Debbie Abilock & Cynthia Hirsch Kosut

"One sure measure of the heart and soul of any society is how it treats its children."
--David McCullough

Objectives

Our goal was to put students in the role of historians who engaged in a genuine historical inquiry. Students act as if they are practicing professionals and incorporate a genuine information problem solving process (library research) into all aspects of their project. As part of the development of historical thinking, they formulate questions, research the historical record, and consider multiple perspectives and judgements. Beyond a working knowledge of the events, ideas and persons of the century, students construct an understanding of the major "themes" of the period and how these might impact a child born in 1900. Based on their analyses they assemble both a physical and digital album of letters, oral histories, artifacts, diary entries, narratives and images based on an invented child within a family. From their investigations students learn to describe the past through the eyes of those who were there, and create hypothetical, historically-plausible narratives for their individual characters.

Students function in two roles:

• As scholars they develop historical thinking skills with which they could research and evaluate evidence, interpret the historical record, develop causal analyses and construct sound historical interpretations

• As unique characters living in different regions of the United States, of different ethnicities, social and economic levels, and genders, they experience and reflect upon the direct impact of events, ideas, movements and people on their respective lives.

Time Required

Semester curriculum

Recommended Grade Level

Middle School (tested on 6th grade)

Curriculum Fit

Interdisciplinary (Art, Technology, History and Geography, Language Arts, Library Research)

Curriculum: Overview of Process

Historian

A structured sequence of activities analyzing visual artifacts, The More You Look, The More You See, is designed to develop reflective capacity, observation, deduction and inferencing skills, clarity and specificity in writing, and the ability make connections between historical knowledge and particular artifacts.

A series of research activities, framed as online investigations, support the students' acquisition of knowledge, as well as help them locate the visual materials and develop the written texts that are used in their scrapbooks. Gradually students develop a character with personality, feelings and ideals, a child whose life is documented in a scrapbook from birth to the moment when the adolescent leaves home.

The following web pages prompt a growing understandings of events, movements and themes through the lens of a particular child:

• You are Born in 1900 asks for information about the imagined family, in a particular setting and with a particular heritage. Naming the child is an opportunity not only for a genealogical investigation but for the students' personal reflection about the significance of names. Students to write about their own name, as well as about the name they choose for their invented child by reading:
   
  1. Sandra Cisneros' poetic House on Mango Street book and audiotape (Knopf, 1984) about a Latino childhood in Chicago later in the century, contains a poignant, playful treatment of the author's personal name.
  2. Knots on a Counting Rope by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault (Henry Holt, 1987), a picture book in which a grandfather and an Indian boy retell the story of his birth and naming.

  Another writing assignment is to write an "I Am..." essay about the child's relationships to parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, and hero(ine)s from this period. Each of five paragraphs begins with:

  1. I am the daughter/son of...
  2. I am the granddaughter/grandson of...
  3. I am the brother/sister of...
  4. I am the friend of...
  5. I am in admiration of...

  The goal is to begin to conceive an historically accurate child in whom the student is intensely, personally interested. The assignment ends with the creation of a calendar for the child's birth month, a transition to the next page.

• Your Month of Birth encourages students to learn about the events of 1900, while also continuing to create their family's background and perspectives. Joy Hakim has called the period up to the First World War an "age of extremes." It was a time of very wealthy individuals and terrible poverty, of new factory jobs and an influx of immigrants looking for work, of the growth of large corporations and the People's Party, of the end of the frontier and the birth of the conservation movement. There were great injustices affecting women, children, immigrants and minority groups, as well as political and social responses in the form of the women's sufferage movement, unions, muckrakers, philanthropy and the Progressive movement.
  
  Students research the limited time frame of one month of 1900 using the resources in Turn-of-the-Century Timeline 1900-1929. The calendar they created in the previous activity can be used as a graphic organizer to record events. From this they can expand their investigations, using the names, events and items they locate, to provide themselves with enough information to develop news articles, commentaries or advertisements for a newspaper or magazine about this month. While each student creates a newspaper or magazine, only parts of the publication are selected to include in an album, generating reflection and discussion about the values and point of view of each family. At various places both the teacher and student will need to expand their understanding of the context using resources listed in Turn-of-The-Century-Child: Overviews 1900-1929. This assignment is also designed to encourage students to begin reading novels or stories, written for children or adolescents just before 1900, many of which are now considered classics.
   
• You Can Read continues the exploration of classics begun in the last web page activity, using the supplementary web page Turn-of-the-Century Child: Books and Reading which links to many full texts online. These include picture books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, enduring stories such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Alice in Wonderland, and period stories by Horatio Alger. In October students read the poem "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley and create an Inside-Outside Shoebox for Halloween. They also begin investigating child labor and schooling using Turn-of-the-Century Child: At School and Work. This is another opportunity for students to "breathe life" into their imagined child and develop empathy for this particular individual. Deborah Brown describes the use of "literacy autobiographies" with preservice teachers to promote reflective thinking about literacy teaching. Similarly, this opportunity promotes introspection about students' own literacy. Because of the wide-ranging choices in reading and perceived connections to the students' own experiences learning to read, this was one of the most popular activities. Many students read several books and prepared recitations for their peers, for children in younger grades, or for parents and visitors around the holidays. When students are creating the accompanying monologues about learning to read, it is helpful for them to use Skye Nunan's worksheets and advice relating it to the genre of poetry called dramatic monologue. James Moffett's Active Voice offers excellent advice on teaching students to write monologues.
   
• Thanksgiving Day asks students to assess their child's status in society, in some cases as part of a marginalized group. It is one of the most challenging activities, since students will find little material directly addressing this topic. "Helping Students Assess Their Thinking" by Richard Paul and Linda Elder addresses rigor in inferential thinking. Students will have to make inferences based on what they know about the culture and background, economic status, beliefs and values, and ethnicity of their imagined family and child. Turn-of-the-Century: Individuals and Groups contains information related to particular groups and movements. This is also an opportunity to teach letter writing using the examples linked to this page.
   
• Traveling Near and Far asks students to imagine occasions which might prompt a family excursion, the original immigration experience, or events during which an adolescent or young adult thinks about leaving home. People were on the move---lured by jobs, curiosity, idealism, a booming economy, new forms of entertainment, and even a war. Students can return to the Turn-of-the-Century Child: Timeline 1900-1929 and Gathering Maps, Pictures, Photos and Prints about Your Child's Location for resources. They can consult Turn-of-the-Century Child: Holidays, Excursions and Trips and Turn-of-the-Century: Entertainment for ideas. Students can follow the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village's The Model T Road Trip, a fictional journal of a family's summer trip from Waterford, Michigan to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1919. In Daddy-Long-Legs written in 1912, Judy a young orphan writes in a letter to her benefactor, "The world is full of happiness, and plenty to go round, if you are only willing to take the kind that comes your way. The whole secret is in being pliable."
   
• This bridges nicely to Technology and Medicine which focuses on the future hopes and dreams of a child of twelve. At the cusp of adolescence in 1912, a child might look to the promises of medical and technological progress to provide opportunities unavailable to the previous generation. Current realities and circumstances might prompt a young adult to begin a physical as well as metaphorical journey toward adulthood. As Gene Stratton Porter writes in Freckles in 1904, "We never know the timber of a man’s soul until something cuts into him deeply and brings the grain out strong."

Historical Context

To begin to develop an historical context, students’ summer reading focused on Twentieth Century Values: Award-Winning Individuals and Classic Novels. During the semester, students are assigned a book from Turn-of-the-Century Child: Historical Fiction (and some Memoirs) written about the particular region, ethnicity, or social/economic level related to their invented character. This provides a basis for examining how an author incorporates history into a work of the imagination.

During the semester students read selections from Age of Extremes and War, Peace, and All that Jazz, two volumes of A History of Us, a series by Joy Hakim and a chapter about World War I (pp. 337-363) from American Heritage History of the United States by Douglas Brinkley. The PBS video of America 1900 can be coupled with reading "New Year's Day," as well as the specific chapter pertaining to the month of their child's birth, in the companion book America 1900; The Turning Point. These selections are particularly useful in teaching reading strategies such as locating information, understanding the main idea, summarizing, highlighting and margin notation, vocabulary and notetaking. Student-selected additional sources pertain to their specific interests in social, scientific and technological, political, economic, cultural, literary and aesthetic movements of the period, or concern particular figures of the early 20^th century. In Point of View: Letter to a Child, students select a prominent figure and write a letter from that person addressed to the student's child. What can these two people have in common? This reversal of point of view can be helpful in making connections and developing a "big picture" when so much of the research focuses on the everyday lives of common people.

Just before Thanksgiving students learn about recitations, a form of rote education familiar to school children during this period, and prepare, memorize and perform monologues and recitations for peers, other students and visiting adults. To further develop speaking and listening skills, Socratic Seminars (a "fishbowl" Literary Club-style discussions where students monitor their mental processes and behaviors) can be held on relevant readings.

Another objective of an integrated Humanities curriculum is to have students explore the connections between reading and writing. Therefore, they read works by authors writing during the early part of the 20^th Century who were writing about the period. For example, students are to describe the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 in the style of Jack London, a witness and reporter of that event. They can compose a biographical sketch of Theodore Roosevelt in the style of John Dos Passos, using his description of Andrew Carnegie in "Prince of Peace" from the section entitles "The 42nd Parallel" of U.S.A. as a model. In a third writing assignment, "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," students are asked to identify 20^th century themes in "Tom Outland’s Story" from The Professors’ House by Willa Cather and apply this to her quote from O Pioneers. Students build their knowledge of different genres and styles to construct their scrapbook artifacts which include letters, diary entries, magazine and newspaper articles, character sketches, historical fiction and author-modeled writing. Regular mini-lessons in vocabulary, adjectives, verb tense, punctuation and dialogue support a formal weekly revision process.

Ongoing assessments include the use of organizational tools such as data sheets, concept maps and webs, as well as opportunities for writing, oral presentations, in-class essays, discussions and Socratic Seminars. At the end of the semester the class comes full-circle to the opening visual literacy activities by exchanging physical scrapbooks and "reading" them in order to answer these questions, and later share these responses with the scrapbook's creator:

• Identify the elements that tell you where this person was born?
• What is the ethnicity of the person and how can you tell?
• What elements lead you to determine the economic status of the family?
• What else can you determine about the family?
• Describe the child's personality, ideals, interests. What artifacts lead you to these conclusions?
• What else can you surmise?

This analysis of each others' scrapbooks, once again, engages students in the type of thinking historians regularly employ:

• Sourcing - in which students focus on the attributes and point of view of the author;
• Contextualizing - in which students situate the scrapbook and its subject in a particular social milleu, cultural context, and political climate;
• Corroborating - in which they compare and contrast the viewpoint of this scrapbook with their own investigation and scrapbook.

Resources Used

Abilock, Debbie. "Turn of the Century Child: Digital Libraries and Teacher Resources." May 5, 2001.

Evaluation

• Scrapbook
• Online scrapbook

Teaching Resources

• Berg, Rebecca L. The Great Depression in Literature for Youth; A Geographical Study of Families and Young Lives. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004.
  Includes international resources, picture books, fiction and nonfiction, oral histories and memoirs, photographers.
• Brinkley, Douglas. American Heritage History of the United States. New York: Viking, 1998.
• Brown, Deborah. "Promoting Reflective Thinking: Preservice Teachers' Literacy Autobiographies as a Common Text. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 42 (February 1999): 402-410.
• Crichton, Judy. America 1900 : The Turning Point. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. - A companion book for a PBS documentary about the United States entered the 20th century.
• Dos Passos, John. "Prince of Peace." U.S.A.; The 42nd Parallel, 1919, the Big Money. New York: Library of America, 1996. 230-231.
• Gorman, Michael. "Human Values in a Technological Age." Information Technologies. 20, no. 1 (March 2001)
• Hakim, Joy. An Age of Extremes. 2nd. edn. New York: Oxford University Press, A History of US, 1999.
• Hakim, Joy. War and Peace and all that Jazz. 2nd. edn. Oxford University Press, A History of US, 1999.
• London, Jack. "The Story of an Eyewitness." Collier's Magazine. May 5, 1906. Jack London's Journalism. [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/Journalism/sfearthquake.html] (May 31, 1999).
• Lynch, Eleanor W.and Marci J. Hanson. Developing Cross-Cultural Competence; A Guide for Working with Children and their Families, 2nd edn. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1998. Facts about the influence of culture on people's beliefs, values, and behaviors and descriptions of the challenges families may have adapting to a different culture.
• MacLeod, David I. Age of the Child; Children in America, 1890-1920. History of American Childhood Series. New York: Twayne, 1998.
• Moffett, James. Active Voice: A Writing Program Across the Curriculum. 2nd edn. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 1992.
• Paul, Richard and Linda Elder. "Helping Students Assess their Thinking." September 23, 1998. Critical Thinking Primary and Secondary Information Library. [http://www.criticalthinking.org/criticalthinking.org/K12/k12library/helps.nclk] (May 31, 1999).
• Stewart, Charles C. and Peter Fritzsche, ed. Imagining the Twentieth Century ed. Peter Fritzsche. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Scrapbook of icons and photographs that trace themes of the century.