Hello Reader,

In between leading a lecture/workshop on computational making at Italy’s University of Padova and a forthcoming lecture at The University of Bologna, Gary and I have been hard at work planning for our institute, The Language of Computation – Constructing Modern Knowledge in Reggio Emilia (June 15-19, 2026). It is not too late to join us!

Who else is in Reggio Emilia?

Do you know who else is excited to be learning about learning in Reggio Emilia? Catherine, Princess of Wales. Princess Kate just made her first overseas trip in more than a year to spend two full days learning about the Reggio Emilia Approach, in Reggio Emilia. She explored the ateliers of the Loris Malaguzzi International Center, Caffarri, and ReMida the very same spaces hosting our institute next month. Her Royal Highness was introduced to the powerful and profound ideas of the Reggio Emilia approach by some of the very same colleagues who will participate in our institute.

Making History

We just celebrated Memorial Day in the United States. Did you know the following?

One of the earliest known Memorial Day observances took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, where thousands of newly freed African Americans marched, prayed, sang, and laid flowers to honor Union soldiers whose deaths helped secure emancipation.

After Confederate forces evacuated Charleston at the end of the Civil War, Black residents uncovered and reburied the remains of approximately 257 Union prisoners of war who had been buried in a mass grave at the former Washington Race Course prison camp. They cleaned the site, built a proper burial ground, and organized a public commemoration.

On May 1, nearly 10,000 people — most of them formerly enslaved Black Charlestonians, joined by Union troops and white missionaries — gathered to dedicate the cemetery and honor the dead. Contemporary accounts describe thousands of Black schoolchildren participating in the procession, reflecting the emergence of newly established Freedmen’s schools in the South during Reconstruction.

In just the past few months, the President of the United States erected a Christopher Columbus statue on White House Grounds. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted by the Supreme Court, threatening to eliminate all Black congressional representation in the former Confederacy. The Department of Defense is renaming military bases for traitorous Confederate soldiers, while references to slavery are being erased from public parks, museums, and monuments.

These are but a few of the reasons we just published Beth Krasemann’s urgent new book for teachers, History in Their Hands: Teaching Inquiry-Based United States History Through the Lens of Black Agency. This thoughtful, thorough, and fearless book guides teachers in pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of American history by providing students with primary source materials so that they may engage in the sort of intellectual and social meaning making as professional historians. We are enormously proud of this book, and we hope you will take a look at it, share the news with colleagues, and perhaps buy a copy for your favorite History teacher.

Speaking of History AI

Every day, we find ourselves using generative AI, increasingly on our phones to make things, solve problems, and learn stuff that was unimaginable months ago. This leads us to question how anyone would seek to deny learners access to such power.A colleague recently shared a remarkable story in the Harvard Gazette, "Who Joined the Nazi Party?" about how researchers are using AI to reveal a deeper understanding of the Holocaust.

"The first Germans to become Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power may have been ideological zealots, but later members were largely “ordinary men” drawn into the movement by propaganda and social pressure…

The researchers used vision-language artificial intelligence to digitize membership cards for more than 10 million members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, expanding on an existing database of 55,000, to illuminate who joined the fascist movement, when, and in what communities. Their findings were published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research…

'What we find is that mass entry occurred in discontinuous waves and that representativeness increased over time. By the end of the regime, the joiners looked much more like the population at large.'"

​Read the report here.​
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Sylvia Martinez & Gary Stager
Constructing Modern Knowledge
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