Inquiry Question: "What happens to students' concepts of "perspective" in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis?"
Part III, Section A: Perspective-Making In The Classroom, Student As Self“A person who is insensitive to the suffering of his fellows is that way because he lacks the imaginative power to get under the skin of another human being and see the world through eyes other than his own.” —Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments Through the implementation of various classroom activities and procedures I have experimented with how students’ use of their own first-person selves can help them engage with historical reasoning. From the stance of their own perspective, students can examine themselves, a present situation, a contemporary text, an historical text, or the perspective of another person in the past or present.
A pivotal instance of the benefit of using one’s own perspective in first-person reasoning occurred in my World History class in early January, when I spent one week teaching students a basic 3-step protocol for analyzing images. The mini-unit, “Introduction to Media Analysis,” was the culminating assignment for my fall seminar in Secondary English Methods. (Artifact: Fall Unit Plan (ENG): Introduction to Media Analysis; scroll down for complete unit plan.) I had developed a graphic organizer using the Library of Congress’s guidelines for teaching media analysis skills, and began the unit using that worksheet (LOC accessed 12/14/12). My classroom mentor and I noted that the original worksheet was very wordy, but decided that including more written instructions would be a better place to start than too few. After two days of using the worksheet and facing student confusion about which questions in the protocol were suggested vs. required, I took the protocol to my Penn mentor for feedback. She recommended that I make a significant change: rather than guiding students through the process with questions and directives, prompt students with sentence starters. The sentence starters she suggested for the three stages were as follows: Observe: In the image I see … The simple reframing of the media analysis worksheet to include an explicit use of the student’s own perspective seemed to put my students at ease. (Simplifying the worksheet with fewer words and adding arrows to indicate order in the procedure also improved it significantly.) (Artifact: Media Analysis Worksheet; scroll down to see both documents.) The original and revised Media Analysis Worksheets are visibly different when viewed side-by-side. By the end of that week students would immediately begin work on the protocol when I displayed an image to analyze and distributed the worksheet. I have used the protocol regularly throughout the semester, and it has become a tool in which students express confidence—they are attentive to the work, eager to share their findings, and talk about their enjoyment of analyzing old and contemporary images.
I am finding that allowing students to be themselves in class falls naturally within the domain of historical reasoning when allowing students to speak, write, and demonstrate what they think. In the previous example, the sentence starters used the first person to remind students to begin an analysis with an awareness of themselves as the viewer—this also emphasizes the subjectivity of analytic interpretation. When we reviewed a media analysis protocol as a whole class, I assured students repeatedly that it was OK to note observations that no one else mentioned. Another example of first-person reasoning is personal narratives, which I use in class for students to explore content-related and community-related topics. Beach (2010) writes: “Personal narratives are the stories people tell to make sense of their experiences. … The function of narrative is not merely to transparently record and depict reality “as it is,” in some unmediated or pristine state. It is, rather, one of the primary tools by which agents interpret and constitute the world” (60). Using personal narratives, students write from their “own social location” (Beach 61) to actualize themselves as actors in the historical record, and in their own lives. This is significant in the context of a classroom, wherein students are often limited by teachers’ authority over what is appropriate to contribute, and when. An extraordinary amount of agency exists in the creation of a narrative, wielding power over silence and misrepresentation by others. Inviting students to write from their own perspectives can “signal to students both the human and academic value of their own experiences” (Beach et al 66.)
In a warm up activity that previewed a lesson on the effect of the Bubonic Plague on feudalism in Europe, I asked my World History students to describe “an event that changed your life.” Students’ responses revealed a rich history of life-changing events, such as coming out about one’s sexuality, the illness of a parent, or the violent death of a sibling. (Artifact: Warm Up on an Event that Changed Your Life.) Students’ personal engagement with the warm up prompted their attention to the day’s lesson. In another instance, I invited my African American History students to write first person narratives about a non-content-related topic, what Beach calls “reflective writing” (118). Earlier this semester an NCHS student died in a car accident—she was a member of the magnet community in the 11th grade, and was a friend or acquaintance of a handful of my African American History students. At the end of the first school day after the student’s death, I overheard a student in my seventh period class talking about the death during a transition in the lesson. He told his group mates that he could not believe that he had gone through an entire day without a single teacher mentioning the death. I stopped the class when I heard his comment, and asked the whole class about whether or not they had talked about it at all. I did not disagree with the student—it was strange that an administrator had not made an announcement or called for a moment of silence, and I too had not heard teachers talking with students about it. Some students responded that one or two of their teachers had mentioned it, or held a moment of silence in their own classrooms, but many students said that no adult had brought it up. I asked students to take out a sheet of paper for a free write. My prompt: “How do you want teachers and administrators at NCHS to talk about the death of a student?” I told the class that this would not be a part of their grade, it was simply a way to help me understand what they needed in this moment. (Artifact: Exit Ticket on the Death of a Student.) Students’ responses were fantastically honest, and fell on a wide spectrum of interpretations. The next morning, I provided the same prompt to my first period class. In response to students’ writing in both classes, I held a 2-minute moment of silence at the end of each period. Students’ personal narratives about an issue pertinent to their immediate lives contributed to the development of a more responsive classroom community. Student’s use of the first person also functions to situate themselves in their own perspective when regarding history. In a recent lesson on the widespread practice of convict leasing used by white southern business owners and state governments between the Civil War and WWII, I asked students to write an exit ticket so I could gauge their understanding of the material, and discern which topics I needed to clarify. This was a formative assessment that allowed me to examine both their personal opinion of the topic, and their comprehension of the concepts. My prompt: “What are your initial reactions to the ideas of convict leasing and peonage? Where do these ideas fit with your understanding of Jim Crow?” In this instance, students’ use of the first person allowed me to assess not just comprehension, but perception as well. I was very excited to find some students explicate self-awareness of the difference between their present perspective on the topic and what they thought might have made sense at the moment in history we were discussing. In this exercise, using the first-person seemed to help students qualify their evaluation of history in terms of “then” and “now,” but an opposite effect has emerged elsewhere, when students’ “presentism” seems to limit their ability to contextualize the past outside of their own experience and values. This is a dynamic that I will continue to pay attention to as I develop my understanding of the effect of first-person reasoning on historical reasoning. In another example of students’ use of the first person from their own “social location” (Beach et al 61) when critically examining the past, students prepared one of two sides for a debate. My prompt: “Who was a more effective abolitionist: John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison?” I decided to have students prepare just one side of the debate—a decision motivated by the need to save paper that I would not make again due to student feedback on feeling “blind” to the other side’s arguments—and they did not have a choice of sides. Students prepared arguments over the course of 1.5 days in class in response to readings that I assigned as homework, and we spent 2 days debating in class. At first, students complained that they were not comfortable defending a position that they did not personally believe in, but I did not allow them to switch sides. I stuck to this because I believe that a key component of cultural and critical literacy is the ability to conceive of perspectives that are not one’s own. In this exercise, students had to negotiate between their own perspectives and those of the assigned position. We conducted the debates in a Fishbowl format, where six students—3 representing each position—traded arguments for 4–5 minutes, while the rest of the class looked on from a surrounding ring of desks, and took notes on the debaters’ arguments and approach. As this was my first time facilitating a fishbowl-format activity, I was very excited to see it play out in a way that was anything other than a disaster. Since I am finally in the position of teaching two sections of the same class, I can try an activity 1st period, reflect upon how it went, and try again 7th period, either keeping the same plan or adapting it according to how the morning went. The personalities of my two classes differ greatly, and the same activities tend to go over better in 7th than in 1st—I have a feeling this is largely because I’m more confident in my instructions the second time through. This observation held true in the case of the fishbowl, for which the procedures were smoother the second time around. Additional factors are simply the time of day, and the chemistry among the students in the class. Seventh period is alive, animated, and various; first period is quiet, if not disinterested, and only a couple of students’ attitudes vary from a norm. The activity reminded me that fishbowls are better suited for discussions than debates, but it worked well for the sake of demonstrating the process of argumentation to prove a point, where the full class could reflect on one case, rather than working in small groups. For the sake of consistency and alignment with my lesson plans, I will continue to refer to the exercise as a “debate,” although in reality it was simply a staged discussion. I very much wish that I had recorded audio of the debates for use as artifacts; in lieu of video or audio, I relied on my observation notes and written feedback from my classroom mentor. (For a longer version of the same analysis, see Artifact: Extended Analysis of Abolitionism Debates; viewing this artifact is optional.) The power of debates is their validation of students’ use of their own perspectives—both personal opinions and interpretations of texts—in the classroom setting. Even for students who did not personally believe the stances they were assigned to represent, the act of embodying that perspective contributed to the learning goals of the entire class. In a final example of students’ use of their own perspective to make sense of the past, the final unit I taught my African American History students was a project-based unit on the purpose of prisons in the U.S. (Artifact: Spring Unit Plan (AAH): Purpose of Prisons in the U.S.; see UbD at this link; find sample lesson plans in the drop-down menu.) The unit includes an examination of the convict-leasing system in the U.S. south during the eighty years between the Civil War and WWII, a field trip to Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and a full-class simulation of a Prison Reform Commission Meeting, among other activities. The field trip to Eastern State Penitentiary was a huge success—the logistics were smooth, the guided tour contributed to student learning, and students seemed to enjoy themselves greatly. (Artifact: Photos from Field Trip to Eastern State Penitentiary.) The lesson plan for the field trip included two writing assignments that asked students to consider the psychological and physical impact of the prison’s architecture on people incarcerated there: 1. EULOGY: Write a 5–7 sentence “Eulogy to Eastern State Penitentiary,” commemorating the building in its glory day, including its architecture and its inmates, and noting the building’s demise. Students’ work shows their attention to their own experience of the prison’s physical space, both in the eulogies and the free writes. (Artifact: Eulogy to Eastern State Penitentiary; and Artifact: Free Write on Prison Architecture.) In the future, I would keep the eulogy assignment as-is, but change the free write to be in the first person, and add an opening assignment for students to sketch physical features of the prison. I believe the sketching would help students use more visually-descriptive language in their eulogies, and better situate them as first-person observers during the field trip.
Another significant learning occurred for me in the process of debriefing the field trip with the class the following day. I realized that in the future, this unit could benefit from more attention to more traditional historical thinking, such as cause and effect and chronology. The tour guides had laid out many examples of how different changes over time to the prison’s architecture corresponded with societal and cultural shifts outside the prison’s walls. For example, when prohibition laws went into effect, Eastern State Penitentiary constructed a new cellblock to accommodate the huge spike in prison population. This correspondence between what goes on outside and inside the prison emerged as a theme that could better tie together various parts of the unit. In conversation with my CM and another student teacher who chaperoned the trip, we developed a graphic organizer that allowed students to visualize these relationships. (Artifact: Annotated Lesson Plan 1; scroll down to “Personal Reflection” on page 5/6 in the embedded document.) During the body of the first lesson following the field trip, I asked students to individually “list 5 things you noticed or read about the physical shape and design of Eastern State Penitentiary.” Students then compared their lists as small groups before we came together as a class. As a full class students copied the pinwheel graphic organizer into their notebooks, and I modeled filling in the diagram using students’ observations from earlier in the lesson. (Artifact: Pinwheel Graphic Organizer; scroll down to see two different versions.) Although this element of the lesson occurred in the third person, it is important for me to note the various ways in which students drew upon their firsthand experience to make historical sense of prisons. While the eulogy and free write assignments did not ask students to write in the first person, they did prime students’ imaginations for a larger assignment due later the same week. The trip allowed students to stand inside of former prison cells, view the prison’s exterior walls from the inside, and imagine what life was like for inmates at that prison. That takes us to another domain of first-person perspective-making, wherein the student borrows the first-person persona of a real or imagined individual in history to make sense of what happened in the past. |