Like most state standards, the California history-social studies content standards provide an outline of content and skills that all students should “know and be able to do.” The standards purposefully avoid pedagogy, leaving all decisions regarding how to teach the standards to teachers.

Pedagogy, however, is addressed in the Department of Education’s primary curriculum document for history education – the History-Social Science Framework. The latest edition of the Framework, stalled in the adoption process due to a lack of funding but available on-line, is meant to help teachers and administrators implement the standards. Check out the Framework’s new chapters on instruction and differentiated instruction as they provide several suggestions for “teaching the standards.”

Content Knowledge

When planning to teach any historical topic a good place to start is to develop your own content knowledge. Go beyond simply reading about the topic in the textbook and establish deeper contextual knowledge of the period. If possible, familiarize yourself with the historiographical debates surrounding the topic. This work can be done largely on-line. A good place to start is the Gilder Lehrman web-site, which includes several, short “guided readings” on World War I and the 1920s that are helpful for developing content knowledge. Similarly, you might also check out Digital History’s short essays on the Jazz Age.

Backward Planning
Before lesson planning, consider how you might embed this material in a larger unit of study - in this case, a unit on the effects of World War 1 or the 1920s. Follow a backwards design process by first establishing the learning goals and objectives for the unit. To do this, think about how post-war literature and art relate to other topics mentioned in standard 10.6 – for example, the “widespread disillusionment with pre-war institutions, authorities, and values” (10.6.3), and the “effects of the war on…population movement, the international economy, and shifts in the geographical and political borders of Europe and the Middle East" (10.6.2).

Lesson Plan: Investigating a Standards-Based Question

One approach for teaching this standard is to investigate it as a historical question: How did World War One influence literature, art, and intellectual life? Or, perhaps, How did artists interpret and depict the consequences of World War One? Begin by providing students some background content on pre-war art movements (e.g., realism and modernism) and information on artists who emerged out of the war. Next, have students examine a number of artifacts that address the question from different perspectives and genres. The standard includes some places to start searching for documents – namely, Picasso, Stein, and Hemingway. You might also take a look at T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and Otto Dix’s painting, Assault By Gas (1924). Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) includes some vividly dark recollections of the war and Wilfred Owens’ Dulce Et Decorum Est (How Sweet It Is) (1921) satirically captures the horrors of trench warfare. It is important here to excerpt strategically - include short passages of written work that speak directly to the lesson’s historical question.

Collaboration
Finally, yet perhaps most importantly, this standard is unique in that it promotes collaboration between history and English classes. If you are teaching a 9th or 10th grade world history course, seek out the members of your English department to see if they teach, or might be willing the teach, any literature of the “lost generation.”

Music can be a great resource for American history teachers. Just like textual primary sources, songs have historical meaning that students have to work to uncover. A song, no less than a presidential address, reflects the time in which it was created, as well as the perspective of its author. Consequently, you’ll want to ask students to consider who wrote the lyrics, what those lyrics mean, who the audience for the song was, and what was going on in the United States at the time. You might want to pair the song with other sources—newspaper clippings, radio addresses, photographs of protests, etc.—that students can piece together to better understand a particular historical era.

Folk music, of course, is distinct from popular music in one general regard: unlike music created by professional recording artists, folk music is generally made by ordinary people and integrated into everyday life. So, while many well-known artists like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan certainly played folk music, it can often be used as a way of better understanding the lives of people frequently left out of history textbooks. PBS’s brief history of American folk music might be a good place to start, establishing the unique nature of the genre and helping you focus your search for resources.

As always when looking for classroom resources, teachinghistory.org can help. Our Teaching in Action section, for instance, includes an example of how a song might be used in the classroom, providing links to videos in which 4th grade students learn about John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry by analyzing the song “John Brown’s Body.”

Our Using Primary Sources section also has some appropriate resources for you. One entry on Making Sense of American Popular Song highlights a website that provides questions to ask when using music in the history classroom, a model interpretation of a popular song, and links to resources. Another entry, on Document Analysis Worksheets, includes a link to the National Archives, which has a special “Sound Recording Analysis Worksheet.”

Beyond the Teachinghistory.org website, you might want to look at some of the other usual suspects for high quality materials and lesson plans. EDSITEment—a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities—is always a good place to look. They have a lesson entitled “Music from Across America” that explores the intersection of music and popular song. The Library of Congress is always a good resource, and they have a full page of links, as well as some specific lesson plans like one on California folk music in the 1930s. Finally, PBS’s American Roots Music website has four lesson plans as well as a bibliography that you might find useful.

There are also some specific music-related sites worth exploring. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also has a page of lesson plans dedicated to teaching with music. You might also want to explore Smithsonian Folkways to see what music they have available.