Annie Evans
“I frequently share our ‘Why?’ in this work, and I am always curious about others, and their ‘Why?’ as I believe, if we asked and listened to this of everyone we meet, we might find common ground.”
Q: Name | Location | Years in Education
Annie Evans | Charlottesville, VA | 35
Q: Tell us the story of your journey to becoming an educator. What are the significant waypoints along that path?
I like to think of my life’s journey as 4 pathways - student, teacher, curriculum specialist, and advocate. Each of these stages in my journey led to me doing what I am doing now, and I believe I had to go through the first 3 chapters and have those perspectives and experiences to be where I am now working with teachers and students across the country.
Milestones for Annie as a student was earning an opportunity to attend Girls' State. This led to an interest in government and politics and continues into adult life with encouragement from our mother who was a local community advocate for schools, parks, and inclusion in schools.
Milestones for Annie the classroom teacher in Richmond, VA include being selected early on in the formation of the NatGeoEd network, which gave me formal training in public speaking and delivering professional learning as well as providing opportunities to travel and widen the lens. A second milestone 30+ years ago was attending a workshop on digital humanities tools being developed by a young associate professor at the University of Virginia-Ed Ayers. His passion and vision for how schools might harness the power of digital tools and resources was inspiring. (30+ years later our paths crossed and now we work together to create New American History). This led to me exploring digital teaching and learning, including a passion for GIS and using maps to tell powerful stories.
Perhaps one of the most profound milestones came to Annie the curriculum specialist in Charlottesville, Virginia. When white supremacists invaded our town, suddenly our entire community was thrust into a global spotlight about history, race, and hate. It was a challenging time to be an educator, but also an opportunity to finally have more open and honest discussions about topics previously not taught in most schools across the country, and now people were listening and more open to learning the truth than ever before.
The final milestone for Annie the advocate was a serendipitous moment when a colleague at UVA reconnected me with Ed Ayers, whose work I greatly admired and followed for over 3 decades. This led to me leaving K12 public schools to work alongside him and create/innovate/disrupt the way we teach and learn about America's past, using powerful digital tools including maps to help every child see themselves in the story of America.
Q: Who inspired you (friend, family, coach, mentor, guide, sponsor, advisor) to become an educator, and/or get involved in education?
My 5th grade teacher Delores Windt helped me fall in love with learning, history, and maps! She never used a textbook and was a masterful storyteller. She let us create projects to demonstrate our understanding and created a safe space for us to ask questions and find answers without just giving them to us. She used inquiry and wove in art, music, and creative writing to get us to think differently about learning. I still always strive to live up to her expectations and legacy.
Q: When (and where) do you feel you are most likely to succeed as you practice your educational art, and your educational craft?
Moving from the classroom to a division-wide role in Charlottesville allowed me to see how our elementary colleagues were underresourced with little access to accurate and rich historical content - we replaced dated worksheet packets with floor maps, hands-on artifact trunks, picture books, and graphic novels that looked like those comics I used to read as a kid, but brought to light the stories of Americans like John Lewis, Shirley Chisholm, and T. Thomas Fortune. Students who previously thought they hated history were now engaged in exploring the toponyms of the streets where they lived, and the names on their sports jerseys, and they had questions - so many questions!
“Why did most of the people in the history books all look the same?” “Didn’t anyone who looks like me ever do anything important?” “Why do we have to learn this stuff?” We worked with local museums, UVA faculty, and community civic leaders to develop a local history curriculum where our students could see themselves in American history. Then came the Unite the Right rally. Suddenly, Charlottesville was a hashtag, and our local history became national news.
Shortly afterward, my path intersected with an award-winning Public Historianand past President of the University of Richmond, Ed Ayers, through a mutual friend at UVA. He pioneered creating digital scholarship projects like the Valley of the Shadow and using GIS to create interactive maps, presented as a digital atlas, American Panorama, and connecting current events to the past with a tool he called Bunk, and hosting a PBS series, The Future of America’s Past. He thought perhaps some AP US History teachers in high schools might be able to use them, but I quickly shared with him that “Sure, they could, but those kids are already doing pretty well - it’s everyone else we needed to share these tools and resources with to help them see themselves in the story of America.” That is when he shared his vision of helping America’s schools and imagining a new way to teach America’s past. What if we engaged teachers and students in using these rich digital tools in all K-16 classrooms to explore the untold stories of American history? What if we could let students drill down to see the ways history happens right in their own backyards, then widen the lens to include all of our stories? We launched our New American History website just a month and a half before the pandemic shut down schools across the country, and suddenly, there was a great need for digital tools and resources freely accessible with no passwords, no logins, and no paywalls.
Q: What are the skills you feel most confident using in your life, and work in education?
My passion for reimagining how we teach history, geography, and civics lies in creating rich digital humanities projects freely accessible to engage students through inquiry. We expanded our work these past few years, bookmarked between the violence and turmoil we saw ignited in Charlottesville and the Black Lives Matter protests exploding in communities across the country amidst a global pandemic, a racial reckoning across not only the United States, but on a global scale, documenting each in Bunk, American Panorama, and other projects, helping students across the country make connections between past and present, and helping them learn to ask questions and seek answers from multiple perspectives, using data and evidence, discovering ways to both commemorate and critique our founders, our nation and our communities, challenging them to become solutionaries.
Q: What are the most significant challenges you are working to overcome as you define what school could be?
The political backlash that historically happens after every major civil rights movement in the modern era is the rise of “Divisive Concepts” and “CRT” rhetoric, much in the same way we say the rise of Jim Crow following the Reconstruction era. Book bannings, School Vouchers, and “Pandemic Learning Loss,” are all ways our public schools have become politicized, from state standards to local school board elections. Case in point - the removal of Confederate iconography and renaming of schools, public buildings, and public lands in recent years saw a resurgence in the “Heritage vs. History” trope. We are not erasing or rewriting history - we leave that to the TV pundits and rage farmers on social media. We hope we are encouraging the next generation of educators, public historians, environmental stewards, first responders, scientists, and policymakers. We hope to spark curiosity and nurture engaged citizens and solutionaries, with a broader understanding of the past to solve modern problems like climate change, food insecurity, and racial injustices. Elections have consequences, but as we saw in Virginia last November, eventually the pendulum tends to find a center of balance, and we hope to see that continue in the coming months and years.
Q: Describe some of the most rewarding moments in your time in education; those crazy days when you knew you were having an impact...and it felt really good.
During the height of the pandemic when we were all living on Zoom, I signed up for a webinar as they were using one of our UR maps, which has garnered much attention in recent years, on redlining. As the webinar began, the moderator informed us the speakers were 2 HS students from Vermont who found our work when their own teachers would NOT teach them about it-they pushed back and created their own lessons to share with their classmates! I was blown away, and inspired by their work. We have been in touch ever since, added more student allies in this work, and have presented together at other digital conferences. The next generation gives me hope!
A middle school in LAUSD in California invited me to share our resources and maps on Urban Renewal. I shared an image of Dodger Stadium and asked “Who’s been to a ball game here?” When most hands went up, I then shared images of Latinx/Hispanic families being displaced from Chavez Ravine to build the stadium. We discussed the links from this era to the persistent public health and environmental consequences of public policies relegating generations of LA families to generational poverty and homelessness. The next week the teacher called to say a small group of her students staged a small protest outside the stadium during a home game and made homemade signs with a link to our website, challenging baseball fans to learn more about the land and its history! Powerful connections, indeed.
Q: What do you most want to learn from this global online community of your fellow educator-leaders?
I frequently share our “Why?” in this work, and I am always curious about others, and their “Why?” as I believe if we asked and listened to this of everyone we meet, we might find more common ground. Ask and listen more, talk less.
Q: What is something quirky that you love about yourself and would help other community members to get to know you?
I am a HUGE Springsteen fan, having attended 78 shows with tickets to #79 in the fall. It is somewhat a family affair, as my older brother has been to well over 120 and our younger brother and sisters attended many shows with us along the way. Bruce’s work resonates with me as a storyteller of American history in an everyman way. The Springsteen archives recently opened in Monmouth, NJ and we are planning a visit there to see their inaugural exhibits.
Q: Ben Franklin supposedly said, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." You might think Ben was full of baloney, but we are wondering when YOU are most awake, alive, productive, creative, and/or reflective. Early morning, late at night, some other time?
I am 100% Night Owl (filling this survey out at 1:32 am!) and have been since I was a little kid. My most creative ideas, lessons, projects, book talks, and mapping projects are all nocturnal creations! Mornings are rough, and I am a connoisseur of coffee to get me through the day.
Q: Cold night, snow out, warm fire, hot beverage, or hot day, white sand beach, shorts and slippers, cold beverage?
All of the above! The geographer in me explores all physical and cultural landscapes and revisits these in all seasons and time periods to look for patterns, ask more questions, and gather data to sift, sort, and analyze. Geoliteracy is lifelong learning in both time and space.
Q: The coolest thing that happened to me today (the day I am filling out this form) was…
I began working with a beloved historian and Afrofuturist to begin to sketch out new learning resources for his forthcoming graphic novel series on the history of Hip Hop. We are creating digital humanities tools and resources including audio/video/animated digital artifacts, and planning a field experience in NYC to bring to life the intersection of history, geography, and music, spanning 5 decades. Stay tuned…
Q: And finally, what do you think is the purpose of education? (Clearly not a small question, but we hope you enjoy responding!)
Helping students find their “Why?” and making space for them to find ways to harness their own natural curiosity, talents, and passions to forge their own paths into informed and engaged citizenship.