Teacher

Unit Three: Follow-Up Activities

Select one or more of the following activities to allow students to synthesize the information from the primary sources they have analyzed.

Purpose:

• Concept mapping offers a useful means for organizing ideas by linking together documents and concepts, sometimes in ways that are different from how they have been presented in the lesson's topics.

Directions:

1. Assign students different concepts.
2. Have students find multiple examples of the concept in the sources provided.
3. Students should refer to their completed response journals for information.
4. Example: The concept of dignity might link Booker T. Washington's statement, "The chief value of industrial education is to give to the students habits of industry, thrift, economy and an idea of the dignity of labor," (from Education) with the photograph "A Living sign on Fifth Avenue, New York City" (from Work). Such linkage would require students to consider how much dignity African-Americans could find in labor if the nature of the work available to them was degrading.

Purpose:

• At the time of his death in 1895, and for half a century before then, Frederick Douglass was the nation's most recognized and respected African-American. After his death, Booker T. Washington played a similar role. Both men had been born to slavery; Douglass, however, had been a runaway, while Washington was still a child at the end of the Civil War. The issues the two confronted were similar and, at the same time, very different. Students can use the documents to create a series of conversations involving these historical figures.

Directions:

1. Using information from their response journals, pairs of students fashion a dialogue between the two men.
2. The conversation could touch on a variety of subjects:
• how to define the important issues of the day;
• the nature of education that should be afforded young African-Americans;
• the expectations that should be placed upon African-American leaders; or
• the identity of this era's generation (the first to come of age without having once been slaves).

1. Have students arrange a conference of African-American leaders to discuss the issues of the day.
2. Several of the pamphlets presented in the lesson are the result of such conferences and will suggest several topics around which such a conference could be staged.

Purpose:

• Students often resort to these contradictory generalizations: "Nothing ever changes" and "That's all in the past." In studying the past, one is stuck both by how different and strange it is and by how much continuity there is with the present.

Directions:

1. For this conversation, students should choose a document whose speaker (or subject, if the document is a photograph) they find especially striking.
2. Ask that they bring this speaker into the present to talk with the class about his or her observation of today's world compared with his or her own.
3. Encourage the class to be prepared to answer the speaker's questions about the extent to which issues and circumstances have changed.

Purpose:

• Creating and sharing Power Point presentations can be used to effectively synthesize observations made by students as they draw conclusions from the documents they have examined. There are many ways such a presentation can be designed, with only one possibility suggested here. This exercise asks that students meld the power of words and images.

Directions:

1. Have students choose a photograph they find moving and to describe how they respond to it by writing a poem.
2. Compare with the poems of identity found in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
3. Another option is to select short excerpts from the documents presented in the lesson and match them with photographs so as to visualize what the document says.
4. Have students create a PowerPoint presentation combining their words and images.
5. Allow time for presentations to the class.