Joseph Guerrera

2025 Yale & Slavery Teachers Institute Cohort Member

My name is Joseph Guerrera, and I am an 8th grade social studies teacher in Bristol Connecticut at Chippens Hill Middle School. Prior to teaching I worked in several museums around the state and gained a deep admiration for Connecticut and New England history. I always try to find ways to incorporate it into my lessons. My district is currently in a transition period in its 8th grade social studies curriculum. We are both piloting a new curriculum and drawing lessons and information from our prior curriculum. I see this as the perfect opportunity to pull relevant sources from this institute and incorporate them into our new curriculum as we develop it. We have an extensive catalog of sources related to slavery and the topic is gone over extensively however few of them are local to Connecticut and my students often leave the class seeing slavery as an exclusively southern institution. While I have made connections to New England factories utilizing southern cotton the full scope of New England’s involvement in the institution of slavery is lacking and I see what this institution has to offer as the solution.