Choosing to Participate Study Guide
This study guide is designed to accompany the exhibit and to elaborate its key challenge: to think deeply about what democracy really means, and what it asks of each of us.
Choosing to Participate focuses on four stories about the meaning of civic participation and the critical need to promote a just society:
1. Everyone Has a Story describes the challenges of a child survivor of
the Cambodian genocide and the people in his new community as he
struggled to build a new life as a refugee in the United States.
2. Little Things Are Big discusses a
small but significant choice made during a late-night subway ride in
New York City that illuminates how ideas about "race" influence the
decisions people make about one another.
3. Crisis in Little Rock tells of the
desegregation of a high school in 1957 and shows how courageous choices
made by young people changed U.S. history and inspired others around
the world.
4. Not in Our Town shows how citizens of
Billings, Montana, stood up for their neighbors in response to a series
of hate crimes in their community.
Related Facing History Resources
Choosing to Participate
