University of Portland – Page 5

May 10, 2016

American Popular Music Responds to Pearl Harbor

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. (Seventh of 13)

A date of Infamy by Mollie Carter
Download lesson as 1.4MB pdf

It’s Dec 10, 1941 you are listening to the radio and hear a song about Pearl Harbor.

Imagine that you were in Hawaii at the time of the attack. Hawaii is not yet a state but America is dazzled by its island beauty; you might even think of it as part of America, your home.

Now picture that you are seeing these images in person, maybe you even saw and heard the planes flying overhead as the attack commenced.

What about the images sticks out to you that might leave a lasting impression? What are you feeling as you see the smoke billowing over the battleships? As the bomb explodes when it hits the ship? You know there is a war going on in Europe and in Asia, but now it’s come to you. What might your thoughts be about the people who attacked you? What ideas or values lead you to these thoughts?

A Date of Infamy by Mollie Carter

Reflection by Mollie Carter

I have rather enjoyed creating this lesson. The idea was something I became interested in while in college and have not had the space to develop since then. When this project was introduced to me I knew immediately what I would do.

It became more interesting, unfortunately, in the middle of November as Paris was attacked and hateful rhetoric began to come from the republican presidential candidates. It reminded me of some of the rhetoric after the attacks on the twin towers, which as a 12 year old then I clearly remember. As I started my venture into teaching, I realized that many of my students would be born near or after this day that so scarred my memory. I was reminded of my own age as well as my place in the greater timeline of history. It is this realization that directed me to think of another generations “day of infamy” and the ways we teach it to students who have little context for it.

I also find myself wanting to emphasize on historical empathy, or perspective taking. Often times when looking at history, we may look at it with our modern day perspectives and judge the people of the past without seeing things through their eyes. The purpose of this is not to justify their actions but realize that it could still happen to us; that if we forget the past or believe we are above it, we are bound to repeat it.

Creating this document based lesson allowed me to combine both of these ideas of mine into one, ideally powerful, lesson. I am not a Mac person so learning to use the book design software was a bit of a learning curve but in the end I found it worth it to create this easy to access lesson. I hope that whoever may find this will have some deep discussions both about our history and the nature of humans themselves.

Image credit: ”Remember Pearl Harbor”
Words by Don Reid. Music by Don Reid and Sammy Kaye. Republic Music Corp., NYC, 1941.
From the Popular American Sheet Music Collection, Department of Special Collections, Miller Nichols Library.

April 29, 2016

Leo Frank: Anti-Semitism, Class Warfare, Media Hysteria

The Lynching of Leo Frank by Jeff Smith
Download at 3MB pdf

My great-grandfather, William Smith, was one of the lawyers involved in the trial of Leo Frank.

In the early morning of April 27th, 1913, the body of Mary Phagan was found strangled to death in the basement of an Atlanta, GA pencil factory. Next to her body the police discovered two semiliterate notes that seemed at first to have been written by her (“i wright while play with me,” read one) but were plainly the work of someone else.

The investigation focused on two suspects: Jim Conley, the factory’s black janitor who was arrested after he was seen washing out a bloody shirt a few days after the murder, and Leo M. Frank, the factory’s Jewish supervisor and the last man to admit to seeing Mary Phagan alive.

After intensive interrogation, Conley claimed Frank committed the murder when the girl rejected his sexual advances. Conley added that Frank dictated the notes to him in an effort to pin the crime on another black employee.

Frank and Conley were both arrested, and the ensuing trial captivated the entire city of Atlanta. The case also brought to the forefront the ugly realities of bigotry, prejudice, and hatred in the South.

The Lynching of Leo Frank by Jeff Smith

Reflection by Jeff Smith

As I began thinking of topics for our document-based lessons, my mind immediately went to a topic with a strong family connection. My great-grandfather, William Smith, was one of the lawyers involved in the trial of Leo Frank. (representing Jim Conley).

However, this dark chapter in the history of Atlanta, Georgia and the Jim Crow South is heavy material, dealing with racism, bigotry, prejudice and lynching. All are certainly important issues worthy of a lesson, but the incident is not the most light-hearted affair. I thought I might prefer to investigate in-depth a more approachable topic, but my family ties made the subject too attractive to ignore.

I was indeed correct in the difficulty of the material, and, as I dug deeper, ugliness after ugliness bubbled to the surface. The topic also began to touch on a broad range of issues in the South, and focusing my lesson on specific documents and skills became an problem. I decided to focus on media coverage of the event, comparing the coverage of competing local papers and the unseemly journalism that was practiced.

The most frustrating part of my research experience stemmed from the controversial nature of the topic. As I google-searched various people and incidents, I noticed odd websites popping up. I learned a bit more about these websites, and apparently the lynching of Leo Frank continues to be a linchpin topic for hate groups to this day. There are several phony educational sites, published by hate groups, detailing “evidence” of Frank’s guilt and the conspiracies working to have him pardoned. Unfortunately, these sites seemed to have hi-definition copies of famous photographs from the case, and it proved difficult sifting through the fake sights to obtain quality documents from reputable sources.

Overall, I felt the iBooks DBQ project was the most meaningful piece of work I produced in the MAT program this semester. Not only did I learn more about my own family’s history, but I also obtained a useful new tech skill.

In fact, in my spring placement I’ve decided to have my students use iBooks author to do a project of their own, presenting a story from a revolutionary period in the form of a children’s book. The kids will create iBook chapters, assemble them into a collection, and present their stories to an elementary school class. Their work will then be made available for the whole school to peruse, and for next year’s 7th graders to refer to when making their own book.

Image credit: Wikimedia: The Atlanta Georgian, April 29, 1913

February 29, 2016February 29, 2016

Cultural Imperialism: Who Stole Cleopatra’s Needles?

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. (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.

Finding Egyptian Needles in Western Haystacks by Heidi Kershner

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.

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016

Samurai: Sources of Warrior Identity in Medieval Japan

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.

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

Samurai: Sources of Warrior Identity in Medieval Japan by Ben Heebner

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

February 8, 2016

Strange Fruit: Media Coverage of the Waco Horror

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.

The Waco Horror by Alekz Wray

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

Tag: University of Portland