One of the issues with which I struggled as a new teacher was the recognition of major themes prevalent in American history. In my first year of teaching I was often more concerned with getting through the next unit, next lesson, even the next class rather than thinking about the bigger picture. And my ignorance of the important themes of history did a disservice to my students. The event-focused history as I taught it failed to reveal connections and humanize the actors of history; it felt irrelevant to most of my students. The content, in fact, was presented as simply a series of inevitable events; each one distinct from the last, never to be considered again as we marched through time. As I became more comfortable in my teaching, I realized the importance of weaving salient themes of history, including race, class, and nationalism, throughout my lessons as a way to make the content more meaningful. Thus, I began the conscious effort of highlighting the manifestations of these themes in history for the benefit of my students. I discovered that the connections we made through class activities based on these themes allowed my students to see relationships within the content and gain a deeper understanding of the material.

The theme of class in America was one with which I felt a particularly deep connection, and as such, it became a thread that bound many of my American history lessons and units. Class issues and class conflict imbue nearly every event in American history. Of course, class was a significant concern as the Founding Fathers developed the framework that became our nation. And class issues are important to those studying the workers of the Industrial Revolution and the soldiers of the Civil War. And from there, class has become arguably even more important to our history. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive period, labor issues were rooted firmly in class. This theme continued through the 1930s, during which time most conflict in American society concerned clear class questions. And since the 1970s inflationary pressures and the struggles of the middle class have often been topics of historians, economists, and pundits. Today, we often hear about issues related to the economic crisis, class disparities, and the effects on the middle and lower class. To adapt an expression from professor and philosopher Cornell West—in all circumstances of history, class matters.

As I have suggested in previous posts, using music to engage, inform, and otherwise foster meaningful learning has worked well for my students and me. Within the theme of class in particular, a rich bounty of songs exists and can provide that fundamental thread through which the theme of class can connect with many periods in history. Songs about class give voice to those we rarely listen to or read about in our textbooks, but can be a component of instruction important to historical understanding.

In early American history students and I listened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and assessed the class differences emerging between the colonists and the British. We reviewed class conflict and the emergence of technology during the Industrial Revolution through contemporary sources including Radiohead’s haunting Palo Alto in an effort to tease out some of the feelings of those fearful of what kind of life new technology would bring and the associated loss of jobs for craftspeople in the 19th century. Antebellum period songwriters including Stephen Collins Foster and Daniel Decatur Emmett provided glimpses into the lives of working-class people of the U.S. as we approached the Civil War.

But for me it was music from the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which allowed me to deeply explore the theme of class in American history. Images depicting working conditions and songs written about the plight of the working class as they voiced their frustration and anger toward employers spoke to my students beyond the textbook. Folk musicians from Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and the band Bright Eyes have expressed some of these sentiments and I employed them generously. Bluegrass and country artists including Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and Earl Scruggs also shared stories of the working class and the rural poor in their songs. And beyond the labor movement specifically, music from urban streets has voiced how not only race but class issues have contributed to the struggle toward equality. Artists including Gil Scott-Heron Public Enemy, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common have all confronted class issues. Moreover, the genre of punk rock largely emerged from working-class ethos and often provides the voice for class struggles as viewed by youth culture. Teachers can use the medium of music from various genres as a means to address class and class issues in a culturally significant way.

Teaching history as more than a series of inevitable events is elemental to quality instruction. Providing opportunities for students to understand the enduring themes that are often left out of traditional, event-focused history can be a way to challenge those myopic narratives. And music focused on the theme of class seems especially prevalent and potent as a way with which to transcend history lessons that are disconnected and irrelevant to students. It is music that is accessible, relevant, and has the ability to engage and inform your students in ways they are not likely to forget.

The first day of my U.S. History class, I showed my students an image of Nam June Paik's multimedia art installation, Electronic Superhighway: The Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii on my interactive whiteboard. The students and I talked about the piece and then I asked the students to each come up with a mood word, one word that would describe the mood of the United States today. The students put their mood words on sticky notes and we placed them on the image of the artwork. Once this was done, I explained to my students that the mood word activity was part of a yearlong project.

A joint effort between Melanie Buckley, an American Literature teacher, and me, the goal of this project, which we call "Visual Art through the Ages," was for students to develop the writing skills to express connections between art and U.S. History. Each step of this project was guided by the essential question "How did we become the United States?" and related back to Nam June Paik's piece. Buckley and I created and formulated the project during the Clarice Smith National Teaching Institute held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Paik's installment, to Buckley and I, visually demonstrates how the United States is not a representation of one culture but many and it took many people, events, and cultures to create the United States. It inspired us to consider how we could combine U.S. history and literature to demonstrate the same idea.

For each unit of study, the students learned art vocabulary, analyzed art from the period, practiced using their new vocabulary to express their observations, and created mood words that they compared to the words they created on the first day. The idea for the art analysis project was that it would be a concluding activity for each unit that could be done in less than 15 minutes.

Since Buckley and I are not art teachers, we first had to learn how to analyze art using the elements of art ourselves. The elements of art are different aspects of art, like line, shape, and color, that can be found in art pieces and are usually shown in a chart. After I introduced the project, the students learned (for many it is a refresher from art class) the elements of art and then as a class we analyzed a piece of art using the elements in the chart below. We asked the art department to do this piece of instruction for the students.

Now, with this emphasis on art, many students were very confused. They kept asking if they were in an art class or U.S. History class, and once we began writing during the art analysis, they were unsure if they were in U.S. History class or English class. This confusion that the students began to have over what we were doing was what I had hoped for. I wanted the students to realize that all of their subjects in high school are connected and can be taught together.

The first day I presented the project, I took the students step by step through the process. It began with an art analysis worksheet. The worksheet was divided into five numbered steps. Dividing up and numbering the steps allowed the students to work on one at a time (this worked best with the time constraint).

We began by watching a slideshow of the six pieces of art Buckley and I had selected for the Age of Discovery/Colonial Era unit. Each student during the slide show worked on step one, creating their mood word and then writing two sentences on why they selected this word. Once they completed this first step and I checked it, they moved on to step two.

Step two was where students analyzed a piece of artwork. The students selected a small, 2 x 2 print-out of one of the six art pieces and glued it on their sheet of paper under the elements of art chart. The students took time to circle and draw lines to two or more aspects of the elements of art they found in their images. The first time students did this, they found it silly but after working through one or two columns of the chart, they began to really look hard for different aspects. For some of them, it became a competition to see what they had in their paintings compared to their classmates.

Once everyone finished finding art elements, we moved on to step three: writing four sentences that incorporated elements of art that they found in their images. Each sentence had to include one element of art linked to where they found it in the image. The handout that I created for them to work on had examples. The whole process required students to move through skills that started with observation and ended with synthesis. Identifying the elements of art in the images used observational and analytical skills. Writing the four sentences let them articulate what they had observed.

For the fourth step of the worksheet, the students had to connect each of the sentences that they created in step three to a specific event or person in the time period we were studying. This part was by far the hardest step. Many students immediately put their hands up and declared they were stuck! They didn't know what to include, what connections to make, or how to even begin. This step focused purely on synthesis and for many, this was a new skill.

I helped the students to recognize that they had to be creative. They could talk about anything and everything in the time period, but they had to connect it to the image. The first thing I did for many who were stuck was prompt them to make a list of four events or individuals that they remembered from the unit. Second, I told them to identify four aspects of art in their artwork that they were really drawn to. Finally, I asked them to connect an event/individual to each aspect. I told them to think back to their mood word for the unit and find a connection.

Still, some students had the most problems with this step. Many took their papers home to work on the sentences for a longer time, but others loved this creative step and quickly wrote four sentences. This step also helped them to realize that art can assist in learning about the past. Art is an accurate source that can recreate the past, just like any other primary source. For some, using art to learn about the past is easier and more meaningful than studying and analyzing a document.

The fifth and last step of this worksheet was to write four sentences summarizing what each student felt was the whole point of the artwork. Taking into account all of the steps, from the mood word to the art analysis and synthesis, how does this image relate to the time period? With all the other steps complete, the students found this easy to articulate. I loved reading their responses and seeing their "aha" moment when they saw their connection.

With each unit's art analysis, the students improved. I noticed that when I used an artwork in a PowerPoint or one on a worksheet, they analyzed it using the elements of art without me prompting them. The students began to see this process as a natural ending to the unit. They became excited about the images selected. Some student even began to write down mood word ideas at the beginning of the unit.

The art analysis activities were just one part of the overall yearlong project. At the end of the year, the students will complete a podcast on one piece of art that they feel connected to. These podcasts will be created in groups (based on art work in the same time period) while at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. All of the images Buckley and I used are from the museum's collections and, with the exception of one, are all on display.

In the podcast, the students will connect their selected art piece to Paik's installment to answer the essential question, how did we become the United States? The students will explain in the podcast how their selected piece of art visually displays one step toward answering this question. In one to two sentences, they will contrast their pierce of art to Paik's piece and explain how their piece helped to create the United States.

FDR once said, “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” In recent years I have attempted to find ways to “get out of the way” of student learning more, and not be the omnipotent source of information and ideas. This past year, this led to my adventures in the world of tweeting.

I began this year with lofty AP U.S. History (APUSH) goals, but a few months into the school year, I found myself behind, overwhelmed with grading, and beginning to lean on the “time-saving” crutches of PowerPoints and lectures. In fact, according to the semester evaluations from my students, many of them wanted me to “lecture more.” I was amazed and appalled. For them lecture was a more efficient way to consume more information in less time. I was tempted to give in to their demands.

It was in the midst of this mid-season reflection that I remembered two important tenants I’ve tried to hold on to in teaching:

1. Students need authentic assessment.
2. Just because I taught it, doesn’t necessarily mean they learned it.

Then I remembered an idea I had before the year began: the @apushhelp Twitter feed.

The purpose of this assignment was twofold. First, I wanted the kids to demonstrate their knowledge in a way that benefited other teachers and students. Second, I wanted to create a means of assessment in which students were asked to communicate complex ideas in an accessible way.

I am by no means a Twitter regular. Yet, when I considered the depth of the APUSH curriculum and the countless facts my students consumed daily, Twitter seemed like a fitting medium for assessing this content. In Twitter I could ask students to share the information they were learning, but also connect these seemingly disconnected facts chronologically within thematic units.

Students were required to sign up for up to one week a quarter. They could work with one or two other students. Their job was to send me an email with six tweets for the week. Tweets had to be under 140 characters total.

In each tweet, students were asked to provide short summaries of facts and ideas that we learned during that week. The goal was to take complex ideas and provide short explanations of these ideas in a way that could help students across the nation prepare for the APUSH exam. Student were encouraged to avoid inside jokes that only our class would understand and to make sure their writing was clear for all readers.

Students had to leave room for a “hashtag” for each tweet. For those unfamiliar with Twitter lingo a hashtag is the number sign (#) followed by a word or phrase (ex. #APUSHrules). A hashtag is used for categorical purposes. I created hashtags for each instructional unit (ie. #colonial, #civilwar, #coldwar, etc.). So in addition to posting a random fact, students also had to link that fact to a broader historical period through the hashtag. This also let anyone who viewed our Twitter page search for all of the different tweets about a certain time period. I hoped this would make it easier to review for the AP exam.

The other major part of this project was the “help” in @apushhelp. My students were required to respond to questions that any person who followed @apushhelp could send in. At first the questions trickled in and usually came from students in another APUSH class at our school, but as the AP exam neared, I was receiving multiple questions every day.
I would email the questions directly to the students assigned to that week. Their job was to research each question and provide an answer and a short link to show their sources.

In order to demonstrate to students that their work was reaching a greater audience than themselves, I also needed to do a little promotion. Through a couple of friends I made at summer institutes and list-serves, I was able to grow the following of our Twitter feed. It took a few weeks to get us over 100 followers, but after that, the growth was pretty explosive. By the AP exams, we had over 600 followers from across the nation, many of whom expressed their gratitude following the end of the exam.

I also realized that, by only requiring my students to submit two tweets each quarter per student, I set the bar pretty low at first. Students could easily complete the assignment with surface level information or freeload off of a group member. I fixed this by requiring each student to send in four review tweets, on one particular day, in the weeks preceding the AP exam.

This project was no “golden bullet,” but it met students where they are, in a digital age, searching for fast ways to acquire as much information as possible. It required that they aggregate the ideas they learned each week and determine the most important. They were asked to find ways to simplify the content in a correct, concise, and accessible manner for a wide audience. Students had to consider what it was that audience was looking for. Most importantly, it let students see tools like Twitter as potential learning tools.

My student enjoyed this project as well. At the end of the year, a number of them expressed their enjoyment of both the process and the result. They felt as though they had contributed to something beyond themselves and had improved others’ APUSH experience. I even had a few that did extra tweets for each unit, to study for tests. So I would say even if the project wasn’t a golden bullet, it was certainly “A PUSH” in the right direction.

If you would like to see the project assignment or rubric, or share ideas for student engagement feel free to contact me at smcampbell1 at fcps dot edu.

Note: Thank you for your interest in our posters. We no longer have the Civil War poster in stock, but you may print a copy or visit the interactive online version.

What can a quilt, a map, some photographs, a haversack, and a receipt tell you about the past? Thanks to Teachinghistory.org’s new FREE poster, “How Do You Piece Together the History of the Civil War?,” these objects can teach a lot about the Civil War and about how historians piece together the past.

This 24 x 36 inch poster features an engaging collage of primary sources and related questions that get students thinking about how we know what we know about the past, especially in relation to our country’s most devastating conflict, the Civil War. The question, “How can geography impact a battle?,” accompanies a map of Gettysburg while a slave receipt prompts students to think about the laws, economics, and people involved in the institution of slavery.

As a special bonus for teachers, Teachinghistory.org has created an interactive version of this poster with links to teaching materials and websites related to the Civil War. Topics include children’s voices during the Civil War, African American perspectives, women’s roles, Civil War era music, and emancipation, as well as military history and life on the battlefield.

This poster and online resources illustrate that it takes many sources and perspectives to develop a rich understanding of the Civil War in all of its complexity.