My students and textbooks are like oil and water. There are several divisions between them that impair larger understanding and appreciation of history in my classroom. I want my students to experience history from a close and personal perspective informed by their textbooks and classroom and not limited by them. For the students in my US History 2 class, History seems very divorced from their life and from their world. Even more contemporary events and figures appear distant and inconsequential to my US History 2 Classes. Why should they care about the Harlem Renaissance, or the World War 2, or Great Depression, plagues our achievement and learning in class. These distant events continue to shape huge portions of our world and society. Students would do well to see how these trends shape the lives of people around them.
There are of course, several ways to do this. Primary sources can be found all over the internet and our libraries and provide great insights into the worlds of the past. Reading about how the Great Depression, the Great Migration, and Immigration affected New Haven's people and population provides incredible and personal vantage points for seeing just how devastating or influential an event or trend can be. Without proper context, stories and anecdotes can lose their relevancy. For this project to be successful, students need to be able to place local history within the national contexts. Finding, seeing, and understanding the different connections between their interviewees and their classroom content will take their learning on parallel paths allowing them to see the larger connections. This duality will mean that the project will take on a variety of different tasks and require lots of scaffolding. My role as teacher is to provide this structure to help my students understand what they are hearing and seeing in their interviews.
The primary questions of this assignment are aimed at getting students to act as the historians of their neighborhoods.
Where are we from? What brought us here? Who lives in our neighborhood? How has the neighborhood changed?
And
Has the City Changed?
Each question serves as a gateway to research, conversation, and analysis that students can easily accomplish. With this project, we don't want students to be overwhelmed by the process of researching, interviewing, and analyzing the stories of their neighborhoods. Instead, the questions are meant to parallel the learning of the classroom, focus the student's research, and scaffold the student's ideas and analysis about their project and neighborhood.
Where are we from?
Origins are the start of our stories and the stories of our city, neighborhoods, and families. Immigration and migration are common denominators and great forces of change in American story and the city lies at the heart of this. As students discuss origins with their interviewees and around their neighborhoods, this will naturally bring about other discussions. Knowing the origins of their interviewees will be a natural starting point for my students, but I want them to work to see how families and communities come together. For my students' families and neighborhoods, New Haven has acted as beacon attracting lots of different people to the city. Exploring the question of how did you or family come to New Haven can unlock a number of connections between local and national history.
What brought us here?
This question adds layers to the interviewee's life and adds dynamic histories to the neighborhood. The several different forces find the bring people in and out of our cities are almost universal across the nation. For New Haven, large historical trends like Industrialization, Immigration, and the Great Migration connect the city's history to the larger trends. Students will discover New Haven's neighborhoods have experienced major historical movements and forces through the people that inhabit it. At this step, I want students to pause and recognized the different challenges of the people they are interviewing. Challenges will range from aligning different stories and to finding different people to interview. I imagine that students will struggle to find and connect their interviewee's stories to the larger historical trends that we will be discussing in class. It will be important at this stage to really connect and re-connect with your students to ensure that they are carefully examining their interviews. For most students, this will be a difficult part of the process and one that will test the limits of their listening and comprehension.
Who lives in our neighborhood?
As the cap question of our project, it is meant to finalize the student's work and push them to reflect and analyze what they've done. This would be a time for the students to connect their neighborhood with the different trends and forces that they will have learned about in their history classroom. This question will also allow us to build different maps of New Haven and even build maps across the different years this project takes place. I want to students to be able to see how diverse their city is and how history has impacted their own neighborhood. Putting their work and research into perspective will allow students to see and recognize how communities have changed and how the people who make them up connect to the events in their textbooks. As you reflect on interviews with your students, it is imperative to help them see the cycles of immigration and migration through their interviews. There will be some key principles that you will need to align your students to. The chief among these principles being the cycle of introducing new people to neighborhoods and places with special attention paid to the forces that push and pull people to America and shape their experiences here. Students need to see and understand how groups are integrated into cities and how they can form their own cultures and spaces in that unit. Using the history classroom and the interviews will allow students to see and piece that story together on their own.
How has the neighborhood changed?
This question asks the students, their interviewees, and the class as a whole to focus in on and view the changes that have happened in the neighborhood. Understanding these changes and their effects will show students how much their blocks and neighborhoods have changed. This area will allow the class to truly see how historical trends and events impact and change communities on the ground. This aspect of the project brings together their work in the streets and the classroom. It is designed to bring together their work and enhance their learning.
How has the city changed?
My students need to see how their city has changed and how it is evolving. Asking their interviewees about how they've seen change in their city. This will help students see how change has occurred in New Haven. Hearing the different stories of how New Haven's changes will give students the opportunity to collect different stories about New Haven's transitions. Our students' blocks will hold a collection of different stories and perspectives. For the classroom project, this particular question will create a tapestry of stories that express part of the story of the City. The resulting stories will allow students to see across the city's history and the different trends that have impacted the current landscape.
The idea behind the different questions provides a framework to help students understand and see the history of New Haven. Using the perspective of the interviewees, students will gain a better and deeper perspective of the city. Working through interviews and with interviewees will help students see how history impacts different people and communities of New Haven. One suggestion on working through the interviews includes placing their answers to the questions along a timeline of New Haven History. This would allow for students, as they work through the interviews to see the connections between their interviewees and the forces and events of New Haven's History. Rae's book,
The City: Urbanism and its End
, does not provide a timeline, but does provide a chronological look at New Haven's important events.