The Great Depression in Your Classroom

THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN YOUR CLASSROOM:
Creating Successful Student Lessons around American Memory

Facilitator: Michael Federspiel

Overview

How long should an American Memory-based lesson be? How ambitious? What kinds of support do we need to provide for students, so that they can find materials on the web site, make sense of them, and present what they have learned? Participants in this workshop will learn about the components of successful web-related lessons by working with student lessons that have been field-tested in the facilitator's high school classroom. The sample lessons were designed to enrich students' study of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and involve three different American Memory Collections that focus on the Depression Era. Playing the role of students, participants will complete a lesson, discuss their findings, then analyze the lesson's components and investigate ways to extend it using additional collections.

Objectives

At the end of this workshop participants will be able to:

identify key components of successful student online lessons
navigate and search photographic, text and audio collections in American Memory
describe some of the realities that Steinbeck would have seen while writing The Grapes of Wrath (the physical, cultural and economic aspects of Dust Bowl and migrant life)
describe some of the styles and subjects of New Deal era photographers, as well as the purposes and accomplishments of New Deal writers and folklorists

Resources

Student lesson "FSA-OWI Project," with student worksheets

Additional examples of Depression-related student lessons, "WPA Federal Writer’s Project Assignment" and "Voices of the Dustbowl Assignment."

Selected "Intercalary Chapters" from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:
1. Chapter 9 - Selling Possessions
2. Chapter 11 - Tractors / Houses
3. Chapter 12 - Route 66

Three American Memory Collections:
1. America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black and White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945
2. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
3. Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941

Samples of students' projects and work

Exercise

1. Introduction (15 minutes)

We discuss the goals of the workshop, and explain that participants will role-play sophomores in an American Studies class that is reading The Grapes of Wrath. Fellows are given selected chapter handouts from the novel (the ‘intercalary chapters’) to establish the Dust Bowl-related themes to be investigated. The student handout for the "FSA / OWI Project" assignment is distributed, and instructions for completing it are discussed (including modifications for the workshop).

2. Lesson Work Time (45 minutes)

Working with a partner, complete the "FSA / OWI Project" student lesson. For the purposes of this workshop, observe these modifications to the lesson:

Spend about 20 minutes on Part One of the lesson. To abbreviate this part, read through only one or two of the seven essays on FSA photographers; fill out only two or three sections of the worksheet.

Spend about 25 minutes on Part Two of the lesson. To abbreviate this part, simply bookmark and/or print out images for your thematic report.

The facilitator will work individually with Fellows to answer questions and guide site navigation and collection search strategies.

3. Debriefing the Lesson (30 minutes)

Participants continue to play the role of students, as they share their findings from both Parts One and Two of the lesson. The facilitator, in the role of teacher, leads the discussion and models ways of drawing out students’ observations, connecting themes, and relating findings back to the novel. The facilitator shows examples of his students’ work on this assignment, so that participants may compare their own work with what students are able to do.

4. Analysis of Lesson Components (20 minutes)

Participants now step back into the role of educators to analyze two things: first, the lesson just completed (i.e. its learning objectives, its structure, the handouts); second, their own wider experiences creating and using web-related lessons. What consistently works? What should be avoided? This discussion will emphasize the need to create small, doable lessons that incrementally build student skills in using particular collections, and that can be linked with others to form a larger unit.

5. Extending the Lesson Using Audio and Text Collections (40 minutes)

Using what you have learned from the sample lesson and our discussion, work with a partner to design an extension of the "Documenting the Depression" lesson, this time using audio and full-text collections. Do these steps:

Select either the Voices from the Dust Bowl or the American Life Histories collection. Spend about 20 minutes surveying the collection, especially the resources found on its homepage.

Be prepared to describe for the group a simple, structured activity (like Part One of of the sample lesson) that would orient students to the collection by focusing their attention on one or more of the homepage resources.
1. To which homepage resource(s) would you direct them?
2. What kind of activity and/or handout could you create to guide their work?
3. How would this activity prepare students to search the collection and use its documents to investigate a Dust Bowl-related theme?

Gather as a large group to share your lesson extensions with the new collections. What new ideas for small, structured lessons emerged across the group? How can you take some of these strategies and use them in your own lesson design?