MSU Museum Director of Education Denice Blair was one of three authors of the curriculum guide. Blair said they hoped the timing of the guide’s release would line up with Black History Month. 

"I would encourage people to use this for Black History Month, but also to use it for beyond," Blair said. "This is a great curriculum for any time of year."

"Honor in Action" began with discussions among museum leaders about how to make museum artifacts and resources more widely available to the public. 

"We want to think critically about all the fun and innovative ways, and, frankly, intellectual ways and creative ways that the collections can be utilized for other types of learning and creation," said Devon Akmon, director of the MSU Museum and CoLab Studio.

Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood was an integrated community in the early 1900s, until redlining changed the community's racial make-up to be almost entirely Black. It was a vibrant community of houses, businesses and art. But then in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the neighborhood was targeted and destroyed to make way for the Interstate 375 highway. 

"It's a really rich story, and we knew it was one that a lot of people would have interest in," Akmon said. "We said, wow, this is a great opportunity to build an educational resource for both college students and for high school students that would enable them to better understand the story and this historical legacy, and how they might be able to apply that now in making the world a better place."

The central lesson of the guide focuses on a quilt from the Black Bottom neighborhood called the Detroit Signature Quilt. The quilt was acquired by the museum and researched by Marsha MacDowell, a curator at the museum and professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design.

MacDowell was also an author on the curriculum guide. She said that through names and addresses stitched on the quilt and through Detroit church communities, she and undergraduate researcher Berkley Sorrells tied the quilt to the Black Bottom community. 

"We were able to have sort of a quilt sharing day, and we recorded their reminiscences about growing up in that church and quilting activities, and in their stories, it shows how vibrant a community it was, and people still feel connected to that area of Detroit," MacDowell said. 

Another important part of the curriculum guide is the focus on honoring. MacDowell said the quilt represented the honoring that quilt makers showed one another and their communities. 

"Just the act of making a quilt and putting names on it means that in one way or another, those people are affiliated, maybe with a religion, maybe with a cause, maybe just living in a geographic region, but something binds them together in the act of making this communal piece of art," MacDowell said. 

From the quilt, the curriculum guide was created.

"We thought, how can we extend this out and encourage students to think about how people honored people in the past, and how do we honor people today? And it went much beyond the quilt," Blair said. 

Blair collaborated with multiple community organizations and leaders to gather information about the Black Bottom neighborhood. These included Marsha Music, the Black Bottom Archives and the Detroit Historical Society.

"It extended even to things like oral history and poetry, which gave this curriculum guide unbelievable depth," Blair said. "It is cross disciplinary. It is very much active, and it engages students in a lot of different ways than just looking at one type of object."

There are also physical resource kits that go along with the lessons that teachers local to the Lansing area can borrow free of charge.

"My vision for how people use this in classrooms would be that they would use the materials creatively and look at the needs of their students and the interests of their students, and see how they could make this fit into what they would like to have their students learn and experience," Blair said.