dominant visual element because of the nature of the document described above), but contrast is created through the levels of information presented (letter/title>click>description>link to outside source). I used repetition with font and size of the letter/graphic/text and alignment with the order of the letters and placement of the interactive button.
The trickiest part was proximity and achieving "gestalt" - I ordered everything in rows and then moved the elements around to create some asymmetry that made the best use of space while maintaining clear relationships between the icons and text. After getting some feedback from other students in this course, I looked online for some other variations of ABC posters and Alphabet Samplers and found some ideas for how to improve this before the site goes live.