May 15, 2002

Elk Grove students get
virtual tour of slave ship

Nearly 100 elementary students from Elk Grove's Barbara Comstock Morse Elementary School will be at California State University, Sacramento on Wednesday, May 15 for virtual tours of artifacts from a sunken slave ship.

The Internet-based tours will allow the students to watch historians from UC Santa Barbara "do history" - examining and describing objects from the slave ship Henrietta Marie, which sank off the Florida coast nearly 300 years ago. Also participating will be UC Santa Barbara students and elementary students from the city of Santa Barbara, where artifacts are on exhibit at the Karpeles Library.

The tours are made possible by the Digital California Project. They will be held between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. in Calaveras 135.

When it isn't their turn for the virtual tour, the Elk Grove students will get a tour of CSUS led by students who plan to be teachers. The will also meet with Maria Mejorado, a CSUS professor of bilingual/multicultural education, who will build on a unit the students recently completed on the life of Cesar Chavez. She will share "voices from the fields," her personal recollections of growing up as the child of migrant laborers. A group of Mejorado's university students will also share firsthand accounts of everyday challenges faced by migrant laborers.

The day is a joint effort of the Center for Teaching for Social Justice at UC Santa Barbara, the Elk Grove Unified School District and CSUS.

More information is available by contacting CSUS professor Larry Hannah at (916) 278-5620 or Gail Desler of the Elk Grove Unified School District at (916) 686-7710. Additional media assistance is available by contacting the CSUS public affairs office at (916) 278-6156.

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For further information, send an e-mail to infodesk@csus.edu or contact
public affairs at (916) 278-6156. For ticketed events, call the CSUS Ticket Office at (916) 278-4323.   
 
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