Picture Investigation

Incorporating powerful visuals into our classroom presentations is an effective way to guide our students into the content. To extend upon this, we should also develop whole-class discussions centered around a few compelling images as a way to deliver historical content and foster engagement in each student. Put the textbook aside for a moment. Let us develop visual inquiry and visual literacy in our classes.

One strategy I have developed to deepen visual thinking in my students is the Picture Investigation. There are crucial moments in the curriculum when the best way to teach a historical concept is by “showing” the history to students.

The first opportunity for this in my 8th grade US History curriculum is in my attempt to describe the pure evil, horror, racism, and greed that was the Middle Passage, the nightmare Atlantic ocean crossing endured by enslaved Africans. This is not a simple issue to teach to fourteen year olds. Nothing about slavery is easy to teach to students, but we history teachers cannot shy away from the difficult parts. It is precisely these parts that need to be strengthened in our curriculum.

The theme for my first week of instruction is the reasons for, and the development of the 13 colonies into three distinct regions – New England, Middle and Southern. One key concept I want my students to understand is why the plantation system of slavery only really develops in the Southern colonies. We examine geographical, climate and economic reasons to explain this. What is missing from this examination is the actual importation of the enslaved Africans. I do not want my students to see the plantation system of slavery as a beneficial, viable and acceptable colonial economic system. They must be shown more. (Note: My students will also spend time investigating the plantation system of slavery later in the year, as we approach the Civil War by contrasting the North and the South in the mid-1800s)

The Picture Investigation of the Middle Passage is centered around four images (all found through a Google Image search for the Middle Passage):

1. An illustration of captured Africans being led to the coast, in West Africa.

2. An illustration of Africans sitting on the deck of a slave ship.

3. A diagram of the cargo space of a slave ship.

4. An advertisement from the colonies announcing the auction of slaves.

The images are shown in this order, one at a time, as we progress through spiraling questions to bring the students into the historical content. With each picture I begin with simple, surface level questions – usually always this one first, “List three things you see in this image.” The students are to silently respond in their notebooks. I am very clear about not wanting students to just shout their answers out loud. As I progress into more difficult questions, I want all students investigating the images themselves, writing down their answers, and participating in our discussion when I call on them. I know that every student can participate in the discussion, because every student has already written down their answer in their notebook.

The students are all engaged in activities like this. They all want to dissect the images, hoping to find the perfect answer to the question I pose. In these moments, when their focus is at its zenith, I will bring in short excerpts from strong primary sources, to add depth to the images. An example of this is when we are investigating the diagram of the slave ship’s cargo space.

Students are quick to describe basically what they are looking at. But not all students can immediately imagine how horrific a situation a picture like this implies. I ask them to either close their eyes or remain looking at the picture while I read to them a brief part from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, a part concerning conditions aboard a ship such as this.

“At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”

It takes just about the whole period to go through these steps with these four pictures. The students are engaged for the entire time. They are investigating. They are thinking critically, as my questions build upon each other. I believe that certain topics in the curriculum like the Middle Passage deserve a strategy such as Picture Investigation, to guide students towards a higher level of historical understanding than a textbook reading alone would produce.

New (School) Year’s Resolutions

We have all engaged in the January 1st tradition of self-betterment. If you’re like me, these resolutions to do not last much longer than January 4th. It’s time for a resolution that will stick.

As August will no doubt turn to September, teachers should be making resolutions. Education resolutions. The New (School) Year’s Resolutions. After a summer break away from the classroom, we should be rested and recharged. We are ready to begin the real year anew. To greet the new faces and challenges that await us with our most energetic smile. We need to take advantage of this energy and focus it towards making new strides in our teaching. We must create our own personal resolutions for the new school year.

My New (School) Year’s Resolutions

1. Improve the efficacy and efficiency of our history department meetings. As history department chair, I want to design and facilitate better meetings, based upon collaboration, classroom improvement, student achievement, accountability and trust.

2. Develop better intervention strategies to catch students who are slipping. I must improve the way I help students who are not mastering my standards. These students need my special attention, even on a daily basis, in ways that will not hold back those who are mastering the content.

3. Write with my students. This is a National Writing Project hallmark. I have dramatically increased the frequency and diversity of opportunities for my students to write in class ever since becoming a Writing Project Fellow in 2009. However, I have not always heeded this Writing Project standard – write with your students!

4. Continue developing the use of Web 2.0 tools in my curriculum. Last year I implemented a Wikispace  and utilized Edmodo with my students. This year I need to expand upon the use of these two technology tools, as well as continue researching new digital tools to better engage my students.

Writing from The Real – The Boston Tea Party

Consider asking students to write a first-person narrative describing the tensions in colonial America, pre-Declaration of independence. A typical textbook will outline the events and acts of this revolutionary time period – the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston tea Party. A better textbook will explain how each new event built upon the frustrations and tensions of what came before. Yet, there will be something missing from most textbooks – the acknowledgement of the existence of multiple points of view. The 8th grade history textbook used at my school is written to show the point of view of the Patriot, who is inching closer and closer to revolutionary fervor. There are very few mentions of Loyalists. There is nothing about a women’s perspective of these events. Nor, any other person alive and living in the colonies (Native Americans, free and enslaved blacks) or any mention of the difference in social class of the colonists. If I ask my students to write from the point of view of a colonist based upon what they read in the textbook, their options are very slim. 99% of the responses be from the perspective of a Patriot. What is worse is the skewed view of colonial society this will reinforce in my students’ thinking.

The students’ reading of the textbook must be supplemented with primary sources. Our students deserve the opportunity to investigate REAL HISTORY. Importantly, students deserve to be shown more than one perspective.

After my students have read about the Boston Tea Party from the secondary source, they are ready for the primary sources. I want to show my students the polar contrast between the fervor of the Boston patriots and the fear of the loyalists, whose person and property were being targeted by colonial revolutionary mobs such as the Sons of Liberty.

To better see the patriots’ perspective, we read “A General Huzzah From Griffin’s Wharf” as told by George Hewes http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2005_winter_spring/boston_tea_party.htm a participant at the Boston Tea Party. The language is challenging for my students so I read this aloud with careful and strategic enunciation and gesture. I then ask my students to describe the scene themselves, whether through writing (a list, a brief timeline of events), an organizer (a flow-chart), or illustration (story-board, comic strip).

This source will reinforce the content understanding my students have from our work first with the textbook, of how parliamentary actions in Britain were directly causing escalating revolutionary responses in the colonies. However, students must understand that not all colonists, much less than half in some places, considered themselves patriots, striving for complete autonomy from the British crown. What then about the colonists who remained loyal to the King? What was their perspective on the actions of the 1770s?

Next, we read “Curse All Tratiors” from a loyalist woman, Anne Hulton http://instruct.westvalley.edu/kelly/History17a_on_campus/Readings/Hulton.htm This will display a contrasting point of view concerning the tensions of the 1770s. After a brief class discussion students can compare and contrast the feelings of Hewes and Hulton. Combining these two perspectives with the first reading of the textbook gives students a much more well-rounded view of this colonial society.

Students are now ready to write. Ask students to assume either the point of view of a Patriot or a Loyalist, and describe the Boston Tea Party from the first-person point of view of their character.

Writing From The Real

History textbooks are not real. They are secondary. They are compiled by historians who are paid by publishing companies competing for the lucrative contracts of school district adoptions. In tone, they are bland and are designed to be objective, unbiased and accurate (often, they fail at all three). They do not inspire. In my eight grade history classroom, we do not write solely based on what we read in a textbook.

The history textbook does serve a purpose. However, inspiring my students to write is not one. We use the textbook in class to build content knowledge schema, to prepare my students for the more advanced critical thinking that will follow. After reading a section from the textbook, my students are ready to investigate primary sources, just as historians do. They are ready for the Real.

In examining primary sources, students are engaged in the work of real historians. They are developing the habits of mind for disciplinary literacy, for thinking like a historian, for DOING history. When historians write, they do not sit down with a textbook. They go to the archives, they investigate and explore, looking for confirmation or criticism of the perspective they are forming. They seek out multiple points of view of a topic or event, in various formats – letters, legislation, speeches, visuals. Through this work, the historian (publishing university professor or 8th grader in my class) is ready to write.

I will use this blog to demonstrate examples and lesson plans for what it means to Write from the Real.

The Eternal Question of Homework

As teachers, we are supposed to assign our students homework. Right? Every night? How long should a homework assignment take? Some teachers might have answered questions like these, to themselves. Most probably have not. We assign homework because we are “supposed to.” We assign homework because we were assigned homework when we were students. We assign homework because, if we do not, there are some parents who will question why their child has no school work to complete. We, teachers need to form a common understanding of why homework is necessary, and what it should look like. We must assign homework, if it is to be assigned at all, that motivates and guides students to critical thinking about their own understanding of content, and to their education in total.

In my History classes, in the first years of my teaching, I believed that homework must be assigned four nights a week, and each assignment was to take between fifteen and thirty minutes to complete, I would compile various photocopied handouts or short readings of the lowest order. I told my students that these assignments would help them understand better what we are learning class (hopefully they did). Each day at the end of class the work was assigned, and the next day collected, from those who completed the work. I would get to grade pile after pile of boring handouts with answers regurgitated directly from bland readings.

I began to reflect. I enjoyed grading these papers just as much as my students enjoyed completing them. Very, very little. So why did I need to keep assigning the dreaded homework?

Teachers often argue that students must complete homework to fully grasp what is being taught in class. Now I say to that – Why? Shouldn’t the activities and strategies done in class lead to the deepest understanding of content? Why rely on homework? Of course, time in class can be painfully short for certain assignments. Let the homework then be the continuation of the valued class activity.

Ask teachers what is a major cause of their heading to the staff cafeteria to grumble and complain, and undoubtedly you will hear about students “who will just not do the homework.” It should come as no shock to us as teachers, or as former students ourselves, that kids would rather be doing just about anything else in the world possible, than boring homework. Yet we continue to assign it. And bitch and moan when it does not get completed. What if we began assigning homework students actually wanted to do? An assignment students look forward to investigating. What might that look like? How excited will we as teachers be to grade this?

I am continually challenging myself. I am still striving to create a new type of homework. I will use this blog as a way to describe these different types of new homework assignments. I believe this new homework must be guided by certain principles:

1. Work must be rigorous. No more photocopied question and answer recall worksheets.    The assignment must be based around a critical reading of a source, or high level thinking, writing, artistic expression, etc.
2. Work must be meaningful. Students need to be shown the value of each assignment. We cannot rely on old standby expressions like “The homework will help you understand the topic.” We must show, not tell our students this.
3. Choice must be incorporated. To increase student buy-in, homework should involve some sense of choice for the students. Options that can be selected. Different ways to demonstrate understanding.
4. When possible, homework needs to value technology. Our students, each year, are increasingly digital, at younger and younger ages. As teachers, we too must develop our technological literacy and invite technology both into our classes and our homework assignments.
5. Assignments must be relevant. In order to change the perception of homework, students need to see that the work does matter, to them, to their education, and to their life beyond the walls of the classroom.

Do you have any other suggestions for principles to guide our new homework assignment?

Why Study History?

“We do need to learn history. Not the kind that puts its main emphasis on memorizing presidents and Supreme Court decisions, but the kind that inspires a new generation to resist the madness of government, trying to carve the world and our minds into their spheres of influence.”                                                                                                             -Howard Zinn.

This quote hangs on a wall in my classroom. Black magic marker on red construction paper, scrawled by my own hand. To me it says it all. Yet I fully know that on their first day in my class, my eighth graders do not know what it means. It is my ultimate goal that on the last day of class they do, and they desire to show it to someone else.

I cannot begin to fathom how many times I have heard from adults, when I tell them that I teach history, “I HATED history in school. It was the most boring subject.” I do cringe when I hear that. Yet, I understand. By relying solely upon traditional methods of teaching history, it can be the most boring subject for anyone. But it is not the history that is boring. It is the instruction, combined with the philosophy, and the purpose behind the instruction.

Why do we study history? Is it to learn that George Washington was our nation’s first president and that he never told a lie? Or, is it to memorize the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue and “discovered” America? Do you remember who the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was? Why not? You must not have been a good student in history class. To borrow a phrase coined by James Loewen, this is all BS (bad sociology). When history is taught so that students memorize trivial facts (or bold lies!), when students must only read textbooks published by major companies seeking lucrative contracts with school districts, we are turning our students away from, perhaps, the most important subject to their lives.

So why then do we study history? “So we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.” I have heard that bland response a multitude of times, but it is far from the truth. The more I study history, the more I see the endless recurrence of past mistakes. I believe this is the result of the traditional methods for teaching history. To force students to listen in the most passive way to drawn out lectures, to read the most insipid texts, to answer questions that require no critical thinking, we are not inspiring our students. To correct this familiar trend, our ambition must be to teach our students that it is their responsibility, as students of history, to acquire the habits of mind to become effective and productive citizens. We must empower our students to realize that it is precisely their responsibility to stop the mistakes from recurring.

One of the most dangerous results of the traditional teaching of history is that through rote memorization of names and dates that dead, white, men have declared important, students come to believe that history is inevitable. Example, once there was slavery, now there isn’t. Everything can only get better. Women were once treated as less than second-class citizens, now the sexes are equal. All problems always get worked out in time. BS! It is imperative that we show students, quoting Frederick Douglass, that without struggle, there is no progress. That the civil liberties we enjoy now began as protests and organizing, and long periods of stepping out of comfort zones. Of being active!

We must provide students with the skills to identify the problems in our society, to investigate and discover their origins, research alternatives and become the active citizenry that will develop into the new reformers of our society. Because if we don’t, who will?