Introducing Artifacts to Students (and Teachers) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/22/2010 - 13:42
Video Overview

Elspeth Inglis and Kim Laing explore the benefits of teaching history with artifacts, not just text. Based on their own experiences with teaching children and history educators, they suggest introducing an unfamiliar object to students and letting students form their own hypotheses about the object's identity. The questioning skills learned from such active, inquisitive engagement with objects can invigorate both learning and teaching.

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LL_Elspeth1.mov
LL_Elspeth2.mov
LL_Elspeth3.mov
LL_Elspeth4.mov
Video Clip Title
Teaching with Artifacts
Mystery Object Exercise
Material Culture at All Grade Levels
Invigorating Teachers and Students
Video Clip Duration
2:23
4:14
2:46
2:35
Transcript Text

Elspeth Inglis: I call it teaching in three dimensions. I did have a short stint teaching high school history, right out of college—and I didn't feel that I knew what to do teaching from a book—teaching history from a book. I had some fun with literature, but teaching history from a book did not come easily to me. I think there are some teachers who know how to do that and some of us don't. I had to have props. I had to have things.

And so my whole museum career related to education—working with children and working with teachers—has always, always, been focused on how do we use objects of everyday life? Works of art, architecture, monuments, any thing that has been made or used by a human being is fair game in my book.

So I usually begin any class on 'what is history?' with an object. And I try to find a mystery object—something that my students, no matter what their age, might not have ever seen. And I do this on purpose, because I want to demonstrate first and foremost how difficult it is to understand history when you take a nugget of information out of context. It is very hard to understand something that you have had no experience with.

So, you know, if a teacher would to walk into a classroom one day, say, she is going to teach pioneer life, and she immediately says to her students "Imagine being a pioneer," the students have nothing with which to spark their imagination. But if that same teacher walked into her classroom and she had a straw hat and she had a cow horn cup and she had a wooden bowl, a candlestick, etcetera, etcetera. And then she tried to get her students to imagine being a pioneer because these are the things that a pioneer would wear, use, or make, etcetera. Then we are getting somewhere, I think, because we are building on experience.

Elspeth Inglis: I find that children really do connect with objects and that they really can have a deep, deep understanding of those objects. It might not be the same understanding you or I have as educators but we have to acknowledge what that student's experience is first and then try to broaden their experience using that artifact.

So I do mystery artifact investigation, that is, that begins with simple observation—descriptives—what is this thing made of? How big is it? What does it weigh? You could do all kinds of observation skills like that. I don't allow them to make guesses about what it does until after they've thoroughly, thoroughly examined the physical properties of the object and test it. Does it have any moving parts? Does it look like something is missing? Does it belong to something else?

Then after they've really exhausted all of those basic observations, I start asking for their ideas about what the thing might do. And if a student responds with—it really doesn't matter what the answer is, I never tell them whether they are right or wrong about what the object is. That is not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to get them thinking and to get them questioning.

And so if, and here is an example I used yesterday, if you know what a candle mold looks like, it's got, you know, cylinders—usually, six, four, it can be many different numbers of cylinders—and it's tin, and it's got a handle, and a place for you to pour the wax. So when I present this to children, and I have been doing this particular artifact for many years, and many times I get the answer from children that they think it's a hot dog cooker. OK, if it's a hot dog cooker, why don't you tell me, or do a pantomime and show me, how this hot dog cooker would work. And the children begin to, you know, pantomime putting the hot dogs in, putting it in the fire, and then you can see—you can see what's happening on their faces as they think this through.

And I say to them, how do you get this out of the fire—because we're talking about before microwaves and stoves, they all know this at this point. And they say, well, you have to have something long because, because they know the metal gets hot and you can't just reach in and hold the handle. Then I ask them what happens to a hot dog when it cooks. Every 4th grader knows that hot dogs expand when they cook, and so then they begin to realize it would be difficult to get the hot dog out of those cylinders. They come to their own conclusion that their hypothesis is not the right one. I don't have to tell them that.

Or I may ask them is there a better way, an easier way, to cook hot dogs over a fire. And they always have the right answer for that. So this is just an example of the kind of process, questioning process, we go through with an artifact. If I wanted to take it a step further, after the students have decided that their original hypothesis of hot dog cooker isn't correct, maybe they have no more guesses left. Then I might bring out a candle or even a lump of beeswax, and usually that's all it takes, is that one extra clue that helps them understand, maybe, what this thing is if they've ever had an experience with making candles. They'll often go, if they see a candle, they'll think it's a candleholder because of the shape—it fits. But, I think you get the idea, that after I have taken something out of context, just to force them to go through that questioning process—it's much harder to do when you are looking at something that is familiar than it is to do with something that is unfamiliar. Then I begin to add some layers to it. Those are the clues or that is the context and that helps to build the story of the object or give the object some life of its own.

Kim Laing: In terms of lessons learned, what we found was that, because we started with high school, we had teachers that had very strong history backgrounds. Their college degrees were in history programs—maybe social studies, but still, they had a lot of history classes. As we have gone down to our elementary, we have teachers with elementary ed degrees, and many universities don't require any history course as part of an elementary ed degree. So while they're super interested and excited and ready to work, they just don't have that university background in history.

So, we back up a little and give them some practice in historical thinking, which really works with the mystery objects, because all those questions are the historical thinking process. And so we have learned to kind of take the teachers from where they're at and customize our interactions with them to the level they're at. So I think that really has helped us in terms of being very grade specific. A lot of grants are multi-grade, but because we focus down on a single grade at a time, we've been able to really customize the information we are giving to the level they might have already had instruction in.

Elspeth Inglis: Elementary and middle school teachers like to have stuff. They always use things. Every teacher I know has used their own money to buy things to bring into their classroom. High school teachers too, but with the high school teachers we have more of an opportunity to use documents. And sometimes it's easier to use documents. It's certainly less expensive to make facsimiles of documents than it is to go out and find objects, but we also assume that the high school teachers will be able to make a different use of objects than elementary and middle school teachers do—including sending their students out into the field on their own. Students, if they are not doing a field trip per se, sometimes they can do internships, they do special projects—classroom projects. I've worked with high school students doing history projects before, and I know that they are capable of some very high-level thinking involving primary sources.

So, we have been experimenting with this over the years, everybody loves objects, everybody. We take—the high school teachers get to go behind the scenes at the museum and see what we do with collections and begin to understand how important material culture is to understanding history. So again it's one of those things that they might not be able to have in their classroom, but it gives the teachers a greater depth of knowledge of the history that they're teaching, when they get to see it in three dimensions.

Kim Laing: Each of our grants has gone to a different site, but we go on a field study—usually two days, sometimes one depending on just how far away it is and how much we can get done in that day. And they get to go behind the scenes at those places, as well. We try to take them places that, funding permitting, they could take their students. Obviously everyone's budgetary situation has limited the number of field studies they can do lately, but we stay in the vicinity of Michigan, or maybe Chicago because we're close enough—it's only two hours away for us—but they work with the curators there and the directors of education at those sites and they go behind the scenes and they participate in the activities and they work with the reenactors and again, it increases their basis of knowledge, their depth of experience, gives them stories to tell in the classroom to make history more alive—and just makes, you know—kind of renews their passion for it. If you have teachers that have been teaching for a really long time, sometimes just that reinvigoration can be really important for them, to get a new feel for it. Or maybe when they studied history, it was political history or military history, and getting a chance to work in kind of a daily-life material culture is something they might not have had an experience with in their college work, so we like to broaden their experience as much as possible.

Elspeth Inglis: Material culture is not something that is covered very well in textbooks, nor is it covered very well in colleges of education. And so, just to underscore what Kim had said, when we give teachers things to play with, in their hands, or put them behind a horse pulling a plow at Greenfield Village we are enriching their experience, which we know, we know, will get back to the classroom in one form or another. The teachers' own experiences, I can't state strongly enough how important it is for teachers to have strong, broad experiences in whatever subject that they're teaching. So I have no qualms about giving teachers tools or time to do things that they may not be able to do with their own students. Still they are going to be able to teach the subject at a greater level of understanding, and with more passion. That's my little soapbox. History has to be taught with passion or it's—it's flat.

Modeling Place-based Teaching

Video Overview

Sarah Jencks of Ford's Theatre and Talia Mosconi of Tudor Place Historic House discuss designing multilayered programs for teaching educators how to use places as primary sources. A number of DC historical sites have formed partnerships to provide educators with wide-ranging orientations to the city's history. Jencks and Mosconi warn against the dangers of running teachers through too many historical sites too quickly, without giving teachers time to process or providing them with context.

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LL_Tallia1.mov
LL_Tallia2.mov
LL_Tallia3.mov
LL_Tallia4.mov
Video Clip Title
Forming Partnerships
Backwards Planning Template
Teaching with Place
Modelling
Video Clip Duration
3:16
2:40
3:18
1:51
Transcript Text

Sarah Jencks: Talia and I got to know each other through the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative, and I went and observed her doing professional development and realized that we were both approaching the Civil War in very different ways, in terms of working with teachers, and that they were really complementary.

Talia Mosconi: We met during one of our professional development workshops, met with Sarah, and we realized that we could do a lot more for teachers if we partnered together, because previously we had just been doing kind of a one-shot come visit us for two hours and learn about the Civil War and that was it. But we realized if we did it together we could create a much richer program where teachers can actually look at the Civil War from different viewpoints, so, for example, you get the Lincoln viewpoint from Ford's. We kind of represent, since we're connected to Robert E. Lee and our inhabitant at Tudor Place was a Southern sympathizer and we also had both enslaved and free African Americans living at the site, so we present that viewpoint. And then we brought in Frederick Douglass to bring in the viewpoint of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln Cottage to further enhance the Lincoln viewpoint.

Sarah Jencks: We started off thinking that it was going to be primarily of interest to DC teachers, but we realized when we opened it up to teachers from around the country that really DC because, Washington, because of its role as the nation's capital, and also because it really is a crucible, in the story, telling the story of the Civil War, had a broader appeal. And, so, we've gotten very excited about the work that we do as a collaborative and really because now, we work so closely together, we're able to offer custom programs to Teaching American History grant groups that come to DC. We're able to work with them to create a program that fits them and their needs, and it's not a one-shot. It's multiple, it's layered, it offers multiple perspectives on the Civil War, it offers multiple perspectives on great men and not so many women, but some women, during the Civil War.

Ford's Theatre is clearly the big fish in many ways, because people tend to go there, but they don't tend to get deep in their experience there, and that's what we're hoping to get out of this. For Ford's Theatre, what is useful about this partnership is helping to deepen the experience at the theatre so it's not walk in, click your camera at the box, and walk out.

Talia Mosconi: And I think too, we've tried to structure the program so it's not just—the program we currently offer is a one-week program where you come and you go to each site, one site a day. But we've tried to structure in a way, too, to build a learning community where we can interact with teachers throughout the year, help them as they're planning their lessons. We've established an online site where teachers can actually post what they're doing in the classroom so others teachers in our network can see what's going on, what works well, and have a discussion board on how they're implementing these sources that we gave them throughout the summer in their classrooms.

Talia Mosconi: It's a weeklong program that we've done, Monday through Friday. This year we will be adding an evening portion on Sunday, just to give an overview of the Civil War so everyone is on the same page and comes with the same background knowledge.

Each site has their own day. They start at Tudor Place on Monday, and we bring—Tudor Place, the person that lived in the house was named Britannia, so we try to bring women's history as well as the history of the enslaved Africans and then free Africans that they hired after the Civil War into that perspective. On Tuesday they visit Frederick Douglass's house, and we have a Frederick Douglass interpreter who talks about oratory and how people can use oratory to further movements. Lincoln Cottage would be on Wednesday to give the early years of Lincoln's presidency and his trips out to the cottage. And then we end, chronologically, with Ford's Theatre with the assassination of Lincoln. We leave Friday open to give teachers time to process, reflect, and then actually start to create a lesson or some sort of activity that they can then bring back into their classroom.

In each of the days we stress both content—trying to provide teachers with enough information on the Civil War for them to feel comfortable teaching it—but our main goal is to teach techniques. So ways you can—we model the techniques for teachers on how to bring primary sources into their classroom.

Sarah Jencks: And we really encourage teachers. We introduce teachers to the "backwards planning" template early in the week and we ask them to use that template in concert with their local standards as the way to develop their program, whether it's a unit or a field trip or whatever else. Because we want to be modeling what we consider best practices. Its very interesting, many teachers are not comfortable with the backwards planning template. Asking them to think first about goals and standards, then about objectives and assessment, and then moving into activities. But they become more comfortable with it over time and for us it's okay for them to be struggling with that during the week because it's a big part of learning how to engage productively with content.

Sarah Jencks: One of the most surprising things we do—that is something people do everyday, but perhaps don't think about from a critical perspective—is that we engage in walking tours. At Ford's Theatre we have a program called "History on Foot." We commission playwrights to write pieces for historical figures that are going to be portrayed by actors. So it's a play—it really is a play—but it's a play walking through the city of Washington that tells a particular story that is connected to Abraham Lincoln's time in Washington, especially to the end of his life and of his presidency. When we do those walks what we encourage the teachers to do is think about how that walk is a primary source, how the city itself is a primary source that they're analyzing, and that they can use perspectives, like the perspectives of the people who are leading the tour (the historical characters) to enhance the learning opportunities for their students. Therefore, every part of a field study experience or a trip is a learning opportunity. And that's something that we've really come to through working in this program. We knew it to a certain extent, but I think that our understanding of that learning has grown.

Actor: The Secretary of State, William Seward, had indeed been attacked in his home in Lafayette Park. Stabbed nearly to death.

Talia Mosconi: We similarly do a walking tour of Georgetown. Looking at different places in Georgetown to get different vantage points—there were Union officers living next door to Confederate sympathizers—so looking at the same community and who was living in that community and how their different perspectives really created an interesting mix during the Civil War. So [it's] giving teachers the option [to come] and look at place as a primary source and [use] that to teach students what daily life would have been like during a specific time period.

I think the walking tour lends itself well to teachers in any community because you can take your students out just in your local neighborhood and really discover your own local history through looking at places.

Sarah Jencks: I do think in general it is one of the things that teachers find both most exciting and most daunting about their experience—because unless you experience it, it can be very hard to understand how it's going to serve the students. So a lot of our—of the teachers worry, they get very very excited for the walking and being outside of their buildings, but they also worry a lot that their administrators or others are not going to understand what they are trying to do. That's something, and even in just saying this right now I'm realizing that we need to think about how to support them and what kinds of documentation we can provide them with and perhaps what we do with them on Friday to help them to feel more confident.

Talia Mosconi: But I think the nice thing about this collaborative is the majority of us are the only educators on site. Particularly for me as the only person on site, it gives me a sounding board, so it's great as we evaluate programs [because] I can talk to other educators who are experiencing the same program and we can evaluate and improve upon the program. I think from that vantage point I think the collaboration has been very beneficial for us.

Sarah Jencks: We sort of ignored the issue of trying to develop a programmatic budget for the first two years. And that is—I don't think any of us are concerned with it all being perfectly even, we're just concerned with everyone being able to do what they can honestly, and that's a big deal. If you go into it saying, "Every penny has to be equal" it's never going to work, you're going to end up with people frustrated. And instead what we've done is we've gone into it saying, "Here's our programmatic budget from the last two years, what can you afford to do?"

Talia Mosconi: I think even extending beyond budget but just staffing the different programs, how we logistically take registrations. We've worked together to really see who can afford—who has time to take these registrations and then someone else can step in and do another job. It's balancing all that together that's made it very effective.

Sarah Jencks: I was talking to a teacher, or to a grant person, and he said, "Well, we're just running the whole time." And I said, "Well, we would love for you to have a deeper experience." And he said, "Oh, well, we're being organized by a tour group and we can't—we just want the teachers to see everything so that they can make the decision about coming back later with their students." But what they're modeling is the way that then students are going to experience it as well.

Connecting Professional Development and Classroom Practice

Article Body

In the library of an Oakland, CA, middle school, four 8th-grade American history teachers are gathered around a table. A doctoral student in U.S. History, the school librarian, and two staff members from the Oakland Unified Teaching American History (TAH) Grant's professional development project join them. The teachers have come from three different schools to observe a lesson on the Fourth Amendment they have planned together.

They wanted students to understand the ideas, rights, and controversy embedded in the dry language of the Constitution. The lesson began in a dramatic fashion. The teacher who was teaching the lesson arranged for a campus security guard to walk into the classroom and search the backpacks of three students. The students had agreed before class to participate in the simulation. After the search, students in the class were asked to write a brief response explaining whether they thought the search was legal. A discussion of this question followed. Then the students read and tried to rewrite the Fourth Amendment in their own words.

Reading and understanding the Amendment proved, as the teachers anticipated, a challenge to many of the students in this class, which included a number of second-language students. At one point the teacher asked, "What do you think they mean by the term effects?" As the teachers had predicted the students had difficulty in explaining how the term was used in this context.

After this introduction, the teacher passed out the Supreme Court case, T.L.O. v. New Jersey (1985), which asked what rights students have against search and seizure if they are on school grounds. (The court ruled they don't have the same rights as individuals outside the authority of the school.) Finally, students were asked to revise what they had written at the beginning of the period on whether or not the search was legal.

After reading what students wrote the mood at the table changed, for it became clear that the students had gained, at best, only a limited understanding of the Fourth Amendment. . .

Initially, the group of teachers clustered around the table was certain that the lesson was successful; students seemed to understand that there were limitations to their Fourth Amendment right to not be searched. Then, the student writing samples were passed out to each teacher. After reading what students wrote the mood at the table changed, for it became clear that the students had gained, at best, only a limited understanding of the Fourth Amendment and how it is applied in a variety of situations and contexts. They did not see how the Fourth Amendment had been applied to the T.L.O. case and argued that school officials had no right to search their belongings without a warrant or probable cause.

As this finding emerged, teachers began to reconsider the design of their lesson—what would they do differently next time? When the lesson was taught again, it benefited from this close examination of instruction and student learning. Indeed, to help the students better understand how the Fourth Amendment had been applied, the teachers refined the lesson to provide a greater focus on the actual court ruling and reasoning in T.L.O., as well as looking closely at additional significant Fourth Amendment cases in American history.

This brief example of teacher collaboration illustrates one aspect of the Oakland TAH program. This collaborative process is known as lesson study.

. . . working to increase teacher content knowledge of American history was just a first step towards achieving the main goal of the project. . .
A Project Challenge: Connecting Professional Development and Classroom Practice

The Oakland Unified School District has received two TAH grants. Each project had the goal of increasing teacher content knowledge of American history and connecting classroom teachers and professional historians. But, working to increase teacher content knowledge of American history was just a first step towards achieving the main goal of the project—increasing student knowledge, understanding, and achievement in American history. This goal raises the fundamental question we sought to answer in our projects:

"How can the enhanced historical knowledge gained by teachers find its way into their lessons and thus increase student knowledge and understanding of American history?"

From long experience in professional development, it is clear the most challenging aspect of this work is helping teachers make connections between what is learned in a workshop and what happens in their classrooms. Lesson Study helped us meet our goal of strengthening that connection.

Lesson Study: Working to Integrate Historical Content and Classroom Practice

As described above, "Lesson Study" provides an ongoing method to examine, refine, and improve instruction. The process is quite basic. A group of 3–5 teachers meet to plan a lesson on a specific historical topic and identify what important information, ideas, and concepts they want the students to understand. The lesson is then taught in one group member's classroom, while the other teachers and project staff observe. After the observation the group members and project staff meet to analyze, with a focus on student talk and writing and on how successful the lesson was in achieving the instructional goals they set for themselves. Based on this discussion, the teachers then refine and/or revise the lesson before it is taught in another group member's classroom.

It is important to note two very important details about what is accomplished in the planning phase:

1. The teachers develop a student question for the lesson. The student question guides the selection of materials and activities that will help students develop thoughtful and accurate responses. It also identifies what student words and work will be the focus of the teachers' analysis of the lesson's effectiveness.

2. The teachers also develop a research question for themselves about the teaching and learning of American history. This both focuses the lesson planning and the gathering of data, and gives the lesson importance beyond the immediacy of its topic and teaching.

Below are some examples of how past lesson study groups connected their student and teacher questions.

A fifth grade lesson focused on Chinese immigration through family photos:

Student question: What can we learn from this picture about the experiences of Chinese immigrants?
Teacher question: Can students use an immigration story to understand a larger historical movement? (A focus on making generalizations and inferential thinking.)

A fifth grade lesson focused on the experiences of slaves and questions of freedom. The class had read the historical novel A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, by Patricia C. McKissack:

Student question: Which characters in the book have the most and least amount of freedom?
Teacher question: Can students develop a nuanced understanding, through multiple perspectives, of freedom at this time and place in American history?

An eighth grade lesson on Nat Turner:

Student question: Was Nat Turner's Revolt a success?
Teacher question: How can we help students understand that it is possible to tell different stories and come to different conclusions about the same event?

An 11th grade lesson on Populism:

Student question: How successful was the Populist Party?
Teacher Question: How can we teach students to use evidence to support their argument?

Lessons Learned—Lesson Study: Possibilities and Challenges

We found that Lesson Study, both through its promise and its implementation addressed a genuine need among history teachers for a systematic way of learning about how to improve instruction, but it was not without its challenges. Lesson study takes time, a scarce resource for teachers. It requires meeting after school and finding and locating resources for a lesson. It requires an understanding among members that by investigating a lesson they might come to different answers and understandings about how best to increase student knowledge and understanding. Indeed, a number of lesson study groups were not able to overcome these challenges. Some teachers showed up late to meetings, or didn't show up at all. Some teachers planned extensively while others in the group did not contribute an equal share. Also, lesson study requires a stance towards teaching and collaboration that is often at odds with how teachers work together at school sites. A successful lesson study develops a lesson that is seen by group members as "our" lesson, rather than the lesson of the teacher who is going to teach it first.

A successful lesson study develops a lesson that is seen by group members as "our" lesson, rather than the lesson of the teacher who is going to teach it first.

So why would teachers want to continue with lesson study? The answer can be found in what teachers believed to be beneficial besides the opportunity to collaborate. Not only did lesson study address a need, but it helped meet the need. Over three quarters reported that they actually learned something new about their teaching—something that was revealed to them through the lesson study process. There was the learning of new content as lessons were developed and materials selected. Indeed, a number of groups chose to focus their lessons on topics they had not taught in depth before, such as Nat Turner and slave rebellions, McCarthyism and the Cold War, or the Fourth Amendment in American history.

There were also new specific instructional strategies designed to help students learn and understand more about American history. For example, groups focused on how to help students read difficult primary source documents, move from specific historical details to generalizations about a time or place, or see a specific event through the multiple perspectives of the time. And there was new learning around the big instructional questions teachers framed for themselves. "Can fifth grade students develop a nuanced understanding of freedom and slavery?" "How to help students use historical evidence to develop and support an historical argument?"

To support lesson study through TAH activities, our efforts have focused on linking lesson studies with historians' presentations. This allows us to provide resources (documents, activities, readings, etc.) that support teachers through the lesson planning phase so they can focus on the lesson analysis portion. The analysis portion, framed by a teacher research question, is often the part of teaching that teachers are unable to make time for as they try and meet the demands of moving through their American history curriculum.

When we first started with lesson study we didn't stress this aspect enough, even though we understood the research nature of the process. We learned that having a teacher question helped immensely in focusing on student understanding as a means for evaluating the lesson's success and instructional meaning. For lesson study to be truly successful, it should help teachers improve the instruction of a particular lesson, inform their instruction beyond that one lesson, and influence future instructional decisions and choices. Why else spend that much time on one lesson?

References

Lewis, Catherine, "Lesson Study: A Handbook for Teacher-Led Instructional Change," (Research for Better Schools, 2002).

Stigler, James and Hiebert, James, "The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom," (New York: Free Press, 1999).

Oakland Unified School District TAH project website.

Hispanic Heritage Month

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The United States has the 3rd largest Hispanic population in the world, according to 2007 Census figures. Only Mexico and Columbia are numerically larger, and among the 44.3 million people of Hispanic origin in the United States, more than 64 percent are of Mexican background. (Visit Annenberg Media's Race, Hispanic Origin, and Ancestry, demonstrating who is Hispanic and how the census category interacts with race.)

We celebrate the presence and contributions of Hispanic Americans during Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15-October 15. The September date marks the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries—in 1821, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Mexico celebrates its independence on September 16—the beginning of a decade-long war against Spain in 1810—and Chile on September 18.

Hispanic Heritage from facts to cultural concepts

Knowing the facts of Hispanic firsts and milestones in the United States presented in these activities from Education World is a good beginning for teaching about the fastest growing cultural group in the country. (Note, however, that the statistics on this site pre-date current statistics cited above from the Census Bureau.)

But Edsitements's Read, Write, Think also encourages students and teachers to look at the deeper influences of culture: art, architecture, education, literature, and more. Edsitement resources also link to Scholastic's Celebrate Hispanic Heritage (primarily for younger students).

Jim Crow laws didn't officially separate Mexican Americans, but the outcome was the same.

The valuable resources of the National Park Service National Register of Historic Places highlight historic properties that deal directly with the cultural and political experiences of Hispanic Americans. Bullion Plaza School, for example, includes lesson plans on the segregation of Mexican-American students—a common practice never mandated by law, but by cultural constructions of race and nation.

Primary sources and artifacts come from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.

Library of Congress Themed Resources for Teachers includes a focus on Hispanic Americans and helps educators explore the culture and contributions and interactions of Hispanic peoples in North America through primary source text and multimedia materials. Lesson Plans highlight oral history as a tool for history instruction.

The Smithsonian's Latino Center turns the spotlight on Latino culture in the United States. Beware of dead links; however, a visit to Hispanic Heritage Teaching Resources reveals a variety of perspectives on Latino life and culture including, among the dozen or so topics, Mexican America, a sampling of objects from the collections of the National Museum of American History, and a digital exhibit, The Power of Photography, which looks at the photographic works of Manuel Carrillo exploring issues of identity and representation.

Bookmark This! New and Improved Websites and Lesson Plans

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black suffrage
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The After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration directed from Queen's University Belfast, launched its Online Classroom, ­a set of 10 online units that explore the aftermath of emancipation in the Carolinas. Organized thematically, the teaching units cover a range of topics, richly illustrated with an array of primary source materials from dozens of archival collections.

The unit Freed Slaves Mobilize, for example, includes a background essay, transcriptions of nine primary source documents and illustrations, questions related to each document, and suggestions for further reading.

After Slavery emphasizes the variety of African American experiences after the Civil War.

After Slavery addresses emancipation both as an attempt by African Americans to overcome the racial legacies that attended and outlived slavery and as a profoundly important chapter in the history of America's working people. One aspect of this story that has become clearer in recent years is the variety of experience among former slaves across the South. These variations make it necessary to move away from broad generalizations about 'the' African American experience after the Civil War and to try to uncover both the shared elements in black life across the region and the varying capacity of freedpeople to mobilize. This emphasis on the "multiple configurations of freedom" across the post-emancipation South provides the rationale for the project's focus on North and South Carolina: together these states reflect the productive, demographic, political, and geographic diversity of the region as a whole.

EDSITEment

EDSITEment posts new materials this month from 19th-century historical writing to material culture to fiction. New resources include a feature on teaching Alexis de Tocqueville's Introduction to Democracy in America, and new lessons on Thomas Hart Benton's painting The Sources of Country Music, and Ernest Hemingway's short story Three Shots.

Real or Fake

Description

Wes Cowan of PBS's History Detectives provides a brief overview of points to consider when trying to determine the authenticity of a perhaps-historical document.

Provenance

Description

Wes Cowan of PBS's History Detectives discusses the importance of tracing the provenance, or chain of custody, of an object, through primary source documents.

Bookmark This! Our Courts Especially for Middle School Students

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screenshot, our courts
Article Body

EDITORIAL NOTE (9/30/10): Our Courts has since changed its name to iCivics. Please change your bookmarks to http://www.icivics.org.

When President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, we pointed out that the judicial system is perhaps the least understood and the most complicated to teach among the three branches of the U.S. government. (Please see The Supreme Court: Connections Between Past and Present.)

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is helping teachers solve the problem, hooking students into understanding the judicial system and civic involvement via a new website, Our Courts. Planned especially for middle school students, the site engages visitors in online games that teach about legal decision-making, the role of various components of government, and the judicial system.

The website encourages critical and analytical thinking through interactive games.

The interactive games and complementary lesson plans are well-scaffolded and segmented to allow teachers and students to proceed at a pace appropriate for the classroom and to allow for both interactivity and classroom discussion and reinforcement. Critical and analytical thinking skills underlie the progression of each unit. Justice O'Connor's goal is to attract students toward civic involvement and public service and to encourage students learn how to analyze problems and to develop arguments. In the process, students learn the basics of the U.S. Constitution and U.S Bill of Rights.

Our Courts considers how 21st century students learn.

Our Courts is about civics education—nicknamed cyber-civics by some participants—developed by experts from Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor School or Law and the School of Education in conjunction with Georgetown University Law Center. They considered how 21st century students learn and the practical needs of teachers and schools.

And as an added feature, students can contact Justice O'Connor with questions, and she'll answer online!

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