Bringing race to the classroom
Project Overview
Throughlines is a free learning platform for educators of premodern literature, history, and culture, featuring educational videos, sample syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, and reading lists developed with leading scholars and researchers from top institutions.
As Lead Multimedia Developer, I lead a team of creatives translating complex graduate-level material into engaging video content, overseeing script development, visual research, art direction, and end-to-end production. I also head the platform itself, directing site architecture, design, and development, and managing agency implementation.
Industries
Higher Education
Services
Content Strategy
Production
Art Direction
Year
2022 - Present
Сhallenge
Our national needs assessment of humanities faculty surfaced a clear pattern: educators who want to teach about race in the classroom are constrained less by will than by infrastructure. Institutional resistance, parent pushback, limited time to redesign existing courses, and inconsistent access to credible scholarship and subject-matter experts in critical race studies. I led the work of translating these findings into strategic content-based solutions.
Approach
The needs assessment made clear what educators wanted: sample syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, and reading lists, all built around access to leading scholarship. I developed and led the platform that houses that library, then directed production of Throughlines' educational videos, condensing research that previously existed only in dense academic papers into ten-minute pieces featuring leading scholars, cutting the time educators spend gathering foundational material. I set the standard for scripts to stay accessible without sacrificing rigor, and defined an analog-inspired visual style that gives the platform its own identity. Delivering all of it meant leading a mix of in-house creatives, contractors, and outside agencies.
Results
Throughlines has secured $7 million in funding from the Mellon Foundation. The platform's materials have been adopted by professors in classrooms nationwide, and its videos are used at major institutions including The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Public Theater in New York, and The Huntington Library. To date, I've led collaboration with 52 scholars from institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYU, UCLA, Princeton, and Brown University, producing more than 150 pieces of educational content.
