Teacher

Unit One: Warm-Up Activities

Select one of the following activities to introduce students to the idea that a person's identity is a complex thing, consisting of external and internal forces, and also tied to larger communal and societal identities.

Materials required for each student:

• shoe box
• materials with which to decorate the shoe box
• objects that represent things important to the student

Purpose:

• Most of us know what it is like to share with others only part of who we are. This activity visualizes the difference between a private identity kept to ourselves and those whom we trust and a public identity freely shared with others. The quotation from W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk that appears on the index page points to how African-Americans developed a dual identity as "an American, a Negro." The first chapter of Leon F. Litwack's Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow describes how important it was for African-Americans to keep part of their identity hidden from a hostile culture.

Directions:

1. Each student should decorate the outside of a shoe box in ways that show to others something about his or her identity (using college insignia or a photograph of an automobile, for example).
2. The outside of the box represents a public identity; that is, those things we willingly share with others as a way of identifying who we are.
3. On the inside of the box, the student should place several objects unseen by others which represent his or her private identity; that is, those things kept private from others.
4. Students will need to decide if they would like to later reveal the inside items.
5. After the box is completed, students can attempt to identify their classmates based on the box's outward appearance and then can guess what items (and identity!) might be hidden within.

Materials required for each student:

• history textbook
• Parallel Timelines graphic organizer

Purpose:

• Timelines are useful ways of tracking chronologies; a parallel timeline tracks two different kinds of activities across the same time span. This activity asks students to construct two timelines that compare events from a personal family history with those that are public and more widely known.

Directions:

1. Students label one of the timelines with events taken from their personal family history (the year they were born or their parents married, for example).
2. Students label the second parallel timeline with memorable events drawn from their textbook, especially those events which they can connect with the ones on their first timeline (a family member who served in the Vietnam War, for example).
3. Many students experience a sense of disconnection with events that the textbook labels as important--sometimes events swirling around us seem to have no bearing on our private lives.
4. Then again, students may be encouraged to discern significant connections--certainly African-Americans who may never have personally known a lynching victim nonetheless understood the import such an act carried for them.
5. Note: Occasionally a student, especially one whose background is different from those of classmates, will not want to list events from his or her family's past, an indication of how painful it can be to share an identity with people who may not be accepting of it.

Material required for each student:

• his or her own wallet or billfold

Purpose:

• We carry around primary sources all the time. This exercise requires students to use the items found in a wallet or billfold to offer an interpretation of the identify of the person carrying those items. Our understandings of the past are limited by the amount of information available to us; it can be difficult to make reliable hypotheses about the past. Therefore historians must be imaginative in order to fashion meaningful understandings with limited materials.

Directions:

1. Divide students into pairs.
2. Have students examine the contents of each other's wallet or billfold. (You may want to give notice of this activity ahead of time!)
3. The contents should be considered as the only artifacts available to tell about the life they represent.
4. Students should consider:
   • What can you reasonably hypothesize about the identity of your partner?
   • What are you unable to know about your partner based on the contents before you?