Category: Guest post

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Cultural Imperialism: Who Stole Cleopatra’s Needles?

782px-Cleopatras.needle.from.thames.london.arpMy Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol III (free iTunes). It features thirteen engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of multi-touch iBook and pdf versions click here. To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. (Fifth of 13)

Finding Egyptian Needles in Western Haystacks by Heidi Kershner 
Download as PDF 3.2MB

Essential Question: Who owns and has the right to cultural property?

Beginning with Roman rule in 31 BCE many of Egypt’s obelisks were transported throughout the empire to be set up in various cities. Because of this, the city of Rome now houses more obelisks than anywhere else in the world (including Egypt). Three such obelisks found their way to the metropolises of London, Paris, and New York in the nineteenth century. 

 

Reflection by Heidi Kershner

The process of designing a document based lesson was quite lengthy and involved. It required finding not only relevant documents and primary sources but ones that were both rich enough yet easily accessible for students to engage with on a deep level.

In my case I found this objective fairly challenging as I was looking to create a lesson to fit within a unit about ancient Egypt. Given that the subject for my lesson was from such antiquity I found it fairly difficult to find primary sources and other documents that would fit the aforementioned stipulations. However once I was able to identify my documents the actual designing of the lesson was pretty fun!

Throughout this process I had to continually put myself in the shoes of my students and ask the question: what should students be doing and learning from each document? With this important question in mind I was able to critically think about how each document and primary source fit into the larger fabric of my lesson.

Even though this type of lesson carries a fairly heavy workload in terms of planning I think that this would be a fantastic method to use in my instruction. Certainly not every lesson can be document based but I think that such lessons could be very powerful in terms of both increasing student content mastery as well as providing an opportunity for students to act as historians (which should always be our goal as teachers of social studies)!

Image credit: Wikipedia 

Cleopatra’s Needle in London seen from the River Thames. In the background the New Adelphi, a monumental Art Deco building designed by the firm of Collcutt & Hamp.in the 1930s. 
Photographed by Adrian Pingstone in June 2005 and released to the public domain.

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Samurai: Sources of Warrior Identity in Medieval Japan

611px-Watanabe_Tsuna_fighting_the_demond_at_the_RashomonMy Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol III (free iTunes). It features thirteen engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of multi-touch iBook and pdf versions click here. To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. (Fourth of 13)

The Samurai: Sources of Warrior Identity in Medieval Japan by Benjamin Heebner
Download as PDF 1.8MB

This document based lesson will use Medieval depictions of the Samurai to answer the question of what it means to be a warrior in Japan and the place of the warrior in society. This lesson, is aimed for students to think about how warriors were romanticized in Japan, and how the social structure of Japan reinforces these depictions. in addition, students will then use these understandings see how Medieval Japanese society was ordered.

  1. What does being a warrior entail?
  2. How are warriors identified?
  3. Are the depictions of warriors truthful or are they fabricated?

Reflection by Ben Heebner
The topic of my document-based lesson project is Japanese warrior identity as shown by Medieval era (1185-1868) depictions of warriors. In the lesson students are asked scaffolding questions that help them look at the underlying biases that go into the varied depictions that we are looking at. By doing this students will be interacting with the sourcing of documents, while forming a contextualization of the time period and society that had its top class  dominated by warriors. Using the sources that I chose, students will be able to engage in the question of how groups of people are depicted and why these depictions and the truth may not actually match up. I intentional choose semi-historical depictions of the Samurai to showcase how depictions reflect the identity of the time period that they were created in.

From the first step in creating this document based lesson I knew that I wanted to do something with Medieval Japan. My mind instantly thought about the many woodblock prints (Ukiyo-E) that became massively popular during the Edo Period of Japanese History (1615-1868). By paring these more recent images of warriors and events, that were popularized by the war tale genre, with the war tales and their definition of valor and bravery, I felt that students would become engaged with this material readily. I knew that I would have to include a source from the war tales themselves to be able to tie all the images together so I picked the ending scene from the Hogen Monogatari. While the inclusion of more documents would help, I think that the  depictions that I chose give students the chance to question why these documents were made and why these documents became so well known within Japanese society.
Medieval Japan is a secondary topic of study for most World History classes. The time devoted to Japan is either at the very end of the year, when teachers are looking to fill time, or as an aside to exploration of China. As this document based lesson shows, Japan’s Medieval period is filled with a gold mine of historical inquiry. Japan’s Medieval period is filled with a great many questions that reverberate across the entire world during the Medieval period. The one that this lesson focuses on is, What does it mean to be a warrior. by looking at this question students will have the opportunity to see how extremely different cultures view the same topics  and begin to see how different cultures and groups respond to challenges. By engaging in these questions, students will have the opportunity to be junior historians and engage in the material the same way that a historian would.

At the end of the lesson I would have one of two activities. The first activity would be a standard argumentative essay that asks students to show me whether or not the depictions of Samurai offered up by the documents are justified or are they hiding the villainy of an entire group of people behind a facade of fiction. Another activity that could end out this unit would be for groups of students to create a movie poster for a fictional film that depicts Samurai. In doing this students would be asked to show whether or not their film would promote the Samurai or vilify them using the documents and depictions as a base. These two activities allow students to engage with the generative question of these lessons which is, what does it mean to be a warrior? In addition, the second activity allows students to display their understanding of the documents by depicting how the documents only show a side of the warrior class.

Image credit: Watanabe no Tsuna fighting with Ibaraki at the Rashomon gate, woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi Wikipedia

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Strange Fruit: Media Coverage of the Waco Horror

Bryan Daily Eagle and Pilot, May 15, 1916 Bryan Daily Eagle and Pilot, May 15, 1916

My Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol III (free iTunes). It features thirteen engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of multi-touch iBook and pdf versions click here. To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. (Third of 13)

The Waco Horror by Alekzandr Wray
Download as PDF 2MB

The 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington, a 17 year old African American man from Waco, Texas, was one of the most heinous acts of government sanctioned mob “justice” in American society. The barbarity of the act, the festive/jovial/family-centered nature of the event, the sheer volume of participants, and the local government inaction around the incident shocked many people in the nation and spurred the NAACP to take immediate action around Anti-Lynching Legislation. Jesse Washington was just one of thousands of stories but we will focus on primarily on his today and the context surrounding lynchings in the early 20th century.

 

Reflection by Alekzandr Wray:

Throughout the entire process of creating my document based lesson I was incredibly engaged. The idea of setting up students to serve as historical detectives was fascinating and doing the research to “uncover” primary sources/information proved incredibly fruitful and fulfilling. I even felt like a historical detective at certain points, especially when the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture emailed me the court transcripts from Jesse Washington’s “trial” in Waco, Texas!

Focusing on the lynching of Jesse Washington was certainly a emotionally/spiritually challenging task for me, however, and I initially struggled with the idea of what I wanted students to actually do with this information and what my intention for the lesson was. “Do I want students to get angry over Jesse Washington’s lynching and just sit in that anger? Do I want students to see how groups like the NAACP rose to prominence because of the work they did to quell lynchings? What am I trying to get at?” Ultimately, I ended up deciding that my intention was multifaceted… I am totally fine with students getting upset over historic injustices (after all, who learns about events like the Holocaust or Jim Crow and DOESN’T get upset?)  because I believe that will ignite an inner fire/passion to fight against present day injustices and, of course, I want students to feel empowered in their ability to contribute to society for the better so I felt the need to highlight the NAACP’s article in “The Crisis” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as examples of resistance.

I truly appreciated this process and wish I had more opportunities to engage in document based learning during my secondary education career. I fully intend on utilizing this type of lesson in my future classroom in sha Allah.

If anybody who reads my chapter on Jesse Washington and the dark legacy of American lynchings has any feedback or recommendations, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. Much obliged.

Image Credit: Bryan Daily Eagle and Pilot, May 15, 1916
Library of Congress
 

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Harlem Renaissance: Rebirth of Cultural Identity

"Barbecue" by Archibald Motley “Barbecue” by Archibald Motley

My Social Studies Methods class at the University of Portland recently published a free multi-touch iBook – Exploring History: Vol III (free iTunes). It features thirteen engaging questions and historic documents that empower students to be the historian in the classroom. For more info on our project and free download of multi-touch iBook and pdf versions click here. To better publicize student work, I’m featuring each chapter in it’s own blog post. (Second of 13)

The Harlem Renaissance by Monica Portugal
Download as PDF 1.4MB

How did the Harlem Renaissance allow African Americans to express their experiences within American society?

The Harlem Renaissance was an early 20th century movement which lasted until the mid 1930s. At the time of this movement African American writers, artists, actors and musicians, were being recognized for their talents and contributions to the newest fads of pop culture. However, along with the newest Jazz songs and popular dances that came about during this period, African Americans used these mediums of art and literature as a way to express their experience of being black, being an artist, being an American citizen, and and being all of these things all at once. 
 Using music, poetry, novels, and other forms of literature and art, African Americans were able to explore questions of race and social tensions in America. Capturing the attention of white Americans, Africans Americans were able to further pursue their desires of equality, and bring to life a rebirth of their cultural identity.

 

Project Reflection by Monica Portugal

For this assignment I chose to focus on the Harlem Renaissance and have my students explore the work of various African American musicians, artists, and writers, in order to identify the purpose of their work, and what it represented. This past semester I did a similar lesson to this DBL with my 11th grade history class for a 1920s unit. For that lesson I introduced similar sources to the ones in this assignment in order to guide my students to a deeper understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, and open a small discussion of race within America. The DBL I have created here will accomplish a similar goal.

For this lesson I wanted to introduce a more serious side of the Harlem Renaissance, and expose my students to these sources in order to guide them to understand a different perspective of America during this time period. Despite the Harlem Renaissance being a time and place full of spirit, opportunity, and pop-culture, it was also a time of opportunity to captivate audiences, black and white, and explore issues of race in America. For myself, the issues and concerns that are expressed in the documents provided by these artists, are still issues seen today. Following this DBL students can be asked to make connections to more modern day issues, compare and contrast, and reflect on American society today. As an educator I want to create a place where such discussions can be held with respect, because I do believe discussing situations and concerns such as this should be held in a classroom in order to help our students be more open minded, respectful, and well rounded to the world around them.

Image credit: Wikipedia / Photograph by Alexisrael

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How To Think Like a Historian

Richard_of_WallingfordLast week Marta Turner (NWRESD) and I had the privilege to work with a team of Oregon teachers in a workshop “The Student as Historian.” The session was jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress, the TPS Regional Program & NWRESD. More information and our “flipped” pre-course here.

One of our goals was to promote historical thinking, so we held a Google Hangout with Dr. Adam Franklin-Lyons – associate professor of history at Marlboro College. We queried him how historians think and discussed his insights into his approached to working  with primary sources.

Adam teaches European history and his research focuses on grain supply and famines in the Western Mediterranean. He also hosts a series of history podcasts at The History Cafe. I highly recommend Adam’s podcasts for their clever take on European history (plus a food theme). For more on Adam –  his research profile and his YouTube Channel

For a more detailed exploration of how a historian thinks watch Adam’s “Introduction to Primary Sources Part II.” (below) He looks at a single letter between merchants who were members of a powerful merchant company run by Francesco Datini at the end of the 14th Century.

Image credit: “Richard of Wallingford” Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336) was an English mathematician who made major contributions to astronomy/astrology and horology while serving as abbot of St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire.