The Grandparent/Elder Project

Unit III: Lesson Three

60 Minutes in Gees Bend

This lesson should be taught with computer access for the students as individuals or in small groups. The teacher and the librarian should teach this lesson collaboratively. The students' challenge is to use their new skills of observation and deduction to learn about family life in the community of Gees Bend, Alabama, during the time of the Great Depression. The lesson also challenges the students to expand their research skills.

As students ask questions and seek answers, the teacher and the librarian provide helpful instruction on how to look for information on the Web with search engines, and how to use periodical databases such as Electric Library, Information Access, EBSCO, ProQuest, or other periodical subscription databases. This lesson involves information access, search strategies, and use of information that is located.

1. Direct students to the 60 Minutes in Gees Bend instructions.
2. The students start with a selected group of Twenty Photographs of Gees Bend, Alabama. Explain that the photographs were taken during the Depression by Marion Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein, two photographers who were part of a project sponsored by the Farm Securities Administration-Office of War Information of the New Deal.
3. Students search the online databases or the Internet to locate information about Dorothea Lange and her photography of Depression farm communities.
4. Students use maps from reference sources, print and online, to locate Gees Bend.
5. Students use research sources, print and online, to learn the reason why the town is named "Gees Bend."
6. Students research the history of this community in its plantation period.
7. Students use Electric Library (or similar online databases such as BigChalk or the Gale Group) to find articles and transcripts of NPR programs that provide additional information on the community during the Depression, during the Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1990s.
8. The students compile their research and create oral presentations modeled after the television program 60 Minutes. These presentations may be done as videotapes to simulate the television program. Individual presentations may be ten to fifteen minutes long, as the television show has a series of segments during the hour program.
9. After the 60 Minutes in Gees Bend activity, have students locate and read the special American Memory presentation about Arthur Rothstein which provides additional information about Gees Bend.