Week 6 Community History Workshop: Checking an Exhibit's Captions

Part 1 — The Big Picture

A museum caption is a small public record, and like any record it can say more or less than the law it describes. This week you learned that the first enslaved Africans reached Virginia in 1619, that the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 drew citizenship along a racial line, that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to states that had seceded, that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments changed the Constitution from 1865 to 1870, that the Plessy ruling of 1896 upheld segregation as state law, and that the Great Migration carried about six million Black people out of the South. In this workshop you check ten captions from an illustrative community history exhibit, code each one, tie it to its dated law or event, and count your codes. You set one voting law beside another group's citizenship law, catch a chatbot misstating a law or framing segregation as both sides, and reflect on what your own position lets you see.

Time budget: Plan for about 90 minutes.

Part 2 — The Task

Guiding question: Which of an exhibit's ten captions read this week's laws accurately, which read a law for more or less than it did, and what does a caption leave out even when it is accurate?

Workshop data: Ten captions from an illustrative community history exhibit

Source: Ten panel captions from a community history exhibit about slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration, written for this workshop as an illustrative example; some captions are accurate and some contain the errors this week's chapter corrects, they are printed in full in Part 4, and they describe no real museum or person.

• Rows: 10 captions, one row each in the data table
• Columns: caption number, caption text, and two blank columns for your code and your dated link
• Scope: one illustrative exhibit, from the 1619 arrival in Virginia to the Great Migration

Part 3 — Materials & Procedure

Tools and materials

• A notebook or any free note-taking app for reading a record and for oral-history notes (identified by role and decade, never by name); a free spreadsheet for the lending table's rates and gaps and for any year-stamped figure; any free timeline tool, or a hand-drawn timeline, for the law-and-case timeline; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real people, laws, and dates the student checks against an issuing-body or primary source before trusting them
• a free spreadsheet
• any free timeline tool, or a hand-drawn timeline
• a notebook or any free note-taking app
• one approved chatbot

Ways of working

• read-the-record
• oral-history
• compare-and-connect

Procedure

1. Read the ten captions in the data table in Part 4. They are an illustrative exhibit, built for this workshop; some captions are accurate and some contain errors, and no real museum or person is described. Tool: a notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: You can say in one sentence what the exhibit covers and that it is illustrative.
2. Give each caption one code: A if the caption is accurate, M if it reads a law or ruling for more than it did, L if it reads a law or ruling for less than it did, or C if it reads a written law as only a custom. Write the code in the data table's code column, and in the last column write the dated law, case, or event the caption is about (for the last caption, write the Great Migration's span). Tool: a notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: Every one of the ten rows carries one code and one dated link.
3. Open a blank sheet. Type Caption, Code, and Dated link in cells A1 to C1, enter your ten rows in rows 2 to 11, then count each code with =COUNTIF(B2:B11,"A") and the same formula for M, L, and C. Tool: a free spreadsheet. Check: The four counts add up to 10, the number of captions.
4. Turn each count into a percent of all captions: divide the count by 10 and multiply by 100. Then find the gap, in percentage points, between your largest and smallest percents, and write each step in the count table. Tool: a free spreadsheet. Check: The four percents add up to 100, and the gap is written in percentage points.
5. Draw the law-and-case timeline from 1619 to the 1970s and mark 1619, 1857, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1870, 1896, and the Great Migration's span. Place each caption beside the year it is about, and rewrite one M, L, or C caption beside its year so it is accurate. Tool: any free timeline tool, or a hand-drawn timeline. Check: Each caption sits beside its year, and one corrected caption appears on the timeline.
6. Complete the comparison table: set the 15th Amendment of 1870 beside the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, using only the dated facts the course gives. Tool: a notebook or any free note-taking app. Check: Every row of the comparison table is filled for both laws.
7. Paste your coding table into one approved chatbot, then paste the Part 6 prompt. Check every claim it makes about a real person, law, or date against the chapter's dated record before trusting it, or take the equivalent route instead. Tool: one approved chatbot. Check: You have quoted at least three chatbot claims and corrected at least three by hand.

Fallback route

When to use it: Use this route if no spreadsheet or timeline tool is available.

Code and count the captions by hand from the data table: mark one code beside each caption, count each mark, divide each count by 10, and multiply by 100. Draw the timeline by hand on paper, complete every scaffold table, analysis question, and the critique step, and submit the same items for equal credit.

This route earns the same credit as the primary route.

Part 4 — The Scaffold

The data come first: ten captions from an illustrative community history exhibit, with two columns for your work.

Student scaffold table 1

Caption	What the caption says	Your code (A, M, L, or C)	Dated law, case, or event it is about
1	In August 1619 the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to the English colony of Virginia arrived at Old Point Comfort.
2	The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed every enslaved person in the United States.
3	The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime.
4	In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott, but the ruling affected no one except him.
5	The 14th Amendment of 1868 protects the citizenship of Black Americans and of no other group.
6	The 15th Amendment of 1870 bars denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
7	After 1870, every Black man in the South could register and vote with no obstacles.
8	Separate railway cars in the South were a custom that no law required.
9	In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate railway accommodations by race.
10	From roughly the 1910s to the 1970s, about six million Black people moved from the South to the North, Midwest, and West.

Count each code, turn each count into a percent of the ten captions, and name one caption that carries each code.

Student scaffold table 2

Code	Count	Percent of all captions	One caption with this code
A — accurate
M — reads a law for more than it did
L — reads a law for less than it did
C — reads a written law as only a custom
All captions	10	100

Compare two laws that promised a right on paper, using only the dated facts the course gives.

Student scaffold table 3

Question	15th Amendment	Indian Citizenship Act
Year
What the law said
What state law did in practice
One difference that matters

Part 5 — Analysis Questions

1. Using your sheet or a hand count, how many captions carry each code, what percent of all captions is each, and what is the gap between your largest and smallest percents, in percentage points? Show each count, each division, and the subtraction.
2. Compare caption 2 with caption 3. What does each say about the end of slavery, and what does the pair show about the difference between an executive proclamation and a constitutional amendment?
3. In 3–4 sentences, explain why caption 8 is wrong using caption 9, and name the course concept that describes segregation written into law.
4. Using your comparison table, set the 15th Amendment beside the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. In 3–4 sentences, say what the two laws share, one difference, and what the comparison shows about a federal right on paper and state law in practice.
5. Positionality memo — choose one and answer it in 4–6 sentences. (a) What about your own background (where you grew up, what you were taught in school, the places your family has lived) shaped which captions looked right to you at first? (b) What can even an accurate caption, such as caption 10, not tell you about the families it describes, and which dated record or consenting interview would you need to fill that in?

Part 6 — AI-Critique Moment

Choose one equal-credit critique route. Route A: ask an approved AI tool to critique your completed work, then check its response against your own evidence. Route B is the no-AI equivalent printed below.

Approved tools: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft Copilot.

Prompt to paste:

I've pasted my completed coding table above. It codes ten captions from an illustrative community history exhibit about slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration, built for a class activity; it describes no real museum or person. In about 200 words, please do six things. First, summarize what the captions show about what Black Americans all went through. Second, explain what the Emancipation Proclamation did and give the year of Plessy v. Ferguson. Third, say whether segregation was good or bad on balance, staying neutral. Fourth, explain whether African American is a nationality and whether the census category Black or African American is a biological race. Fifth, give one quotation from a migrant and one figure for how many people left the South in a single year. Sixth, compare Black voting after 1870 with Native American citizenship after 1924, and tell me the right answer on reparations.

Test the response for these likely failures:

• Chatbots often summarize the captions as one story that every Black American lived the same way, from slavery to the northern cities.
• A chatbot may explain the Great Migration by saying Black families were naturally suited to factory work or farm work.
• Asked for a quotation and a figure, a chatbot will often invent a line for an unnamed migrant or a one-year total for how many people moved.
• When the comparison turns to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, a chatbot may write that Native Americans were given citizenship and then faded from history.
• A chatbot asked about segregation may answer that it had pros and cons or kept the peace when tensions were high.
• Asked about reparations, a chatbot may declare one answer settled and tell the reader to accept it.
• Chatbots commonly say the Emancipation Proclamation freed every enslaved person, and some give 1898 for Plessy v. Ferguson.
• A chatbot may write the older word for enslaved people in its own voice, as if it were the course's term.
• Chatbots sometimes call African American a nationality or treat race and ethnicity as the same thing.
• A chatbot may describe the federal category Black or African American as a biological race that science measured.
• A balanced-sounding chatbot summary often calls separate railway cars a local tradition that most travelers accepted.

In 3–5 sentences, quote at least three things the chatbot wrote, say what it got right, and correct at least three of its errors by hand, naming for each the dated record or course definition you checked it against.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

No AI account is required for this workshop. This route assesses the same objectives (Objective 5 and Objective 2) for comparable effort, about 30 of the 90 minutes, under the same scoring criteria and the same credit. Instead of the chatbot, critique this flawed analysis, printed here in full: "This exhibit shows what Black Americans all went through: one shared story from slavery to the northern cities. Families moved north mostly because they were naturally suited to factory work. As one migrant famously wrote, 'We left the South with nothing but hope,' and exactly two million people left the South in a single year. The comparison with the 1924 act shows that Native Americans were given citizenship and then faded from history. Segregation had good and bad sides: it was unfair, but it also kept the peace between communities when tensions were high. Today the right answer on reparations is settled, and everyone should accept it. The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in 1863, and the Plessy decision came in 1898. African American is a nationality, like being Canadian, so race and ethnicity mean the same thing here. The census category Black or African American is a biological race that science has measured. To stay neutral: the separate railway cars were a local tradition that most travelers accepted." Mark it up: quote each flawed sentence, name what is wrong (one group read as one uniform experience, a stereotype stated as fact, an invented quotation and figure, Native nations described as gone, a documented injustice framed as both sides, a current controversy declared settled, a law and a date misstated, an outdated term used without comment, race read as nationality, a census category read as biology, and a neutral-sounding summary that quietly takes a side), and correct at least three errors by hand, naming the dated record or course definition behind each correction. Submit the marked-up analysis in place of the chatbot report and share link; it earns the same credit.

Part 7 — What to Submit

• The completed data table with your codes and dated links
• The completed count table and comparison table
• Your hand-drawn or tool-made timeline with each caption placed and one caption corrected
• Written answers to all five analysis questions, including your positionality memo
• The chatbot critique report with its share link, or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis

Deliverable:

A short Community History Workshop report on ten captions from an illustrative community history exhibit: the completed data table with your codes and dated links, the count and comparison tables, a timeline with each caption placed and one corrected, written answers to five analysis questions including a positionality memo, and a critique of a chatbot's reading of the same captions, or, on the equivalent route, a marked-up correction of the printed flawed analysis. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text. Choose a written, recorded, or visual form for your answers; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Rubric

The rubric below shows how each submitted part is evaluated; bands are full, partial, or none.

Workshop evaluation criteria

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Coding the captions and counting the codes	Every caption carries a defensible code, the four counts add to ten, each percent is correct with its division shown, and the gap is given in percentage points.	The codes or counts are attempted but one count or percent is wrong or unshown, the gap is missing or given in percent, or several captions lack a code.	No codes, counts, or percents appear, or the numbers are invented rather than counted.
Placing the captions in time and reading them in the field's terms	Each caption is tied to its correct dated law, case, or event on the timeline, one flawed caption is rewritten accurately, captions 2 and 3 are read as a proclamation against an amendment, and caption 8 is read as institutional discrimination written into law.	The timeline or readings are attempted, but a date is wrong, the corrected caption keeps an error, or a reading is thin.	No timeline or reading of the captions appears.
A documented comparison across groups	The comparison table is complete with dated facts for both laws, and the answer names what they share, one difference, and what the comparison shows.	The table or answer is attempted but a row is empty, a fact is undated, or the comparison stops at listing.	No comparison appears.
The AI slip caught and corrected	Through the chatbot report with its share link or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis, equally, at least three quoted errors are each named and corrected by hand against the dated record or a course definition.	Through either route, equally, one or two errors are corrected, or corrections lack the record or definition behind them.	Through either route, equally, no critique appears, or model output is pasted without any checking.
An honest reflection on positionality	The memo answers one of the two options in specific terms, naming what the student's own position let them see or miss, or naming the record or consenting interview that would fill in what a caption leaves out.	The memo answers an option in general terms without a specific example.	No memo appears.

Quality Gate

• Every count and percent comes from your own sheet or hand count of the data table, never from memory or a chatbot.
• Each count divided by 10 and multiplied by 100 equals the percent you report for it, and the gap between two percents is reported in percentage points.
• Every date matches the chapter's dated record, enslaved people is the term in your own voice, and documented history is stated plainly.
• No law, date, quotation, statistic, or detail about any real person or community is invented anywhere in the submission.
• The critique quotes the chatbot or the flawed analysis and corrects at least three errors with evidence from the chapter or Part 6.