Program helps kids discover their inner Lin-Manuel Miranda

If you’re an educator watching “Hamilton,” it’s not a big leap to imagine how the musical might help teach students about the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers, the miraculous creation of a republic governed by checks and balances.

After Jessa Brie Moreno and Mariah Rankine-Landers first saw the show, in new York in 2015, the pair — gym buddies as well as co-workers, then at the Alameda County Office of Education — saw how “Hamilton” might teach students something more: not just facts, but how to question them; not just well-worn narratives but how to write their own.

For Rankine-Landers, the show was a way to “see myself in this history that has been told to me over and over my entire life.” She wanted to give that to students. The pair thought, “Let’s figure out curriculum, because it’s fun,” says Rankine-Landers. “We’re that kind of nerdy about curriculum writing.”

Over a year and a half, they worked with Marc Bamuthi Joseph (who just left YBCA for Kennedy Center), Michelle “Mush” Lee of Youth Speaks, actor Reggie D. White and educator Jah-Yee Woo, among others, to write “Rise Up! An American Curriculum.” The free, open-source lesson plan prompts the very students who are some of the musical’s biggest fans to use some of the same skills Lin-Manuel Miranda employed in writing the show. Or as Rankine-Landers puts it, “Let’s engage the artistic process that these artists engage.”

Lessons, which are designed for grades nine to 12, include “Disrupting the Master Narrative,” which, inspired by the musical’s “My Shot,” asks students, “What are the core American stories?” and “What purpose do they serve?” A later one, “New Mythologies, Flip the Script,” building off the musical’s “Farmer Refuted,” asks students to reframe or retell American myths in ways that don’t prop up oppression. The curriculum asks students to use collage and movement, playwriting and journal writing, poetry and discussion circles. Rankine-Landers and Moreno, who now run the education nonprofit Studio Pathways, also periodically train educators in how to use their tools and in how to work beyond the initial discomfort some might feel about discussing identity in the classroom or asking students to examine power structures in which many of us have been complicit.

At one such workshop, held at Stanford on Jan. 12 as part of a Conference on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and the Arts, Rankine-Landers and Moreno asked educators from throughout the Bay Area to create tableaux via

Photos by Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Jessa Brie Moreno (left) and Mariah Rankine-Landers share the curriculum for “Rise Up! Disrupting the Master Narrative” for high school students.

Hillary Han (left) and Patty Owyang draw each other in a creative exercise.

“Rise Up!” workshop participants mime a scene from “Hamilton.”