Judith S. Goodrich
The unit
Growth of Cities
spans three or four weeks and complements our textbook’s unit titled, “The United States Becomes an Industrial Nation”. After five class periods devoted to vocabulary, background, and hands-on exploration of basic concepts related to the meaning of progress, energy and the development of some machines of the Industrial Revolution, the students will work in teams to research and develop a PowerPoint presentation that shows their understanding of the ways that people and cites were affected by industrial (heat engine) changes in the 19th or early 20th century. These teams of two students each will research the history of a designated city at any point within the timeframe of approximately 1800 to 1910. The students will need to discover the personality of the city -- its size, society, and special features (the geography of place) and use this information as a backdrop for the focused investigation of a heat engine at work in that city in the same years. A student team might look at Lowell Massachusetts and textile mills; Titusville, Pennsylvania and oil drilling equipment; Springfield, Massachusetts and the early gas car or the textile mills; Cleveland and iron ore and the steam powered device that removed it from boats; Pittsburgh and its steel mills or Cincinnati and steamboats or railroads. Using the development of the city as a backdrop for investigating heat engines creates a tangible context for the Industrial Revolution in America. Understanding the impact the heat engine had on a way of life makes history more concrete and manageable. Students tend to generalize when talking about history -- the president is interesting, the war was difficult, the factory was big -- I think that forcing a detailed peek into a moment of urban development will help students appreciate historical detail and evidence.
Students will need to constantly reflect and reassess the impact that their selected “heat engine in action” had on the city. The essential question should be at the back of their minds as they work on any facet of the project. For example, they might ask themselves: Is a cable car powered by a steam engine really “better” than a horse and cart for moving around San Francisco? What does the term ‘better’ mean? Is faster the same as better? Does a steam powered saw mill in Cedar Mills Oregon create dangerous working conditions? What kind of pollution does a heat engines add to the environment? Isn’t tying up a pioneer wagon on the Oregon Trail safer than pulling a train into a frenetic railway hub in Chicago?
As a class, we will discuss the notion of progress before students embark on their own research. Students will be aware of the need to define and refine their own notions of progress before drawing any conclusions based on their gathered evidence. Of course, the evidence itself might contribute to a change in their view of progress! Some suggested definitions for “progress” could include gradual improvement or growth or development, development to a more advanced state, development in a positive way, and a progression of development that shows relationships between current conditions and past conditions.3 We will also think about two intriguing statements: progress can’t be stopped and what some people regard as progress is not progress at all.
We will discuss these and other classroom generated definitions. We will talk about the areas where students would clearly expect to see progress: improvements in health; better working conditions; better jobs; less poverty; more education for all; cleaner air; cleaner cities; less disease. We’ll move into the other side of progress where a negative effect might be present: faster cars -- do these cause more accidents; more machines doing work -- do these contribute to unemployment or pollution; taller skyscrapers -- do they cost more to build at the expense of something else and do they increase population density? Land use -- are groups of people being displaced to accommodate technological changes? We will talk about labor and working conditions. After these classroom discussions, students should begin to think of evaluating the essential question (on (
Is the history of the growth of a city a history of progress?)
as a complex issue.
Unfortunately the science curriculum for 8th grade does not easily parallel what we study in American History. Students learn about the Solar System, geology, weather, and review the scientific method. In the 7th grade, students studied the human body and focused on an introduction to biology. Students studied simple machines, energy, work and motion in the 6th grade. Ideally, this unit on progress will be repeating from a different point of view what students may remember from earlier years; but I will assume that we will need to review much of the material on the meaning of energy, work, and heat. We will also review basic thermodynamic laws (and vocabulary) about the conservation of energy and the movement of heat.
Performance Tasks
The students will be writing in a daily ‘exit journal’ to record whatever new ideas they are mulling over as they conclude each session of research. These remarks will be used the next day to remind students where they left off and to trigger research for the new day. Students will be required to answer the essential question more formally in a final concluding essay but the daily notes should help them keep their ideas and their changes in thinking in mind. Students will be required to use balanced research: they will need to use at least one primary source as well as text-based resources to supplement any information taken from reliable websites. Students will include a bibliography or works cited list in their presentation.
Students will take notes from books and online resources and save their materials in a digital portfolio. “Cutting and pasting” huge paragraphs of information will not be allowed -- the value of using an essential question to guide research is that the use of the material will be unique to the student and not easily imported from a website. For example, copying a paragraph describing James Wattt’s steam engine cannot answer the essential question about how life changed in Lowell Massachusetts, although the use of a steam engine in Lowell to industrialize textile mills will be good information when thinking about progress. Research that must answer an essential question avoids the “download online information and call it a report” behavior that many students have developed when using technology as a tool.
Students will present their findings to the class in a PowerPoint presentation or in a Microsoft Publisher newsletter. They will be encouraged to illustrate the heat engine they selected for their city and explain in simple terms how the engine works. Students will follow a rubric to guide them through the requirements of their final presentation so that each student will address the same general topics in answering the essential question. Text-based resources for the topic will be collected from the library media center and made available in the classroom. Students will access some pre-selected websites that explain the workings of simpler forms of the engines or transportation modes they select. Students will be able to use the homepages of their selected cities for historical information and to lead them to more specific topics to research. Students will design their own Internet research guides so that the time spent on the Internet is directed and focused -- in other words, students will be looking for specific information rather than surfing the Internet for inspiration. Students will maintain a works cited list including citations for images and animations..
