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Sights/Sites of History

Continuing with our theme of engaging alternative sources of history with our senses, this unit will focus on the impact that visual representations have on the historical narrative. Most of us have heard the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." However, the thousand words that I would come up with may be very different than those of some else, and this is heavily influenced by our own positionality and experiences. After a lesson on the essentials of rhetorical analysis, students will be analyzing photos that capture key moments in our history, as well as examining some of the monuments and memorials that serve as symbols of these moments. This will also provide students with an opportunity to learn how to identify potential bias in images and monuments. 

  • Essential Questions 

    • Sights of History: 

      • What role do images play in history? Are words not enough? 

      • What do images add to the narrative? 

      • What power does an image have in telling a story?

      • How do identity, life experience, and point of view shape the way we “read” and respond to photographs and other images?

    • Sites of History:

      • What is the purpose of monuments and memorials?

      • What impact do they have on us and the way we think about history? 

      • Why is it important who is remembered, and how they are remembered? 

      • How can we alter these monuments to tell our greater understanding of current issues?

      • How do we justify the injustices we bear witness to?

      • How can we challenge self-fulfilling narratives created by those in power?

  • Learning Goals

    • Students will understand that through memorials and monuments, communities and individuals seek to shape future generations’ understanding of history.

    • Students will understand that when creating monuments and memorials communities and individuals make choices about what aspects of a particular history are worth remembering and what parts to leave out. 

    • Students will understand the power that a single image can have to capture the significance and emotion of a moment in our history.

    • Students will understand the power pictures hold in ensuring the truth/reality of the moment is shown.

  • Common Core Standards

    • Historical and Social Sciences Analysis Skills

      • Students identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations.

    • ​11.9     Students analyze U.S. foreign policy since World War II.

      • ​3. Trace the origins and geopolitical consequences (foreign and domestic) of the Cold War and containment policy, including the following:

        • The Vietnam War

    • ​11.10     Students analyze the development of federal civil rights and voting rights.

    • ​11.11     Students analyze the major social problems and domestic policy issues in contemporary American society.

  • Activities

    • Sights of History ​

      • To start of the unit we will begin with a Four Corners ​activity that serves as a community building activity, and introduction to the topic for this project. I will display a statement on the board and students will decide if they agree, disagree, strongly agree, or strongly disagree. I like to start this activity with fun statements like "pineapple does not belong on pizza" before the ones that connect to the content. For this specific activity I gave students two statements, "images are more powerful than words" and "how we preserve and record our history is important." This gets students thinking before diving into the thick of it.

      • After the opening activity of this unit I introduce the students to a simple rhetorical analysis protocol. Sometimes a single image can have a far greater emotional impact than words alone could. The emotional potential makes photography a prime candidate for interpretation based on bias/positionality/past experiences. Images capture moments; they are rarely comprehensive or entirely representative. I will show the students an image that most people are familiar with, the image of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ-Day in New York. Using the rhetorical analysis strategy we analyze and discuss the photo as a class. 

      • After getting some practice looking at images and understanding the emotional power they can have I will have students put it to practice. I will break students up into groups and have them create an Instagram page and a post about a key historical event from human history. They will be responsible for choosing the photos to include, the captions, and the hashtags that go with them. This gives students a chance to challenge the bias of the past, and choose images that are more encompassing of the full story of history. 

    • Sites of History​

      • This is the second half of this project and unit is focused on the monuments and memorials around the U.S. that serve as physical representations of our history. However, before dicing into the thick of it, the students need a strong understanding of what a monument is, and to do that I will lead them through a Think-Pair-Share to give them an opportunity to build a working definition of what a monument is.

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      • Many of the monuments in the United States are associated with a level of controversy, regardless of what part of our history they serve to preserve. Before getting into the thick of it students must understand the complexity of monuments and how the biases and positionality of their creators shape the message they communicate. In order for this to be achieved students will Jigsaw three articles about Mt. Rushmore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. These three monuments represent key moments in American history, and each one of them has been a point of controversy at some point in their history. Each group will share out about what they read and we will discuss the controversial and biased history or these monuments as a class.

  • Final Product

    • For this project students will produce two final products, one individually and one in a group. For the individual product of this project, students will choose a historical idea, event, or person that they feel history has failed to give the recognition it/they deserved. Each student will create a mood board that represents key pieces of the necessary history as well as a rough draft of the monument they would create to represent the history of their idea, person, or event. After completing their mood boards, students will be intentionally grouped based on their chosen topic. They will then pitch their idea to their small group and vote on which monument will be the one the group creates a 3D rendering of. The pictures above are those 3D rendered monuments. In most instances, the groups found away to combine elements from each students original design into the groups final design. 

    • The image below is a picture from our exhibition, where students printed their 3D renderings as NFTs and displayed them with the work they had been doing in their Digital Technologies class. This served to connect the work being done in one class with that of another discipline. 

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