Although sometimes left in the shadow of their male counterparts, many women have achieved historical fame on their own merits. In this unit, we will use films and literature to expose our students to a sampling of these great American women. After all, to understand our culture, we need to learn about the women who helped form it, because women are one half of our culture and are often the ones who set the tone for the times. Too often, the area of Women’s History is ignored or only dealt with in the month of March. It is important for girls, as well as boys, to see female role models who were real and who gained fame for their personal strengths, be they physical or mental. This unit will deal with several women, both real and imagined, who broke the gender and race barrier and achieved their fame in times when men were the accepted heroes and women were home in the kitchen making bread. History is more engaging for the female students when they can identify with the main characters.
Women’s History is a relatively new area of study. Many universities now have well-established departments devoted to Women’s Studies. Just like Black History, Women’s History has a month of its own. Does this mean that they are not part of history the other 11 months of the year? There is no reason why women cannot be part of the curriculum and should be woven in whenever possible. History is not only about battles and generals.
As far as the portrayals of women in films for the masses, Sandra Kay Schackel suggests that men have been the creators and writers of our Westerns and therefore have been inclined to relegate women to the roles of saloon girls and schoolmarms. She argues further that the women receive passive and genteel roles and that shows of strength are reserved for the heroes. (1)
We will use the lives of three great American women as our common denominator. Their lives all overlap in some way, in that Harriet Tubman (b.1820- d.1913) was alive when Annie Oakley (b.1860 - d.1926) was born, and Annie Oakley was still alive when Wilma Rudolph (b.1920-d.1954) was born. What images they provoke! We have Annie Oakley, who personifies the Wild West, even though she spent most of her adult life performing on stage. Hers was a controlled environment and while she literally shot her way out of poverty, she didn’t face the same hardships Harriet Tubman did. True, Oakley suffered pain towards the end of her life, the result of a train accident, and surely would have endured the prejudices a woman of the time who worked in a man’s profession would have faced.
Tubman had the kind of bravery born of mistreatment and injustice. Beaten, whipped, vilified, she used adversity to become a strong, determined and focused spokeswoman for her race and gender.
Shortly after these two women left their mark, Wilma Rudolph came along and also overcame personal hardships while dealing with a society that forced her into rooms marked ”colored only” on the doors.
All three used their fame to better the lives of others. All three serve as good role models and reflect a good portion of our history.
While learning about history from the women’s perspective, students will also develop library and research skills, as well as gain a new perspective and appreciation for our heritage and for our literature. These ends will be accomplished through the use of films and literature.
I am a Library Media Specialist at the L. W. Beecher Elementary School in New Haven, Connecticut. We are in the process of creating a Library Media Center for the first time. The Media Centers in the New Haven School System are being revitalized thanks to Library Power, an initiative funded by a grant from the Dewitt Wallace - Reader’s Digest Fund. Library Power supports collaboration between the Library Media Specialists and the classroom teachers as well as resource based learning and flexible scheduling.
Collaborative planning teams up the classroom teacher with the Library Media Specialist - this provides for more meaningful lessons for both parties. Each one brings a skill to the lesson and in effect, are co-teachers of the unit. By bearing equal responsibility for the lesson, the two teachers will also get a better understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Collaboration generates more ideas, alternatives and solutions. The needs of the students demand more interaction than just pulling off a selection of books on a given topic from the shelf. We will give the students the opportunity to learn and use skills as they relate to their educational needs. The hope is that they will be able to develop lifelong skills.
Flexible scheduling is used by the New Haven Library Media Centers as a way to prevent misuse of the resources. Classes are scheduled as needed, preventing library skills from being taught in isolation. Skills taught with no concrete purpose in mind are quickly lost. Flexible scheduling, as the name implies, allows greater flexibility in scheduling classes for as many sessions as needed to cover a topic. Students are also given increased access to the library on an individual level, instead of needing to wait for the class visit often referred to in the profession as the “weekly death march.”
With resource based learning, students use many resources, including print, non- print, and technology, to learn about a topic, joining problem solving skills with their research to formulate meaningful knowledge. Students are more involved with the learning process and are being challenged to think instead of parroting back information they have copied. Teachers can make the assignment more difficult or easier for individual students according to their needs.
We also use the Big Six in our lessons.(2) Developed by Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz , this is a systematic approach to working on research projects -these skills are:
-
1. Define the task - ask these questions: What do I have to do - an oral or written report, another form of presentation? How long should it be - how many pages, how many minutes? What will go into it - exposition, graphs, maps, etc? Is there anything else I need to know to get started?
-
2. Information seeking strategies - What sources will I use? - (Books, encyclopedias, newspapers, internet, etc.). Which sources will give me the most information?
-
3. Location & Access - Where will I find this information - in the library, at school, at home, through personal interviews, through the internet?
-
4. Use of information - How will I get this information -through note-taking, through the use of photocopies, or will I read, hear or view the information?
-
5. Synthesize - How will I organize and present the project and what will be the finished form - oral report, paper, poster, multimedia, etc?
-
6. Evaluation - How effective was my project? What grade did I receive? What could I do to make it better? Judge the information problem-solving process: how did I use my time? Did I use the best resources?
Without the Big Six, a resource- based lesson may go like this. A third grade teacher assigns a class project on Black History. She could go the Library Media Center and request that all the books dealing with the topic be pulled for her class. The Library Media Specialist could then direct the students to a designated spot in the Media Center when they come in. The students could then be left to their own devices to extract the information needed. In this scenario, a lot of copying will take place and the learning experience will not be beneficial.
Working with the Big Six model and with the concepts of resource-based learning, collaboration and flexible scheduling, the scenario would run like this. The third grade teacher who wants to assign the topic of Black History to her class sits down with the Library Media Specialist several weeks before the planned assignment. They discuss what is to be accomplished - are the students going to learn about specific movements , about specific historical figures and their accomplishments? What does the teacher expect the end product to be? What is the time frame? What are the objectives? The two professionals brainstorm until they come up with a plan that has a beginning, a middle and an end and clearly defines each other’s duties.
The teacher will let students know what is expected of them. The Library Media Specialist will weave library research skills into the lesson and help teach the unit. She and the class will discuss their needs, and where and how these needs will be met. The result is that the students are not learning about the library in isolation - they are able to put to practical use their lesson of information retrieval. This is a much more effective method for learning and more meaningful to the students.
To this end, I will be collaborating with my teammates, who will be spotlighting various people and movements in American history. I will be working with the members of my team to gather and utilize information pertaining to their units as well as devising supplemental lesson plans that will involve the development and use of research skills in their students. Whenever possible I will use women of the three periods as my models. Students will be developing their research skills as we all work together. Collaborative efforts present more intense learning experiences for the students and allow the teacher and Library Media Specialist each a chance to contribute their expertise to make it a better learning experience.
My lessons have several objectives and cross the curriculum covering social studies, literature, research skills, and language skills. Students in grades one through three will learn about historical figures and the times in which they lived. Learning about real people will make their eras more real and will stimulate interest in history. For instance, Harriet Tubman lived in a time with many historical connotations. Studying her life will lead to several related topics such as the issue of slavery, the Underground Railroad, the effects of the Civil War on slavery and the freeing of the slaves. The subsequent migration North many years later can be analyzed. What were the conditions that convinced the Black people to leave their homes in the South and to leave their families?
Research skills will be incorporated as students find relevant materials on each of the women in their time periods. Utilizing the Big Six, we will determine what it is they need to know, where and how to find this information, how to use it, what the end product will be and how it will be evaluated.
There will be a lesson in note-taking, which will enhance their talents in using the English language. Students need to know how to gather the information from their resources once they are located. Too many students are never taught how to extract the relevant facts and end up plagiarizing or copying lines from books, changing a word or two. As they grow older and more sophisticated, the same sentence becomes more elaborately phrased. The lessons that will be used will force them to think about their assignments and put their research together in a logical sequence. (Many years ago in the public library, a young girl came to me and told me she needed to write a poem for school the next day. I showed her several books on poetry as she wanted to get some ideas on how to write one. After a while, she came up to me and showed me what she had been working on. She had copied, word for word, the poem Trees by Joyce Kilmer and was planning to pass it off as an original poem. I tried but could not convince her that her teacher might recognize this work. I often wonder what happened....)
We will use films to introduce heroes and heroines in literature, both real and fictional. Seeing people on the screen brings them closer to home for the student. Images that may have developed in their minds can be verified or negated. We use the films to reach out and appeal to the students’ other senses. When they read, they use the sense of seeing. When they watch films, they see and hear and are able to visualize places and people more clearly. When films are made well, the students are able to see history, almost as if they were flies on the wall.
We can use films to our advantage. A film can serve as a hook to reel in the students, to introduce them to famous people, to little known facts and to awaken their curiosity and interest in the world outside their everyday sphere. Through film, we can transport them to different times and landscapes. We can recreate history, giving our viewers a birds eye view of times and scenes that took place long before their birth. But we have to choose our films carefully. Some filmmakers abuse history and rewrite it to conform to their time and budget constraints. Sometimes truth is not as marketable as fiction, so it may sell more tickets if a scene is juiced up. To separate entertainment from educational, teachers need to screen carefully, explore their topic, and carefully evaluate the film. Rosenstone points out that a working knowledge of history helps, as well as being aware of the discourse surrounding a given event. A film purported to be “historical” should not take liberties and ignore the existing data and arguments.(3) Of course, this may narrow the field of available films but school systems and libraries have many free films that can be borrowed. As professionals, we can weed out the negative films and even use them to our advantage by doing comparison studies with them.
By viewing the films, we will accomplish some of our objectives which are:
____
____
Viewing
|
1. students will be able to identify main characters in the stories and distinguish between real and fan
|
|
tasy events in the stories and films.
|
-
2. Students will be able to order the plot events in the correct sequence.
Post screening objectives will include:
-
1. students will be introduced to tall tales.
-
2. Students will be able to write truth stretching stories..
-
3. Students will be able to compare and contrast film and books.
-
4. Students will write film reviews.
-
5. Students will be able to answer these questions:
-
Whom do you consider strong?
-
Write a list of the people in your life who are strong and tell why.
-
Draw a movie poster or book cover.
____
Classroom instructors should use film, but not as a babysitter or as prep time. In order to use films positively, tapes should be previewed first, so that the teacher is familiar with the content and can adequately prepare the lesson in terms of time and content. Things that can be done to use films creatively include just showing parts of a film to help enhance a lesson, turning off the sound to simplify a deadly narrative, leaving the lights on so that students know they are still in a learning environment, letting students know in advance what they will be expected to glean from a tape, and making frequent use of the pause button to discuss or reinforce.
____
____
____
____
