Stereotypes in the Curriculum

Image
silkscreen, Indian court, 1939, Louis B. Siegriest, LOC
Article Body

In his article “Popular Culture, Curriculum, and Historical Representation,” John Wills sought to examine the perpetuation of stereotypes in the American History curriculum by examining the treatment of Native Americans. Wills found that despite a variety of representations of Indians in the curriculum, teachers and students tended to emphasize a romanticized stereotype of Plains Indians. What did this indicate, he wondered, about the possibility of challenging narratives shaped by racial and ethnic stereotypes in American history?

Refuting one stereotype of Natives as uncivilized savages, teachers perpetuated another: the romanticized image of Natives as buffalo-hunting nomads.

Wills, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside, spent an academic year in three 8th-grade classrooms exploring the interaction between cultural texts and their readers. He observed and videotaped 130 lessons at a predominantly white suburban middle school in San Diego County, transcribing teacher lectures, class discussions, and multimedia and student presentations.

What he found was that although these teachers were concerned with challenging stereotypical representations of Native Americans, they often struggled to move past overly simplistic portrayals. Refuting one stereotype of Natives as uncivilized savages, teachers perpetuated another: the romanticized image of Natives as buffalo-hunting nomads. So what did this indicate about American history and the portrayal of racial and ethnic minorities?

Natives and “the Story” of American History
As research by other scholars has revealed, American history classrooms are often characterized by a dominant narrative of perpetual progress. In this narrative, Americans of European descent drive history forward to produce expanded rights and opportunities, with the exception, as one teacher put it, of “a few black marks.” The consequence of this, Wills pointed out, was that racial and ethnic minorities remain largely incidental to the story being told. The exceptions are the stories of the enslavement of African Americans and the removal of Native Americans from conquered territory.

Wills showed that despite changes in textbooks, Native Americans were still confined to a small place in popular historical narratives. Natives only “fit” into the story during the period of westward expansion, when nomadic Plains Indians presented an obstacle to settlers. Because this was the established “place” of Native Americans in the popular story of American history, they were predominantly represented as nomadic, buffalo-hunting Plains Indians.

The addition of more racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women and members of the working class, to the story of American history provides students with more diverse images of particular groups. Wills argued, however, that as long as these images are framed by the dominant narrative of perpetual progress, students’ understandings will be limited and partial, compromised by stereotypes of these groups.

In the Classroom
  • Ask students to describe or depict a Native American from the past.
  • Some students will focus on Plains Indians, emphasizing aspects of nomadic life like the construction of teepees and the hunting of buffalo.
  • Ask students where those images come from. Popular media? Textbooks? This kind of discussion can help show students the relationship between popular historical narratives and the more complex realities of the past.
  • Take a look, either during a unit, or over the course of the year, at how different tribes of Indians lived at different points in history and in different regions. Who were the Indians encountered by the Puritans? How did the Five Civilized tribes get the moniker "civilized"? What are some issues facing particular tribes today?
Sample Application

One of the teachers in Wills’s study opened the year with a lesson on early contacts between Europeans and Native Americans. Using the textbook A More Perfect Union she encouraged the students to consider what life was like for Indians living on land that would later be colonized:

“Not all Indians were nomadic. They didn’t all travel around and follow buffalo herds. Some of them farmed. And they needed land to farm on.”

After this unit, the class did not talk about Native Americans again for several months, until they moved on to the exploration of the West and the concept of Manifest Destiny. Encouraging students to consider the perspective of those who removed Natives from the land, the teacher referred to John Winthrop’s claim that in order to have a right to land it had to be farmed, mined, or changed in some way. She then followed up with a question that, for at least one student, seemed to draw on their earlier lesson:

Teacher: “Okay. Now, that’s a real important point because did the Indians farm, mine or, build very often?”
Student: “Farmed.”
Teacher: “They farmed, some did farm, some were farmers. But they would were farmers and…Well, that’s real funny ‘cause some of those…Okay…Most of them did not, farm, most of them traveled around. And so, one of the reasons that, the people who were moving west—though it seems very racist—but at the time, they had this idea in their head that: “Hey, if they haven’t improved the land, then it’s not really their land.” So it wasn’t like they went in and they uprooted these guys’ houses and stuff…”

Having painted herself into a corner, the teacher struggled to reconcile what she had taught the students earlier in the course—that not all Natives were nomadic buffalo hunters—with the dominant image that “fit” into the traditional story of American history. Indian removal is a tougher, more complicated topic when Natives are represented as farmers rather than nomads. Such a representation, however, is not only more historically accurate, but also challenges students to think in more complex ways about American history.

For more information

These two Ask a Master Teacher posts deal directly with the issue of incorporating Native American history into the normal curriculum:

Also check out these posts in the Ask a Historian field for specific information on Native Americans:

In addition, the National Museum of the American Indian by the Smithsonian Institution is an excellent resource for in-depth information on Native American history.

Bibliography

Wills, John S. “Popular Culture, Curriculum, and Historical Representation: The Situation of Native Americans in American History and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes.” Journal of Narrative and Life History (1994): 277–294.

Reading in the History Classroom bhiggs Wed, 02/01/2012 - 14:00
Image
Photography, Large print books, 27 Jan 2009, Flickr CC
Article Body

In their article “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy,” Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan provide insight into the different reading skills required for success in different disciplines. What reading skills, the authors asked, do chemists need? What reading skills do mathematicians need? What reading skills do historians need? And how does this affect secondary students’ reading abilities and inform the secondary curriculum?

The authors of this study, both professors in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, analyzed the approach to discipline-specific reading taken by experts in those disciplines. They asked mathematicians to talk through their work reading math articles, chemists to talk through their work reading chemistry, and historians to talk through their work reading works of history. The authors then identified the specific strategies that the experts employed as they read. Once they had done this, they worked in collaboration with teachers to develop discipline-specific instructional approaches for teaching these strategies. Their overarching purpose was in part to develop an advanced literacy curriculum and a corresponding teacher education curriculum.

Not All Reading Is the Same
Reading is often thought of as a basic skill that can be applied in various situations. Yet research into literacy reveals a more complex picture. Strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into more sophisticated literacy skills that enable students to deal with the specialized and complex reading of literature, science, history, and mathematics. Those early skills do matter, but they must be built upon with “disciplinary literacy” instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, or history.

How Historians Read
What are the literacy skills of historians? As opposed to mathematicians and chemists historians emphasized paying attention to the author or source when reading a text. They read with the view that both “author and reader are fallible and positioned.” Their purpose in reading a history book seemed to be to figure out what story a particular author wanted to tell (rather than discover one truth). Additionally, reading historical texts meant encountering words that are not current, for example “aeroplane,” and that are metaphorical, for example “Black Friday.”

(While the researchers are not specific about the texts they used with the experts, this report suggests that the targeted texts were secondary sources rather than primary.)

Working to Develop Historical Reading Skills among Students
After identifying these specific literacy skills, the researchers worked to develop discipline-specific instructional strategies.

A History Events Chart
One strategy was a “history events chart.” As students read about a particular event, they wrote down answers to the questions of “who, what, where, when, why, and how” in order to summarize the event. They did this for each event they read about. Then, they were asked to determine the relationship between events. Drawing connections between events on a chart, and writing down their explanations demanded that students draw their own cause-effect relations. It also demonstrated that these relationships can be hidden in a text and must be uncovered.

In the Classroom
  1. Ask yourself a series of questions to determine if and how you are teaching your students historical reading.
    • Do I teach reading?
    • Do I teach historical reading?
    • What specific skills and approaches to historical texts do my students know?
    • What specific historical reading skills don’t they know?
  • Become more clear about the historical reading strategies you will teach your students.
  • Try an instructional strategy for teaching that particular reading skill. (This blog on historical thinking may be helpful in getting you started on numbers 2 and 3.)
  • Once you find one or two strategies that work for you and your students, use them repeatedly with different texts and topics. This structure and repetition will help your students internalize these reading skills.
    • Sample Application

    Another example of a technique to develop historical reading skills among adolescents is the “Multiple-Gist Strategy”:

    In this strategy, students read one text and summarize it, read another text and incorporate that text into the summary, then read another text and incorporate that text into the summary, and so on. The summary has to stay the same length, essentially, and this forces a student to use words such as similarly or in contrast when incorporating texts that can be compared or contrasted with each other. [The teacher’s] preliminary results [with this strategy] reveal that students who learned the multiple-gist strategy wrote longer, more coherent answers to essay questions.

    The teacher not only helped students develop specific historical knowledge, but also equipped them to better read and understand the many texts that are important to doing history.

    For more information

    See this blog on Common Core State Standards to help you connect this study to those standards.

    Bibliography

    Hynd-Shanahan, Cynthia, Jodi P. Holschuh, and Betty P. Hubbard. “Thinking like a Historian: College Students’ Reading of Multiple Historical Documents.” Journal of Literacy Research 36: 141-176.

    Shanahan, Timothy, and Cynthia Shanahan. “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy.” Harvard Educational Review 78(1) (2008).

    Fifth Graders as Historical Detectives: Solving Historical Puzzles

    Image
    Students discussing primary source documents with their teacher, Teachinghistory
    Article Body

    Who says that elementary students can't think historically? A researcher from University of Maryland College Park challenged that assumption in a recent study. Through direct instruction in historical analysis skills, Bruce VanSledright's students not only showed marked improvements in their work but also became excited about a subject in which they had previously expressed little interest.

    The Study

    VanSledright spent four months teaching 5th-grade American history in a diverse urban elementary school that included several English Language Learners. For his study sample, he chose eight students of different skill levels. He closely followed students' development as historical thinkers, and conducted before-and-after evaluations assessing their ability to analyze historical documents. For the pre-tests, students looked at two texts and three images concerning the Boston Massacre, and they sought to figure out what had happened, which accounts were accurate, and why. For the post-tests, students looked at four texts and two images concerning the battle at Lexington Green and conducted similar analyses. During both assessments, VanSledright had students think aloud, describing what they were thinking and wondering as they examined the documents.

    Instructional Approach

    VanSledright engaged students in investigating historical problems, explaining to them that they were going to be "historical detectives," doing the sort of work that journalists often do. He taught two units—one on the colonization of North America by the British, and one on the American Revolution—looking at particular puzzles like the "starving time" in Jamestown Colony and the causes of the American Revolution. He aimed to take students beyond simple reading comprehension and taught them how to read, interpret, and analyze historical documents in order to investigate particular puzzles. He also instructed students in comparing sources, evaluating them for perspective, and judging their reliability. Finally, he taught students to synthesize varied historical accounts in order to construct a narrative of what happened.

    Fifth graders can move beyond simple reading comprehension to read, interpret, and analyze historical documents and investigate particular puzzles.
    Thinking Historically in Fifth Grade

    After four months of careful instruction in historical reading, all students showed marked improvement. Their first improvement was in reading individual texts, which they learned to analyze critically, examine for point of view, and place in context. Their next major improvement was in reading multiple texts together, which required cross-referencing, synthesizing, and evaluating texts for bias. All eight students gained some ability as historical readers by the end of the semester, and four demonstrated occasional expertise. Equally important, all students became more interested in history.

    Student Work

    For their work on the American Revolution, students studied possible causes of the conflict. They were encouraged to consider point of view and understand the role of perspective in making sense of evidence. They were then assigned to work on newspaper beats for papers with particular points of view. Armed with packets of primary and secondary sources, students researched their beats and produced a story and illustration consistent with the position of their paper (see sample application).

    In the Classroom
    • Introduce historical thinking as detective work or similar to the work that journalists do when piecing together a story. This kind of historical discovery can be fun for younger students.
    • Try modeling a "think-aloud" for students as you read a document. Tell students that you are going to share your thoughts as you read and ask them to pay attention to the questions you ask, the mental notes you make, and the types of things you are looking for.
    • Remember to use visual primary sources as well as written ones to teach students historical analysis.
    Sample Application

    Take a close look at the causes of the American Revolution and ask your students to make sense of different viewpoints, including those of the rebels, the loyalists, the British citizens who supported King George, and others. Use primary sources to study reactions to the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the first shots fired at Lexington Green. Then create newspaper headlines to show the different points of view for the five events.

    Sample Student Work

    The London Times, Shootings in Boston, Five Rebels Get What They Deserve: ". . . its citizens armed, supported by untold thousands of hideous farmers ready to invade the town . . . As you can see England had to defend themselves or they would have gotten killed. Till next issue...Good day!'

    The Boston Evening-Post, British Tea Tax Brings Americans Great Misery: ". . . there were a lot of reasons that the colonists had for fighting against the tea tax. One of them was the tax was totally unfair and made a joke of common sense . . . The tea tax was giving the colonists a headache!"

    The Boston Globe, Boston, Citizens Beat British Guards with Clubs: "…one soldier fired at an American in self-defense after the colonists hit his arm . . . Even though the captain said, "Don’t fire" the other soldiers fired after the first man fired. Three British soldiers died that day (in twenty minutes) by the mob."

    For more information

    Interview with Bruce VanSledright, http://www.mdk12.org/instruction/curriculum/social_studies/bruce_vansle…

    Bruce A. VanSledright, In Search of America's Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).

    Bibliography

    Bruce A. VanSledright, "Can 10 Year Olds Learn to Investigate History as Historians Do?" OAH Newsletter, August, 2000. Also available online at http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2000aug/vansledright.html.

    Reading Abraham Lincoln: A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking

    Image
    Abraham Lincoln statue from the Lincoln Memorial. NHEC
    Article Body

    Teaching history is not only about teaching students what happened in the past; it’s about teaching them how to think about the past. Many students instinctively employ modern perspectives when reading historical documents—a practice historians call "presentism." Students have to be taught to "think contextually," learning to recognize how the past differed from the present. In a significant study, Sam Wineburg revealed that even among teachers contextual thinking is a unique skill that needs to be intentionally developed.

    Wineburg and his colleagues worked with 12 pre-service teachers participating in a fifth-year certification program at the University of Washington. They asked those teachers to "think aloud" and make visible how the teachers thought about six historical documents from the nineteenth century.

    In this small study, being a history major turned out not to be a reliable predictor of being able to contextualize historical documents. Even college students with strong history content knowledge can fall prey to presentism. The most sophisticated historical readers, on the other hand, build a social context for the historical documents they are reading, drawing inferences from each document, establishing a spectrum of ideas for the period, and reading multiple documents in conversation with each other.

    Drawing Inferences from Documents

    Historical documents tell readers something not only about their author, but also about the world in which he or she lived. One document from the study, for instance, is a campaign speech made by Abraham Lincoln, in which Lincoln seemingly reveals deep bigotry toward African-Americans. But Lincoln’s words cannot be separated from the occasion on which they were uttered, the location of the debate, or the kinds of people who were in attendance. In short, the speech may tell us something about Lincoln, but it may tell us even more about middle America in 1858.

    Establishing a Spectrum of Ideas

    In order to build a social context for understanding historical documents, students need to have a general understanding of what people thought about particular issues at that time. In the case of Lincoln’s comments on race, students can better understand the context in which he made them by reading documents written by defenders and opponents of slavery. Examining excerpts from white supremacist John Bell Robinson and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, for instance, helped successful readers understand how slavery was understood in Lincoln’s own time.

    Reading Across Documents

    Looking at the ways in which different documents from the same period inform each other is another way of building the social context of the past. The technique, which historians call "intertextual reading," involves reading each document with the others as backdrop, weaving them together to bring to life the world of the past.

    image
    Image of bust, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, New York Public Library
    In the Classroom

    The past, as L.P. Hartley wrote, is a "foreign country," which means that people thought, spoke, dressed, and lived in different ways than we do today.

    • Think about how you can help your students understand this strange place, where people lived differently, had different rights, and believed different things.
    • Begin by asking students to figure out where they stand on a particular issue. Then, reminding them that they are dealing with a different time and place, give them a number of documents focusing on a particular historical issue.
    • Have students make lists of what they can infer about the time period from these documents. How was it different from our world today?
    • See if students can use the documents to establish a spectrum of ideas for the period, and ask them if modern perspectives fall within the poles established by that spectrum.
    • Reminding them that they should be reading across the various documents, ask them to paint a general picture of this past world.
    Sample Application

    The two excerpts below are from think aloud exercises with two participants in the study. While those participants were teachers rather than students, they nevertheless reflect the same strengths and weaknesses exhibited by younger readers. Take a look at the first one:

    Lincoln was not so much...working in the interest of the black man, for altruistic sense. . . he’s not giving them equality in personhood.

    The criticism that Lincoln is not giving African-Americans “equality in personhood” is a distinctly modern one that ignores the fact that Lincoln was operating in a very different time in American history. Further, the reader draws conclusions about what Lincoln stood for, ignoring the fact that Lincoln was speaking in the context of a political campaign.

    Now take a look at how the second reader approaches a historical text:

    . . . I get the feeling that he is wrestling with something that doesn’t really have a good solution. This is the best you can have for now. . . He was real one-dimensional in the first article, kind of a slimy politician. Then he has another side with the letter to Mary Speed, kind of human. And now this is again another, it’s beginning to fill out, but now I see him more as the chief executive and trying to deal with problems, trying to balance a war, thinking ahead, what are we going to do after the war and sort of coming up with—and this is prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Is this prior to the Emancipation Proclamation? Yes, this is prior. So, I mean he may have had this idea in mind, so he’s thinking forward, and how are we going to deal with this huge number of slaves? Maybe colonizing is certainly a viable option in 1862. It kind of reminds me of what the British did with Australia. Ship all the undesirables down to Australia.

    Unlike the first reader, this seasoned one considers the fact that, however distasteful it strikes us today, creating a black colony may have been "a viable option in 1862." Further, instead of taking Lincoln’s words as clear evidence of what the future president believed, the reader notes that different Lincolns appear depending on the context: a "slimy politician" in one, a "human" side in a second, and a "chief executive" in a third.

    For more information

    Teachinghistory.org's Teaching Guide Structured Academic Controversy (SAC) in the History Classroom further discusses leading students toward synthesized, contextualized understanding.

    Avishag Reisman and Sam Wineburg, "Teaching the Skill of Contextualizing in History," The Social Studies 99, no. 5 (Sep-Oct 2008), 202-207.

    Bibliography

    Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

    ExplorePAhistory

    Image
    Image of Native American tribal chief
    Annotation

    ExplorePAhistory offers teachers a wide variety of educational resources for incorporating Pennsylvanian history into the U.S. history classroom. The site is divided into three main sections: Stories from PA History, Visit PA Regions, and Teach PA History. Educators will find the first and third sections particularly useful for designing lesson plans. In the Stories section, 34 thematic sections trace the history of the Keystone State. The Teach section also offer over 100 lesson plans that can be searched by historical period, subject, grade level, and discipline, or by keywords.

    Teachers should not discount the VisitPA section of the site. Although designed as a way to attract tourists to the state, the regional subsections provide educators particular stories and featured markers that provide depth to Pennsylvania history.

    ExplorePAhistory's simplicity and teacher-centered resources makes it a useful site for exploring U.S. history through the history of one of America’s oldest and most influential states.

    ExplorePAhistory is a collaborative project between the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the U.S. Department of Education, Pennsylvania Public Television Network, the William Penn Foundation, and several state agencies. Additionally, the project’s education materials are a product from a Teaching American History (TAH) grant with Ridgeway School District and history professionals across the state.

    K
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10
    11
    12
    Pennsylvania
    Mid-Atlantic

    The Thomas Jefferson Building: Secret Messages

    Article Body

    In the Library of Congress online interactive The Thomas Jefferson Building: Secret Messages, students explore four locations in the oldest of the library's buildings. Built between 1890 and 1897, the Thomas Jefferson Building features art and architectural details that help communicate the building's purpose to visitors. Students discover details in each of the four locations and decide which of four themes they best symbolize: celebrating achievement, providing access to knowledge, inspiring creativity, and promoting progress and discovery. At the end of the activity, students choose from all of the details the one they thought best conveyed its theme, and describe a modern symbol they might use to convey the same idea. A brief Teacher Resources page suggests ways of incorporating the activity into curriculum, and a blog entry offers more ideas.

    Buildings are a living record of human interaction with place. This interactive encourages students to analyze buildings as primary sources and consider the intent behind architectural details.

    Website
    The Thomas Jefferson Building: Secret Messages

    Performance Assessments Requiring Historical Analysis

    Image
    Silkscreen, "For greater knowledge. . . ," Federal Art Project, 1940, LoC
    Question

    A group of schools are working on common performance assessments, defined as a question requiring a written response in which the student must apply skills of historical analysis to answer the question. (i.e. More than directed writing response.) We are looking for exemplars of such items. Can you direct us to some?

    Answer

    A great place to start is Oakland Unified's History and Social Studies page, specifically the left column on the page. The site offers historical questions with assessments and support materials designed to improve historical reading, writing, and thinking. Examples available were designed for the 8th and 11th grades, but the concepts can be applied to any age group.

    Another place to look for performance assessments that focus on historical analysis is the College Board's website. Their "Sample Questions and Scoring Guidelines" page has free response questions—"Document Based Questions"—and scoring guidelines dating back for the past several AP US History exams.

    The thematic essay from the New York Regents exam is also worth a look. It's a good example of a written assessment that asks students to apply the skills of historical analysis, and the "United States History and Government" page has tests from the past several years. The page includes a scoring key and rating guide that specifically looks at the thematic essay, and which includes a wide selection of student responses.

    . . . a number of lessons available online, which include evaluation rubrics and examples of student work.

    Benchmarks of Historical Thinking, a Canadian website, is also a good resource. They have a number of lessons available online, which include evaluation rubrics and examples of student work. This example, for instance, is an assignment that asks students to write a letter to a Holocaust survivor and includes attachments, such as the task description at the bottom of the page.

    Historical Thinking Matters also has tasks and examples of student work. Their "Teacher Materials and Strategies" page gives you access to four thematic topics, each of which has examples of student responses to historical prompts that ask them to use primary sources as evidence. Two examples of student work for each topic, like this essay and this essay about the Spanish-American War, or like this essay and this essay about the Scopes trial, are also useful tools.

    UPDATE (Oct. 26, 2012): Be sure to check out the Stanford History Education Group's Beyond the Bubble, a user-friendly site where you can find shorter assessments, interactive rubrics, examples of student work, and a video about how to construct your own.

    Hispano Music & Culture of the Northern Rio Grande kschrum Wed, 07/28/2010 - 12:43
    Image
    Upper Penitente Morada Chapel, Arroyo Hondo, Taos County, NM

    Hispano Music & Culture of the Northern Rio Grande, housed at the Library of Congress’s digital archive America Memory, is a collection of religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

    Bracero History Archive

    Image
    Bracero History Archive

    The Bracero History Archive—a collaborative project of George Mason University, the Smithsonian, Brown University, and the University of Texas, El Paso—is an online collection of resources that documents the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative where millions of Mexicans came to work in American agriculture during the mid-20th century.

    Resources on Native American History

    Image
    Photo, Woman from Plains with baby, c. 1901, Library of Congress
    Question

    I teach Native American history/studies. . . It is difficult finding curriculum and good lessons for these subjects. I would really like to find a good text book but have not been able to. . . [A]ny ideas or suggestions would be helpful. . .

    Answer

    There are several textbook-y resources available that we like. Consider the readers in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Three of these paperback readers address Native American history, including The Cherokee Removal and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Each of the readers begins with an introductory essay that provides an overview narrative of the topic and its historiographical context. Following this essay are selected primary and secondary sources accompanied by orienting background information. Depending on the ages and abilities of your students, these readers can serve as a resource for creating source-based activities and lectures, or for older and more capable students, they can be a kind of textbook. However, be forewarned, if you are working with younger students, you will likely need to further excerpt and prepare many of the provided sources.

    For a lengthier survey textbook that is popular and worth investigating, try First Peoples by Colin G. Calloway. Also consider the documentary series, We Shall Remain, a recent entry in the excellent PBS series, The American Experience. You can find teaching activities and full episodes on the series’ companion website. Also see this blog for links related to this series. All of these resources can help you craft lessons that emphasize both the diversity of Native Americans and the fact that they are still with us today—two ideas that challenge many students’ misconceptions about this topic.

    Subscribe to 6