Tell History

I’ve been dipping into What Poetry Brings to Business (University of Michigan Press, 2010) by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and my friend and fellow oral historian Ted Buswick; this promises opportunities to reflect on life, creativity, and work. Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America profiles the project that is the model for the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative. Harlem Children’s Zone was featured this week on NPR. The Dayton Teachers History Book Club will read and discuss Jon Hartley Fox’s King of the Queen City (University of Illinois Press, 2009) about Cincinnati’s King Records this summer. I had the opportunity to interview Fox earlier this month. He and King Records are featured in a piece for Our Ohio on drummer and Ohio Heritage Fellow, Philip Paul.  In a similar vein, I look forward to George Lipsitz’s recent book, Midnight at the Barrel House: the Johnny Otis Story (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Otis also recorded with King Records. I’ll get started preparing for oral history courses with the Oral History Association’s 2009 Book Award recipient, Joanna Herbert’s Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Britain and move on to other oral histories of urban life and/or gender studies. I recently downloaded (Kindle on my netbook) New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage by Yehuda Kalay, Thomas Kvan, and Janice Affleck (Routledge). Numerous friends have recommended Michael M. Kaiser, The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations; I plan to read more about the arts, culture, and community development as I work with Culture Builds Community and other projects.

I mean big as in heavy books to lug to the beach this summer. I wrote earlier about oral history books leading up to the Oral History Association conference in October, 2008. The Dayton Teachers History Book Club is reading Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals as a companion to following the nominating conventions and presidential electioneering this summer. Fortunately, I already read that one because it weighs in around 900 pages. Let me know if you are in Dayton, Ohio and want to join us for this discussion come September.

I recently finished three novels—Noah Charney’s The Art Thief, Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero. All three are good reads that I recommend. Charney’s is a debut novel and it’s a kind of mash-up of sociologist Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and mystery writers Janwillem Van de Wetering and Georges Simenon (“Maigret” for PBS watchers). Now I realize that I read the short, easily portable books first and have the weighty tomes to carry on vacation. By the way, if you haven’t read Van de Wetering–take one of his mysteries to the beach.

What I want to haul around, to the dismay of my husband, are John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme: the Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland and Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I noticed that a Canadian blog, Gen X at 40, linked to my earlier piece on the Acadian Bank Museum in Rustico and I was embarrassed because a local historian in Rustico had to correct so much of my first draft. I want to get the Acadian story right. I also liked Faragher’s Daniel Boone a lot. Some how the lottery of books on hold at the public library landed the second big book in my lap this weekend – Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. I know there will be a hold on this when I get back so I’ll try to shoe horn it into my suitcase as well. Perhaps I should just download the audio book? I’m also taking Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven because recent events in Texas have so many people talking about it.

I’m saving Elliot Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America and Christopher M. Kelty’s Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software for my return. Kelty’s book is available free online but I couldn’t seem to wean myself off of a book to hold in my hands. Perhaps the new One Laptop Per Child computer that also functions as an ebook will solve that problem. These two did not sound like vacation reading. Looks like I’ll facilitate a Center for Teaching and Learning book discussion of Two Bits at Wright State in the fall.

If you like photographs, I recommend a book that is both beautiful and serious. Gary Harwood’s Growing Season: the Life of a Migrant Community will remind you where your fresh vegetables come from this summer. You can see many of his photographs online but buy the book.

I find myself eagerly awaiting the next addition to Louise Erdrich’s children’s book series (The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence). Some adults got hooked on Harry Potter but not me. I should go back and read more of her adult novels but I don’t think there’s room in my suitcase or my two-week vacation.

In February, I proposed that history education in the middle childhood years should begin with good fiction and non-fiction books for children. College survey courses in American history at Wright State University are populated first by students in education, followed by history majors and a sprinkling of history enthusiasts from other departments. Many of the education students plan to teach middle childhood language arts. I’m looking for feedback on a “Stories First” assignment for these students—please let me know what you think.

My premise is that we will not serve future teachers well by diluting substantive history content in these courses. The Masters degree for future social studies teachers requires surprisingly little history relative to the courses that students will teach. The survey is often the last opportunity, before they enter their own classroom, to study many aspects of American history. While undergraduates are often focused on their career plans rather than the history content, teachers often wish they had studied history more deeply before launching their careers.

Reading children’s books is not the best use of the limited time college students have to give to American history studies; however, studying and writing about the historical context for these stories may encourage future language arts teachers to teach more history.

I am considering a collaborative wiki-based assignment option. Students, working in small groups, would either contribute to an existing children’s literature wiki or develop a Stories First: Reading History wiki for integrating historical study with language arts. Students will not summarize the children’s book; motivated students may read the story on their own time however, the focus of the assignment will be on explaining the historical context, events, and people. If students either contribute or build something of value, they will be able to return to it as a reference in their own teaching while other readers may contribute, correct, and extend what the students build.

I contacted Wikipedia and received an encouraging response directing me to the university projects page with some stipulations; as long as these articles:

• do not contain original research
• stick to summarizing other notable reliable published sources (and cites those references); and
• focus on “real-world context and sourced analysis, offering detail on a work’s development, impact or historical significance, not solely a detailed summary of that work’s plot.”

The response pointed me as well to two other children’s literature wikis: see ChildLit Wiki; and Children’s Literature.

In the current American history survey course assignment, students develop a Document Based Question (DBQ) and then write a model essay answer. The students pursue an individual historical research project while discussing the historian’s craft in class; students identify a historical research question, review both primary sources and historical scholarship, selectively edit the primary sources related to the question, develop a thesis, build on past scholarship, interpret the evidence, and explain their conclusions. The assignment connects the classroom with their career plans—Ohio Content Standards for Social Studies Skills and Methods introduce primary sources in the fifth grade and then build, recursively on historical research skills through tenth grade—without diluting the study of history.

The DBQ assignment serves future high school social studies teachers effectively. Can an alternative assignment option work for the students interested in teaching middle childhood language arts? Will a student wiki project like this be of value to middle childhood social studies and language arts teachers?

Please share alternative assignments.

The One Laptop Per Child XO computer screen swivels and folds flat to make it easier to explore an ebook. Ebooks are a cool resource for the OLPC but you don’t need the XO to access ebooks for kids. The OLPC is set up to access a wonderful, international collection of children’s books through the ICDL or International Children’s Digital Library. According to their website,

The ICDL Foundation’s goal is to build a collection of children’s books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary children’s literature from around the world. Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children’s literature from the world community.

The ICDL currently offers over 1300 books representing 41 languages. These include both lovely old illustrated children’s books and new publications donated to the ICDL. There are simple, kid-friendly controls for moving through the picture and story books. You can use this collection for free online. You can also add the ICDL’s “Children’s Book of the Day” as a “gadget” on an IGoogle page.

I cross-posted this from our Jump Start blog.

As we wrapped up the Dayton Teaching American History grant project, history teachers and I organized the Dayton Teachers History Book Club. Participants teach in elementary, middle, and secondary schools and in language arts, social studies, computer technology, nursing as well as women’s studies, and African American history. We have been meeting for over two years. We read both historical fiction and non-fiction.

We read Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: the Promised Land of Error last month. Looking around for something a little lighter to follow it with, I learned from the Library of Congress Blog about the streaming video of David L. Robbins talk, “Nuts and Bolts of Historical Fiction” at The Center for the Book.

We read Robbins’ thriller about an assassination plot against FDR, The Assassins Gallery. It was a popular book, combining a compelling story with lots of historical detail. There were points when the author, who admits being inspired by the sales of The Da Vinci Code, seemed to have an eye to a movie contract; scenes in the novel felt like they were written for movies in the way that scenes in some movies look like they were designed for the spin-off computer games. However, the book was entertaining and it encompassed fascinating historical events and settings. We talked a lot about the research and writing of historical fiction. Robbins claimed that about 10% of his research about history and place makes it way into his novels and that “reading voraciously” with close attention to footnotes and bibliographies, is crucial to his work. Also crucial is serious on the ground study of the sites featured in the book. The podcast enhanced our discussion of The Assassins Gallery.

While Robbins writes for an adult audience, social studies teachers look for good historical fiction to engage their students while language arts teachers are eager for well-written historical fiction to share with their students. World history teachers complained about the dearth of resources including historical fiction for world history, particularly the ancient world. There’s good news on this front: the 2008 Newberry Medal award winner is Laura Amy Schlitz, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village while one of the 2008 Newberry Honor books is Christopher Paul Curtis’ Elijah of Buxton about life in a Canadian community of escaped slaves. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! is written to be performed by students as witty monologues or dialogues. The book does not shy away from issues of class, gender, and religious difference. The commentary as well as the illustrations are full of details of everyday life in the Middle Ages.

We all wished for essays and commentaries contextualizing the historical fiction in relation to history and explaining the relationship between history and fiction in the novels. Podcasts with authors like those offered by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress or WETA Learning Media’s Meet the Author series available though ITunes and Reading Rockets may go a long way to fill that need.

When we get together, we talk a lot about history, teaching, the schools, our careers, and our lives in general. The group is very patient, listening to me sound out my ideas. Some participants are passionate readers who share great books that fill my shelves, reminding me of the friends that I have made through the club. Its important for the public to realize that teachers have a commitment that goes beyond the job on the clock; they read widely and talk substantively about both the content and approaches to teaching.

Next on the reading list is Kim Lacy Rogers’ Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change.

My views of middle childhood education come both from raising two children (college graduates in their twenties) and from serving as co-director of two Teaching American History grant projects. On one hand, I understand the impulse in No Child Left Behind to make inequality visible and to hold schools accountable. Unfortunately, in a world of local school districts serving widely different populations, the implementation of No Child Left Behind leaves a lot to be desired. NCLB gave a stronger hand to itemizing knowledge and skills in a way that is often at odds with nurturing a love of learning about the past in practice.

The Ohio Social Studies Standards for middle childhood learning should be scrapped in favor of integrating language arts and history in 4th, 5th and, perhaps 6th grades. It’s not that the standards address the wrong content, its that there isn’t time to teach the wide content encompassed by the standards effectively while engaging young learners. Putting the many indicators first makes for a checklist approach to learning. Merging with language arts, to some extent, will expand the amount of time given to the study of history over the paltry hours it receives as part of integrated social studies and it will strengthen language arts.

Stories should be at the core of this curriculum. These are the years when children come into their own as readers and love to immerse themselves in new worlds. They also like to master information. A literature based approach to history integrates these two powerful interests. Children today are the beneficiaries of well-researched, imaginatively written children’s fiction and non-fiction literature by writers like Avi, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and Louise Erdrich. Building a curriculum on stories will foster new contributions to children’s literature. In addition students are more likely to imagine themselves as future writers and historians if they read good books than if they read textbooks designed to address long lists of indicators.

Instructional designers should read deeply of this literature and consider activities that will extend student understanding of both the past and of social studies skills and methods in relation to children’s literature. Students can still construct multi-tiered timelines, maps, and pie-charts but around the history connected with these stories (and with the standards). They can read primary documents including first person accounts and photographs and compare these to the information in the stories. These works, explored in detail, serve as a vivid basis—the post-holes–for future studies. Young students love for the past will be nurtured through stories rather than strangled by benchmarks and indicators.

A merger with language arts brings more opportunities for creativity into the study of the past. Poetry, like Alice Walkers’ “In Our Mothers’ Garden” also immerses students in the drama, challenges, and emotions of the past. In Minneapolis, for example, we made quilt squares based on a reading of Walker and a study of African American quilts from John Michael Vlach, The Afro American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Students also learned how African Americans built schools and institutions in the wake of slavery. In early elementary classes, students turned the picture book, The Ox Cart Man into board games by identifying obstacles and opportunities both in the storybook and in New England life. More detailed “chapter books” lend themselves to such collaborative, creative projects.

Students can learn by doing – producing their own works of fiction based on a careful reading of selected first person narratives and other historical research and evidence. Students can publish their work in school magazines and websites and by making their own books, using blank books (our son’s sixth grade teacher used Bare Books with great success), or going on-line for a publishing service like Lulu.com. The National Museum of Women and the Arts offers up tremendous resources for simple to complex bookmaking projects for kids. Public libraries can host displays of children’s books. A National History Day competition for middle childhood students could offer a book-making category.

As they research, write, illustrate and construct books about the past students will learn more about what it means to be both an historian and a writer.