Overview

Objectives 

• identify reasons for using primary sources and role playing exercises with middle school students; 
• access and evaluate documents and photographs from the American Memory collections and elsewhere related to European immigration; 
• describe the world of the immigrant, in terms a middle school student might use; 
• identify the pros and cons of various ways students might express what they learn and understand; 
• discuss how historical events affect ordinary people, and how ordinary people may affect important events.

Resources 

1. Excerpts from middle school students' history scrapbooks
2. Immigration Resources, an HTML list of miscellaneous sites and files assembled by the instructor 
3. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1940
4. Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company
5. Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs 1851-1991
6. Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years.

Exercise 

1. Introduction (20 minutes) 

Participants discuss the basic questions teachers ask when planning an activity as part of a larger curriculum. The discussion will be focused on why it makes sense to use primary sources and an extended role play. We'll address the following questions about a project in which students research and create fictional immigrant family histories: What is the informational scope of the project? What concepts will students learn? How does this activity fit into the larger curriculum? How did we get here? How long should it last? Why is it important to have students do a multimedia project like this? How much should teachers structure the study? How much of the direction should be provided by students? How can we assess student learning?

2. In pairs, choose a culture to investigate (45 minutes)

1. Open the Immigration Resources webpage. Practice navigating. Return to the homepage. 
   
   
2. Choose a culture to investigate. Examine several documents from Touring Turn of the Century America and from American Life Histories. Begin to evaluate them for usefulness. 
• To what extent do the images and documents from these collections reinforce or extend students' existing knowledge of immigrant life? 
• How might students use what they learn to make their own fictional immigrant families more realistic?
• Print two photographs and two text documents that satisfy the criteria mentioned in 2b. Examine the photographs. What do you see? What do they tell you about immigrant life? What questions do they raise? Read the life histories. What information confirms what you already knew? What information is new? What questions are raised?
• Briefly consult the other resources on the Immigration Resources webpage. Find one that complements / contrasts with the American Memory collections, in terms of information provided for students. 

3. Demonstrating Understanding (30 minutes)

1. Make an artifact (a drawing, a historical newspaper article, a 3D paper model) that conveys what you now know about immigrant life, and integrates something you saw in the photos. You might, for example, create a dollhouse-size room from a tenement, or a newspaper story about conditions for urban immigrants). By recreating an artifact, the student focuses on details that would ordinarily overlooked. S/he comes to appreciate something about both the technology and the texture of turn of the century life. 
   
   
2. Write a journal entry, suggested by a document you read, from the viewpoint of a member of your fictional immigrant family. Be sure to include details you gleaned from the documents. You might describe, for example, going out to buy a pickle on the Lower East Side of New York City, or, playing street games with your friends using actual songs children sang. By using historical information found in the life histories, students come to appreciate social history, which complements their understanding of historical events or forces learned in other ways. 

4. Follow-up Discussion (25 minutes)

1. What issues have arisen for you in the course of today's work?
   
   
2. What feels right about this project model of curriculum? What doesn't?
   
   
3. What was it like to use the collections? What are their advantages over other media and other sites? Disadvantages?
   
   
4. How do we decide whether a collection is worth using to achieve curricular goals?
   
   
5. What's your response to the idea of a consolidating activity? What are its advantages and shortcomings?