Smithsonian Learning Lab

The Search for an American Identity

We live in a multicultural, multilingual, multinational America, which offers complicated, imposing, unsettling questions about American identity. There are no easy answers to what is an American identity or perhaps no answers at all. What is an American identity is an important subject in an ever changing America, and Smithsonian Institution exhibits and objects on display in various museums help us to seek answers to the question of what is identity and what is American identity.

Mimi Mann

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Teaching with the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution offers millions of possibilities to enrich classrooms across the country, from elementary to college level and beyond. At Montgomery College in Maryland, we have been enriched beyond words in working with the Smithsonian for 27 years as part of our Smithsonian Faculty Fellowship, which joins faculty and students in projects centered on Smithsonian visits. My newest collection of images contains myriad ideas for using Smithsonian objects and exhibits in the classroom. We have taken more than 25,000 of our students, their families, and friends through Smithsonian doors and virtually and have witnessed profound, positive changes in our students, as they expanded their worlds outside the classroom.

Mimi Mann

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Social Justice Memories

Powerful images of social justice performers and social justice itself.

Mimi Mann

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Social Justice and the American Way

Racist and unjust events of the past few years, directed mainly at Blacks but more recently Asian Americans and immigrants in general reveal, how far we haven't come to fulfill Dr. Martin Luther King's and others' ideals of equal justice and treatment for all. The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a rich resource of artifacts, documents, and basically every kind of reminder of the journey our people and others have taken to fulfill the lofty goals set forth in our founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other goal-setting writings that helped to make what America strives to be today: a blind Statue of Justice. Come along on our journey and discover not only what social justice/injustice should and can mean but also what justice as a whole is meant to mean to us all.

Mimi Mann

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