The graffiti text book is a twenty first century participatory media campaign, that seeks to deconstruct, critique, and rewrite the dominate narrative of history. While this narrative has been written by the “dominate” and “victorious”, this project hopes to provide the oppressed an opportunity to write themselves into the history books.
This project works by encouraging students, teachers, and parents to write in their own stories of history into the history books used at their schools, then upload them to our forums for everyone to see. By going so, they will write their own story into the textbooks, and can educate those who follow about their history and oppression. As well, with our companion site we can help spread these stores to a wide audience, and hopefully influence the textbooks writers themselves.
This could radically change the way we are educated, by allowing for an open source, Freireian narrative of history. We could allow for the history and the voice of the oppressed to heard, fight the jingoism of American History and end the political disunity of this country.
The key is to get people as active participants in the project, so we created an example textbook with selected pages out of 13th Edition of The American Pageant textbook. It is the most popularly used textbook for teaching American history in high schools, and can also be found free online. We intend this to be a guide for our participants on how to graffiti their own textbooks, and hope others will join us in creating their own.