BY ANNE FLATTÉ

Help me, O God, to see that I'm just a symbol of a movement. . . .

O God, help me to see that where I stand today,

I stand because others helped me to stand there

And because the forces of history projected me there.

And this moment would have come in history

Even if M. L. King had never been born.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

These words, offered as a daily prayer by Martin Luther King, Jr., as he rose to prominence, epitomize one of the primary missions of the work of the Papers Project established in his name.

Making King into a myth, says Clayborne Carson, "disempowers people because it conveys the idea that only great people can bring about great historical change. To me, the real message of King is that he gained an opportunity to display his exceptional qualities because many other people created a stage on which he could display these exceptional qualities."

With that in mind, King Papers scholars, Stanford students and K-12 educators have joined forces to develop a curriculum they hope will change the way schoolchildren learn about the man, the movement and the continuing struggle for justice. The collaboration is the latest in a series of public education efforts of the Papers Project and draws on its many resources, including its online documents database, the skills of student researchers and connections to veterans of the movement.

"There’s a need for curriculum that goes more in depth into Dr. King and issues around civil rights -- as opposed to just reading the textbook, or just treating it as we study holidays," says Stan Pesick, a social studies teacher currently on special assignment as co-manager of Urban Dreams, an educational reform program of the Oakland Unified School District. Urban Dreams and the King Papers Project are working together to develop curricular materials for high school English and history classes.

According to Carson, the problem with how King and the movement are taught is that teachers often focus too much on King as "the man who had a dream," which leads to misconceptions about the real leader and diminishes the roles of other players and grass-roots activism in changing American society.

Since becoming an academic expert on these forces of history, Carson has personally consulted on museum exhibits, books and films about King and the movement. Carson also has helped to design exhibits at the King Visitors Center in Atlanta and at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. During the late 1980s, Carson was senior adviser for the 14-part public television series, "Eyes on the Prize."

It was the success of "Eyes on the Prize" in the classroom that convinced Carson of the viability of media as an educational tool. But the introduction of the Internet as a means of mass communication now holds even more promise.

In 1993, the King Papers Project launched its King website. The site, http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/ holds some 600 primary source documents, as well as pictures and chronologies of King and the movement, and currently averages 10,000 hits a day. The Woodside Summit Group, an African American-owned Bay Area computer services firm, has funded the site since 1997.

Last year, the King Papers Project began working with the Oakland schools to develop interactive lesson plans and resources based on primary source materials for distribution over the Internet via the Project’s website. Dubbed the "liberation curriculum" by Carson because it draws on material from the African American freedom struggle as well as other liberation struggles, the lesson plans focus on connecting students with ideas about how to achieve social justice and social change.

Joy Williamson, assistant professor of education at Stanford, agrees that students "need to broaden their understanding of American history to be better citizens and participants in a democracy."Waiting until high school or later to introduce students to such subjects as diversity, freedom and social justice is too late, Williamson says. "You have to start in kindergarten. If you wait, then you treat it like a secret, as something that’s not an integral part of history, when it is."

For educational reformers, the liberation curriculum promises a way for students and teachers to bring an increased understanding of diverse perspectives to bear throughout the academic year in a variety of ways, rather than teaching minority histories in a vacuum during certain months of the year or only on special holidays. Julie Henderson, a multicultural coordinator at the Campbell Unified School District (K-8) who joined the King Papers Project staff recently as part-time liberation curriculum coordinator, says she believes that providing professional resources to teachers is key. She says that although teachers do try to include diverse perspectives in the classroom, they often don’t have the tools to teach in a comprehensive way.

"At the very least, we’ll get a little folklore, have a few fiestas," says Henderson. "At best, you will have folks who during the appropriate time in the school year introduce Dr. King and Rosa Parks, and it will stop right there."

In the Urban Dreams project, nine high school teachers signed up last summer to work with the King Papers Project to develop lesson plans and were matched with Stanford students participating in a seminar taught by Carson and Winter Pettis Renwick, a curriculum developer at the Papers Project.

Renwick worked with the students as they developed ideas for lesson plans and helped coordinate their contacts with the Oakland teachers. All of the plans are required to have a strong historical component and must be designed to meet California state and national frameworks and standards in the social sciences, language arts, English language development and teacher education.

When creating the plans, says Renwick, "we use central questions and ideas like ‘What is justice?’ A lot of these ideas relate to every student in [a class], including students who have recently immigrated to America, students who have language learning issues, students who come from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. It gives them all a chance to feel connected to the curriculum."

To date, the liberation curriculum team has developed several lesson plans built around diverse themes, including poverty, the role of music in freedom struggles, and nonviolent resolution of international conflict, based on King’s "Beyond Vietnam" speech.

As the educational content is developed, Renwick works with web developers Masud Shamsid-Deen and Robert Harris to get the ideas up on the web and provide a site that allows for discussion.

Participating teachers and Stanford students meet in person and in online discussions to test the site and to offer feedback on the sample lessons. "Right now the important thing is trying to forge relationships with teachers," says Shamsid-Deen. "If you were to look at the whole liberation curriculum process, it’s first geared toward providing teachers with materials, and starting to develop lesson plans and units, and a community online where they can discuss these lesson plans and units and how they’ve used them in a classroom."

Firsthand accounts by movement veterans also are an important part of inspiring curriculum development. The King Papers Project recently invited Jean Wiley, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to speak to Oakland teachers about her life of activism. In the future, teachers and their students will have an opportunity to experience such testimonials on the web via video clips.

"Often it’s made much more real for the students when they hear it firsthand than when they read it out of a book or they hear it in a teacher’s lecture," says Williamson. "[The civil rights veterans] can talk to people about why they did the things they were doing -- why they chose the tactics they chose."

Wiley says she hopes that through the liberation curriculum students and teachers will be moved by the stories of ordinary people in the movement who did extraordinary things. "There’s so little to inspire people to civic engagement, to volunteerism, to putting a cause before personal gain and profit. I hope it will also spark an interest in learning --- a love of learning history, or a love of reading poetry, or a curiosity about political systems. And I think it can. I think students are hungry for a spark."

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project