Stop the Presses: The Newsies Strike out against Child Labor!
Medea E. Lamberti-Sanchez
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Rationale
I decided to use a performance piece like Newsies to take the topic of child labor, and use the arts platform to creatively explain the historical significance of the event as well as draw real-life connections to the topic through informational, non-fiction articles as well as fictional resources to allow the students to create and draw their own connections to the materials. Since Betsy Ross is an arts-magnet school that provides children with an outlet to see and think differently, the performance piece will provide many ways for the students to enrich their background of child labor through music, dance, theatre, and visual arts. This piece will invite the students to research people and places in the past like Theodore Roosevelt and New York, 1899, as well as current people and places in the world involved in the fight to end child labor like the National Child Labor Committee. Performance excites and attracts its viewers through its exciting plot, characters, and portrayal of history seen through another's perspective. The performance piece will allow my students to use the production to gather their own perspective about what information they received from viewing the movie, Newsies. I think this piece will push them to find differences and similarities between the fictionalized portrayal and the historical portrayal of the same event and interpret it accordingly.
