Lesson One
Objectives:
New Haven's status as a diverse and growing city is well known to students growing up here. They take this fact for granted and see that New Haven's opportunities and problems are the inevitable outgrowths of city life. This would be a false notion for our students to operate under and one that does not portray the changes that occur in New Haven. There are numerous amounts of changes that have occurred in our city and impact our students. For the first lesson of this project you will need to do the following: introduce the project, the idea of oral history, and get students to re-think their perspectives. This lesson is meant solely to outline the project and the learning and work that the students will be doing.
To introduce the project to your students, you will need to explain new ways doing history and envisioning their work. I would hand out the "Introduction" to Douglas Rae's
The City: Urbanism and its End
. This part of the book outlines the changes that New Haven has seen through the perspective of a small business owner in downtown New Haven. You can either assign students to read it in groups or together along with questions to ascertain the general gist of the chapter and extract themes from the piece. This chapter will introduce the ideas of change in the city and how the city continues to change. The themes that students extrapolate will also coincide with the themes that we will be learning about in our city, immigration, and migration unit.
The Introduction presents New Haven history through the perspective of the shop owner, Joseph Perfetto, as he discusses how industry and the city have changed. The use of Perfetto in this chapter illustrates the benefit of using personal accounts to explain and explore history. Personal accounts are at the heart of this project, and Perfetto's story and struggle make a perfect segue way into the power of personal stories and accounts. As you discuss the power of Perfetto's testimony and perspective, ask students to think about two or three of people they would talk to who might inform them about the history of their Neighborhood. This will allow you to talk about the Oral History Project.
When you explain the Oral History Project, it is important to go through the work and the concerns that students will have along with the objectives and requirements of the project. At a very simple level, students should be required to conduct 3 interviews with 3 different people focusing on or around the different topics and questions that have been discussed in this paper. After a discussion on themes and questions, have students experiment with putting the questions in their own words. Inform them that they will be training on how to conduct interviews in class over the next few days, and discussing the final task which will be a cumulative effort of everyone's parts and interviews.
For the final task, there is a lot of leeway to measure student learning and growth. Students could write up their reflections and post them to a classroom blog. Another way might be for students to create a map on Google Maps ©, a free tool, of the people they talked to and summarize what they learned about their neighborhood. Students could also create photo galleries and podcasts that could be posted, with participant and student consent, online to start to build neighborhood histories. All of these ideas will push students to synthesize and analyze the information they gathered from their interviewees and class. Driving students to find connections between their interviewee's words and the ideas and concepts in their textbooks will bring life and add faces to trends in their books and make history alive for the students. Getting students to understand the work they need to do and how to do it will require work on your end.
Lesson Two
Objectives: Maps, Sample Interview
The objectives of this lesson are to introduce students to the project, the history of their city, and the process of making an oral history. The goal behind this lesson showcases how difficult it can be assess the value of your interviewee's perspective and align it with the learning going on in the textbook. There are two different strategies that will be outlined here in this section that focus on how to use maps and interviews in the classroom to help students see how the city has changed and how interviews can prove to be a valuable and tricky measure of history.
The first step in this process is to bring the different strands and themes of history into New Haven. After reviewing the different trends and impacts of migration, immigration, and urban change, the best place to go is Google Earth. If you can't get Google Earth on your computer, students can download it on their phones and they can share if need be. Once you have access to Google Earth, you can go to the Sanborn© Fire Insurance Maps from the Yale University Map Collection (http://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/print_sanborn.html). Here there are a variety of maps and resources that you can use. The different maps allow you to download different maps that you can overlay on top of Modern New Haven Maps. The website Historical Map Works (http://www.historic mapworks.com) also has lots of historical maps. One possible activity would be to hand out various print outs of the maps and ask the students to identify where certain New Haven Landmarks and their neighborhood. This pushes students to struggle with identifying how the landscape has changed and been manipulated through human interaction. This can occur as a class or in small groups with the same result.
The other part of this lesson needs to include a live-interview. As the teacher, you need to explain the point of doing interviews and give students a list of questions that they might ask someone they are talking to about their project. Have the students review the list of questions (look above for guidance) and ask them if they would change them in anyway. Ask the students if they think that the people they will interview will all give the same responses to the questions. After a discussion of these issues and the issues you might have in interviewing people, arrange to do an in-class interview with a fellow teacher or administrator. Prep with your subject ahead of time to make sure that they have a copy of the questions and know to ask some clarifying questions. Also allow for time to discuss the waiver form so students will hear you explain the form to an interviewee. This will allow you to help your students prep for some of the more difficult people they might interview. Instruct your students to write down the more important parts of the speakers answer. When the interview is done, have students thank the interviewee and break apart into teams. In the teams, they will do the following: assess their common and uncommon answers, compare and contrast what they found to be important, and lastly, ask them to reflect on why such differences might occur. Why would your small group hear and record different things when listening to the same presenter? As students and groups grapple with this question, it is vital to talk about the work of the historian to unite and rectify the different stories. As students argue and debate, make sure that you end the class with a discussion on how we all hear different things but we can tie them with the different trends that we are discussing in class. You might want to address student concerns also at this time.
Linking the skills of interviewing and the scope of the project should also be done at this time. Students would definitely benefit from seeing and learning how to use conversation as a learning tool. The model interview will help connect students to this idea and show them how important listening can be. Also be prepared to explain oral history to your students. While, the idea may be difficult for them at first, students will eventually gravitate towards the idea. One possible way to teach them about the power of oral history is to talk to them about the difference between a "top-down" view of history that is common in their textbooks, and a "bottom-up" view that they find in their primary sources. This project allows the students to put their own spin on New Haven and American history that they've been learning about in their textbooks.
Lesson Three
Objectives: Interview Skills Check list, Potential Projects
This lessons aims to give students a real grip on how to interview their subjects and how they can present their final project. These two concerns are paramount as they address the student's ability to complete the project successfully and ways for you to assess their work. This lesson should build on the last lessons in the classroom, specifically the model interview and any oral histories you might have used before teaching this unit including Perfetto's story. Spending classroom time discussing these two facets of the unit will help ensure successful interviews and projects.
Making sure students can carry out an interview can be a difficult task and one there you must prepare the students for thoroughly. There are any number of challenges that students can encounter as they are attempting to complete this project. The first obstacle to overcome needs to be the skill deficit that students will face. Going over the model interview in depth will provide a series of discussion points and questions for the kids to work through. These starting points will help you understand the misgivings and concerns of your students. Going over the template of questions will help settle a lot of their concerns. Other than that, the best thing you can do is have your students try out the interview process.
The focus here needs to be on getting students to be comfortable interviewing people so feel free to be creative. The only method I would recommend would be for students to interview each other. Here is where you can start working on some procedures to help the students catalog and remember their experiences. An interesting experiment might be to have the students interview each other and record their activity on their phone. Students can use the recording to help them judge how they did and to allow them to review their work. Technology will play an important role in this project and getting students to think about how they can improve their interviews and record them for this project. To wrap this part of the lesson have the students listen to their tapes and share out their reflections.
Just to be fair, there are some concerns and limits that you need to discuss with your students. The first thing is that you need to discuss this project with your administrators and work on sending home a letter to the parents so that they can be aware of the project and also assist the student to complete the project. This is mainly because parents can help steer students to more productive people to talk while minimizing potential struggles and dangers to the student. Parent involvement can also provide students with an excellent person with whom to start their interviews.
You should dedicate some time in this lesson to discussing possible final products for the project. This opportunity presents itself here to allow for differentiation and alternative projects. For my own classroom and goals, I want to build two components, a technology-centered one and a writing-based one. For the writing I want my students to analyze the different trends and aspects of what they discovered in researching their block. This writing should be reflective of the interviews the students have done and what they learned from the neighbors. The writings should cite the interviews and this will link it to the technological aspect. Google Maps has a feature that will allow students to "map" and integrate their writings and selections from their interviews. This would create a multimedia presentation that other students and classes would be able to add on to and contribute their interviews and work.
The Google Maps will also allow students who need differentiation to contribute to the classroom project. For students who have difficulty writing, they can still do the interviews but perhaps they can create a photo essay of their work or some kind of artistic expression for what they learned and experienced. This is particularly cogent for my students as we are an arts magnet school. However, finding a way for students to express themselves and their work grants all students access to the history of their neighborhood and the classroom's work. There are of course many different ideas that one could use to provide for this kind of connectivity and using them to integrate the class will benefit the students and their learning. A diverse set of final projects will also make the classroom's map look more interesting and reflect different aspects of their neighborhoods.
This lessons are designed around helping students makes sure they understand the goal of the project and how they can complete it. Making sure that students grasp the scope and purpose of the Block by Block Project ensures that they have all they need to complete the project. This lesson intends to hand over the project to the students. Giving students the responsibility over the project will empower the students' work and effort.
Lesson Four
Objectives: Interview Check in
This lesson goal is to build a procedure for checking in with the students and their work. As the other lessons demonstrated, success in this project hinges on student buy-in. In order to do this, you train them to do interviews and allow them to act as historians. However, it would not be wise to let the students completely loose until the final project is due. Having a weekly Check-In procedure will help keep students on task, help them organize their thoughts and observations, and help them connect the work they are doing outside of class to the work they are doing inside the classroom.
The check-in procedure needs to be evaluation of the students' work and part making connections with the material in class. This means that the format is flexible and needs to be flexible. Some students will really need to be monitored to make sure that they are completing the work and the interviews. Other students will need teacher guidance on making the connections between the interviews and the classroom/historical content. These two concerns will drive the check-in process and procedure as you provide students with the support they need to successfully complete this project.
Students who need help completing their interviews may need more than just encouragement. They might need help reaching out to people and local institutions. As a teacher, you can reach out to parents to make sure that the interviews are being completed or discover any other obstacles for the student. For students struggling to find people to interview, you might push them to do a family history where they interview their aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other relatives about the family's decision or decisions to move. Another idea might be to have students to write the history of a local or community institution by interviewing people there. There are several examples from local YMCA branches to Boys/Girls Clubs to local banks, clinics, shelters, or churches. This can also provide a different snapshot of history to accompany the Block Histories that most students will be finishing.
Some students will struggle in connecting their interviews with historical events and trends that are discussed in the classroom. The Check-In procedure will allow the teacher to help students use their interviews to access the classroom content and thus allow of a deeper and more intricate understanding of their interviews. This part of the procedure needs to help address student questions and concerns. Collecting questions about the students' interview experience supplies you with starting points for connecting their thoughts with the content being covered in class. These questions can provide important data and information that the students need and overlook. There should be a reflection worksheet that centers around an interview so that students are reflecting as much as possible on one interview. The teacher's job needs to be making sure the students use these questions to push their thinking about what they are hearing. Be prepared to push students to interview people again if they need to in order to complete the project.
This lesson builds upon the success of the previous lesson and aims to integrate the project into the fabric of class and show students that you value its completion. This lesson, and the procedures you create for your class, will help sustain the energy of this project until you are ready to begin discussing the final its presentation to the class and other classes.
Lesson Five
Objectives: The Exhibition
This lesson revolves around the presentation of the final project and the students' work. For my classroom, I plan on scheduling time with the computer labs around the school so that students will be able to collaborate on creating their map. You probably should familiarize yourself with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) and test out the different features before the students use it. Time in the lab can also be spent editing the interviews so that the most important snippets make it to the maps. Having students collaborate on creating one map will allow them to see each other works and the overlap between the events that have affected New Haven. This can also be done with a timeline to help students focus on key times and events.
As the map comes together, let students explore the map they have created. This sharing can provide a useful means of collaborating and rediscovering the impact of certain events and similarities amongst the interviews. This map and the timeline would allow the project to reflect the work being done in the classroom as the interviews were collected. This connection is vital as students will need to digest their work in as any different ways as possible. Giving time for them to explore their interviews will also allow them to interact as experts on New Haven's History. Organizing this sharing around the theme or notion of conference would allow students to sample how experts interact. You might provide some larger scale for students to discuss and assign a few to record the discussions that occur.
This lesson and project wraps up, it will be important to find good closure to move on. Students who have successfully completed this project will have performed an amazing of work and growth. For my students, I want to make sure to reward their work and new found expertise with the benefits of being experts. Showcasing their work to other teachers, administrators, and the local institutions that helped will show off your students work and given them a chance to see their work through other people's eyes. As you move on, take the time to think of opportunities to reconnect your students to their work throughout the year. This can help remind your students of what they can accomplish and their power as historians.