The Education department at the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery has just launched a new web feature which pairs works of art with teaching strategies.
Their new teaching / learning site, Seeing America, documents the Gallery’s outstanding collection of American Art through 82 works and their connections to American history, culture, literature and politics.
The accompanying Classroom Guide integrates background information on the art, the artist and America with visual literacy classroom activities. Lesson plans and resources are readable online and available as downloadable pdfs.
After you’ve had a chance to view the site leave a comment with your responses. I’ll pass them along to my friends at the Education department.
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If your interested in world art, take a look at my blog post “Picturing the Story – An Interdisciplinary Approach to Culture, Environment, Language, and Learning.” I served as an advisor to the Education department’s last teaching site – “Picturing the Story: Narrative Arts and the Stories They Tell.” It uses world art from the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery dating from 1500 BCE to the 20th Century. Each work has a story to tell, either visually through imagery and symbol, or indirectly through custom and ritual. The stories reflect sacred beliefs, folk traditions, common human experiences, or unique cultural practices.
Update: October 2012: While this lesson is still available as a pdf (see original post below) an expanded version – Why We Fight: WWII and the Art of Public Persuasion - is now available at iBookstore It includes 43 historic posters, 13 rare films, plus numerous communiqués, photographs and recordings. Plus student “stop and think” prompts based on CCSS skills.
Homefront America in WW II (PDF) is designed to improve content reading comprehension with an engaging array of source documents – including journals, maps, photos, posters, cartoons, historic data and artifacts. (One of the central goals of the Common Core standards).
I developed it to serve as a model for blending essential questions, higher order thinking and visual interpretation. I intentionally refrained from explaining the documents, to afford students the chance to do the work of historians. A variety of thinking exercises are imbedded in the lesson to support reading comprehension. Graphic organizers support differentiated activities to assist the students in extracting meaning from the documents.
Hopefully this lesson serves as a model of how to infuse support for literacy into the more typical educational goal of content mastery. But more importantly, it is designed to demonstrate how student engagement can be “powered” by an essential question.
Instead of attempting to teach the American homefront experience during WWII via the memorization of historical facts (like “victory” gardens), this lesson approaches the same subject through a more timeless question “How did Americans change their lives to support the war effort?”
This essential question invites the students into the material as they draw from their life experience to construct a response. Guiding questions direct students to construct comparisons between the American experience in WWII and the Iraq / Afghanistan war. Moreover, since the events of September 11th, the very notion the “homefront” has been redefined by new perceptions of terrorism and homeland security.
Instruction is not simply an act of telling, it should instead be centered around creating learning experiences that provoke student reflection. In this lesson, source documents and literacy strategies combine to simultaneously teach content and comprehension. But more importantly, an essential question serves as a springboard to engage students in a deeper reflection on the notion of sacrifice in the historical context and in their own lives.
Scaffolding questions include …
Pre Reading / Think Before You Start:
Before you begin this lesson,think about and discuss in small groups the following questions:
What resources are needed to wage a war?
How could people on the home front help to supply these resources?
What would you be willing to contribute to a war effort?
Post Reading / The Question Today:
Civilians have always been impacted by war and they are frequently called upon to contribute to national war efforts. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
How have Americans on the homefront contributed to the effort? What have they sacrificed?
How do those efforts compare with the home front in WWII?
How did the attacks of September 11 change the nature of the “homefront?”
Over the last few weeks I've been guiding teams of teachers on reflective classroom walkthroughs. During the course of one of our "hallway discussions" I asked a social studies teacher, "who's the historian in your classroom?" After a bit of give and take, we concluded that in the traditional classroom, the students get to watch (and listen) to the teacher be historian.
That's certainly what you would have seen early in my teaching career. I was the one doing most of the reading, reflecting and synthesizing of historic material. I thought my job was to distill it all and simplify for consumption by my students. It took me a few years to realize my job was to get the students to be the historians (and economists, anthropologists, etc).
Here's a sample lesson that I developed to demonstrate how historic material could be scaffolded so that all students could participate in doing the work of historians – What Did Europeans "See" When They Looked at the New World and the Native Americans? Seems appropriate with US Thanksgiving nearly here.
It examines European views of Native American and the New World in the Age of Exploration. While it is a rather one-sided account, the documents reveal a great deal about the cultural "lenses" that the Europeans "looked" though. It is designed around an essential question that will engage students in reflection about how Europeans allowed prejudice to color their perceptions. That, of course, invites thinking about how we may be looking at other peoples and cultures today.
The source material contains twenty-five documents in text and image formats – including journal entries, letters, maps, and illustrations. I modernized historic accounts at two reading levels – 5th and 8th grade. (Each contains the same twenty five documents). I selected images which could be “decoded” by students with a minimum of background knowledge so that all students could practice their content reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. A series of six exercises accompanies the lesson to guide students through the process of extracting information from the documents and constructing their own answers to the essential question.
While this lesson is historical, the same perspective applies to lessons across the curriculum – who's the scientist, engineer, artist, nutritionist, mathematician, literary critic, and musician – in your classroom? Teachers are no longer simply “education dispensers” gathering, distilling and delivering information to students. (There are too many other sources that do a great job of delivering information 24/7.) Instead teachers can thrive as “educational architects” who design classrooms where students do the work of constructing meaning.
Close reading (in the Common Core) requires students to consider text (in it’s different forms) through three lenses: what does it say, how does it say it, and what does it mean to me? Summarizing is an essential skill for learning, but too often in school we simply ask students to “guess” what the teacher (or author) thinks is important.
An essential part of a summary is that it needs to be expressed to an audience. In life, we purposefully craft summaries for a specific audience (directions for the out-of-towner, computer how-to for the technophobe). In school, the tacit audience for most summaries is the teacher. Imagine how a student feels when asked to summarize a textbook passage for the teacher. In effect they have been asked to summarize one expert’s writing for delivery to another expert – the teacher. “…and remember, be sure to use your own words!”
If students are going to learn to summarize they need to be given a chance to genuinely share what they think is important for an audience other than the teacher. Here’s a three step process I followed in a second grade classroom using a popular Currier and Ives print, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” (1868) Link to larger image
Step 1: Start with the concrete “right there” observations.
I projected a digital image on the screen and asked student to talk about the people, things and activities they could identify. They replied, a train, native Americans, a village, people digging, steam from the train, houses, trees, a lake, maybe a harbor, a road, dry grass, covered wagons, poles, mountains, a school house, people working, people waiting for the train, a train track, etc ….
Step 2: Give students a chance to tell what they think is important.
I managed this aspect by asking each student to draw a picture of what they saw in the projected image. The details they included were what they thought was important. Here’s a few samples. Click to enlarge.
Step 3: Give students a chance to frame their summary into a narrative explanation for another audience.
I digitally divided the image into multiple sections and photocopied them (in B &W) into packets of image details. I gave groups of students the packets and asked them to work in teams to assemble the images into children’s “a story book” with a caption under each image.
Here are some of their captions: (spelling corrected)
Water would come from the mountain and fill the lake. You could get fish and drink water. Water is very important
People were moving west. They moved by wagon at first, then but train, which is faster.
Life was tough. People had to do everything for themselves.
It maybe was lonely because people missed their friends back home.
The people were building a town. They could get wood from the trees. It was a small town at first.
The Indian see the people coming. They knew things were changing. They got sick from the smoke.
The school was different from our school. People had different clothes than us.
The train split the old life from the new life.
While summarizing has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies for building content knowledge, that gain only applies when students are allowed to make their own judgements about what’s important and frame their summaries for an audience. When we ask them to “learn” the teacher’s summary – they are reduced to memorizing “another fact.”
When we ask our students to create authentic summaries (with audience and purpose) we give students a chance to reflect on their learning. Instead of simply testing them for factual knowledge, students can be asked:
I developed this series as part of my work with Prentice-Hall supporting Daniel Boorstin’s A History of the United States.
Originally it was suggested that I develop lessons on questions such as “Should slavery be extended into the territories?” I argued that most of these issues had been answered, and that it would be more engaging to frame the debates around essential questions. Thus the typical question – “Should the Constitution be ratified?” became “How powerful should the national government be?” Anyone following the reauthorization of NCLB or the proposed health care legislation knows the enduing relevance of that question.
The Great Debates feature consists of twelve debates, one for every unit of the text. Each of these debates contains an introduction that states the topic of the debate, examines the background of this issue, provides information about both the readings and the debaters, and discusses the debate topic from a contemporary perspective. Units feature the conflicting viewpoints of two or more historical figures or organizations and a worksheet that helps students analyze the debate through a series of comprehension and critical thinking questions. Download all Great Debates here
Essential questions / debates include:
Debate 1: How Should Society Balance the Need for Tolerance with the Need to Protect Itself?
Debate 2: How Powerful Should the National Government Be?
Debate 3: Who Should Be Allowed to Vote?
Debate 4: Should Women Have Equal Treatment Under the Law?
Debate 5: How Should Americans Treat the Land?
Debate 6: Has Industrialization Produced More Benefits or More Problems for the Nation?
Debate 7: Should the United States Pursue a Foreign Policy of Isolationism or Interventionism?
Debate 8: What Should the Nation’s Immigration Policy Be?
Debate 9: To What Extent Is the Federal Government Responsible for the Welfare and Security of the Individual?
Debate 10: Is Civil Disobedience Ever Justified as a Method of Political Change?
Debate 11: What Are the Limits of a Free Press?
Debate 12: How Much Should the Nation Invest in Defense?
The Education department at the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery has just launched a new web feature which pairs works of art with teaching strategies. 
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