As a new semester is about to begin academics are busily putting finishing touches on their course syllabi. Here at the University of Maryland there has been sustained interest over the past few months in integrating discussion and thinking about the recent events in Ferguson, and subsequent #BlackLivesMatter movement into our classes. Look for news about planned teach-ins and events like ours in the coming weeks.

If you are interested in finding Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter resources to use in your coursework one place to look is the #FergusonSyllabus hashtag on Twitter. Marcia Chatelain, a history professor at Georgetown University and a University of Missouri–Columbia alumna, started this hashtag with this tweet back in August of 2014:

You can listen to an interview with Chatelain from Saint-Louis Public Radio soon conducted just a few days after this tweet. Since then there have been over 8,000 tweets with the #FergusonSyllabus hashtag. Chatelain wrote a post about her favorite suggested resources, and you can find other lists, such as this Google Doc from Daniel Krutka, a Professor of Education at Texas Woman’s University.

Here at MITH we have a collection of these tweets between August 17th 2014 and January 7th, 2015. We have done some rudimentary analysis that we thought we would share here. If you have ideas for things to do with this collection please let us know.

Timeline of Activity

Ferguson Syllabus Chart

Top 25 Most Mentioned Web Resources

Web Page Mentions
Rhetoric Race and Religion: #FergusonFiasco: The Killing of #MichaelBrown: A Reader 271
Rhetoric Race and Religion: #FergusonSyllabus: The #FergusonFiasco and Teaching African American Theology 226
Rhetoric Race and Religion: #FergusonFiasco: Doing Theology After #Ferguson-Part 1 127
Prison Culture » #FergusonSyllabus: Talking and Teaching About Police Violence 112
Ferguson and college education: Sociology and history professors teach the #fergusonsyllabus. 59
TTT Studio and Chat | EdTechTalk 55
Teaching #FergusonResources – Google Docs 50
How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson – The Atlantic 47
#FergusonSyllabus (with images, tweets) · neelofer · Storify 46
Rhetoric Race and Religion: #FergusonFiasco: The Killing of #MichaelBrown: A Reader 39
Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus | Dissent Magazine 37
Ferguson Syllabus « Sociologists for Justice 30
How the #FergusonSyllabus Can Help Teachers Talk About Race and Rights in School | Alternet 28
The Ferguson Syllabus 27
Rhetoric Race and Religion: Why Holder Did Not Have to Come, or Why We March and Protest 25
Teaching About Ferguson: Do’s and Don’ts – The Root 25
24
Teaching About Ferguson | Teaching for Change 22
Race–Not Just a Hot Topic – Race Matters in the Classroom 21
Ferguson and college education: Sociology and history professors teach the #fergusonsyllabus. 20
Whiteness And Anxiety In The Diverse Classroom – Race Matters in the Classroom 20
How the #FergusonSyllabus Can Help Teachers Talk About Race and Rights on the First Day of School by Liz Pleasant — YES! Magazine 19
How the #FergusonSyllabus Can Help Teachers Talk About Race and Rights on the First Day of School 19
How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson – Atlantic Mobile 18
bending arc toward justice 18
How to talk to students about Ferguson | PBS NewsHour 16

Top 5 Most Active #FergusonSyllabus Users

R3 365
Dr. Marcia Chatelain 332
Andre E. Johnson 211
Wabash Center 209
Rhetorical Theology 203
fahri sakarya 174
Jay 159
ColorsOfAlgebra 87
FocusASconnect 70
Julie Tilsen 60

Top 5 Most Retweeted

 

If you would like to analyze the data yourself we have made tweet ids, as well as a CSV presentation of the data available for you to use on GitHub.