University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) is one of CCDI’s 2024 Higher Education awardees. The team began their project in December 2023 and will be presenting at the CCDI’s upcoming Summer Fuse 2024 event in Washington, D.C. UHD is receiving $69,084.67 for their project, “Discovering Afro-Latino Heritage: A Reflective StoryMap Project to Enhance Student Belongingness and Learning.” Through their project, they will remix maps, photos, recordings and other Library digital materials to create interactive StoryMaps that illustrate the origin of Afro-Latinos in the United States. StoryMaps is a web-based platform that can be used to create interactive stories by combining maps, multimedia, and narrative text. Isabel Brador, a Program Specialist for the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative, interviewed the UHD team to learn more about their project.
Congratulations on receiving a CCDI Libraries, Archives and Museums award! Can you tell us about your project?
Our grant project sponsored by CCDI involves working with faculty teaching key target courses to design student assignments involving exploration of Afro-Latino heritage. Students will be searching the Library of Congress digital collections for relevant materials, and creating multimedia deliverables, including StoryMaps. Our primary deliverable for the project is to create a collection of these StoryMaps and multimedia content that centers Afro-Latino heritage and can be a source of inspiration and a sense of belonging for our students and community members. The StoryMap resource will also be a content resource for relevant Latin American and Latino Studies courses.
What excites or inspires you the most about the work you’ll be able to achieve with the CCDI award?
At UHD, we have been focused on improving a sense of belonging for our students and engaging students through innovative digital technologies across instructional modalities. Our CCDI sponsored project combines both of these elements, through the le