Inquiry Question: "What happens to students' concepts of "perspective" in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis?"
Part III, Section B: Perspective-Making In The Classroom, Student As a real or imagined individual in history“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 Equally rich artifacts supporting my inquiry come from activities where students borrowed the first-person perspective of a real or imagined individual in history when writing or dramatizing an historical analysis. Through imagined perspectives, students can explore a particular topic, such as “resistance” in a unit on slavery; through real perspectives, students can reimagine historical narratives to include people who were disempowered or underrepresented at a time—rewriting history to give voice to individuals whose voices do not appear in a popular narrative. Beach et al (79) refer to “its potential for extending student agency and shaping identities.” Thus, dramatizing the past can affect the student’s current self. I have seen the effect of borrowing perspectives as transformative—through writing or dramatization, students can take on the persona of an individual who the student, as their present self, either loathes or admires. Then the student can depart from the borrowed perspective to return to their own, and reflect on what they noticed about using someone else’s “first person” self.
“Dorothy Heathcote, who pioneered this approach, stressed the ubiquity and simplicity of dramatic activities: ‘the ability of humans to ‘become somebody else,’ to ‘see how it feels’… to ‘put yourself in my shoes’ [is a capacity that] humans employ naturally and intuitively all their lives.’ Dramatic inquiry harnesses that intuitive ability to deepen and extend students’ inquiries” (qtd. in Beach et al 70). In the context of my World History course I design activities that allow students to take on an historical person’s perspective solely through writing and drawing. Although the “dramatization” here is narrative and written, the theoretical framework for “dramatic inquiry” applies. In one activity, I used the RAFT method (Bheul 114) to define students’ role as newspaper reporters who were present at the time of the first encounter between Native Americans and Europeans in Central America. (Artifact: RAFT Newspaper Article; scroll down for original assignment.) Students collected evidence using a “reporter’s notebook” (in the form of a Taba Chart), then organized their evidence using a graphic organizer that I created to lead them through the RAFT. Students’ final product was a newspaper article about the differences between Native Americans’ and Europeans’ perspectives on what happened, and who had more power, during the groups’ first encounter in Central America. In order to encourage some creativity among students as they imagined themselves as reporters, I encouraged students to take some liberty in describing the “scene” they saw in front of them, but using historically-accurate details about what each group was likely wearing and where it took place. (Artifact: RAFT Newspaper Article; scroll down further for student work.)
In another activity in the same class, I borrowed from TCI’s interactive notebook to have students sketch three different historical perspectives on the bubonic plague in a lesson on the decline of feudalism in Europe. Using TCI’s activity for a similar lesson as my model, I created a graphic organizer with three ovals to prompt students to draw the faces of three individuals: a peasant, a knight, and a noble. Using the textbook as a source of information about how the bubonic plague affected people physically, and how the social effects of the plague varied among different social classes, students drew thought bubbles to describe in the first person what each person might have been experiencing. Students then selected one of the three perspectives from which to write a fictional diary entry. My prompt: · Write 1 page in the first person (using “I”) from the perspective of this person A selection of student work shows the range of success on this assignment. (Artifact: Feudalism Faces; scroll down for student work.) All students used the first person to some degree, however a detailed coding of data from the assignment reveals additional strengths and weaknesses in student work—much of which can be attributed to my instructions and modeling throughout the lesson. (Artifact: Feudalism Faces; scroll down further for data table and data analysis.) In response to various observations on the data—including possible confusion about how to write in the “first person,” the inclusion of students’ own/present perspective in the thought bubbles, and many students’ failure to respond to the 4th prompt—I recognize the need to more effectively model new activities, and to speak more explicitly about separating our own and our borrowed perspectives, particularly in this class. Looking at the data table from top to bottom, notice that the number of students meeting each criterium of the assignment drops. Perhaps more effective modeling through all phases of the assignment would affect the compliance, or success, demonstrated by the data.
In the context of my African American History course students have also taken a more traditional approach to dramatization, borrowing perspectives to represent physically in the first person. This recently took the form of dramatic readings. When studying the ways in which the definition of “race” has changed over time in the U.S., students prepared and performed dramatic readings of the diary of an eighteenth-century slave owner, William Byrd, who wrote quotidian journal entries about his physical abuse of his slaves. The purpose was not to glorify Byrd’s sadism, but to “dramatize whole-class inquiries about life” (Beach et al 73) at the time when Byrd was writing. As a class, we explicitly situated Byrd in the past to avoid confusion about bringing his voice into the present. Although I was nervous about whether students would be uncomfortable reading and reciting Byrd’s words as if they were their own, when we debriefed the activity students talked distinctly about their peers’ performances, and about Byrd’s beliefs about race, but did not conflate Byrd’s beliefs as if they were the student performers’. (For further analysis see Artifact: Extended Analysis of Dramatic Readings of a Slaveowner’s Diary; viewing this artifact is optional.) Beach et al (2010) explain: “In dramatic inquiry, socially imagined events and possibilities become visible in embodied action in a social space that is experienced by participants as if it is actually elsewhere: in a travel agency, in Rwanda, or in Plymouth in 1620. Additionally, social relationships and hierarchies may be playfully shaped and changed in ways that could not actually happen in everyday life, as people pretend to act as if they are other persons” (75). In another activity I asked students to write from the perspective of a slave engaging an act of resistance. I designed a lesson in our slavery unit on the theme of resistance, (one of four themes, including experience, business, and abolition), with the goal of getting students into a first person mindset to explore the experience of slaves who resisted the conditions and institutions of slavery. The lesson began with a warm up for students to list 10 ways they could resist their parents’ power, followed by a jigsaw reading of first-person narratives transcribed from WPA interviews with former slaves in the early 20th century. (Artifact: Extended Analysis of 6-Word Memoirs on Slave Resistance; see analysis for more detail; scroll down for lesson plan.) For the closing activity for the lesson I asked students to explore the perspectives they had read by writing 6-word memoirs. This activity is used more typically in English classrooms, but translated powerfully to the context of my class. Students responses are potent, and some show a very clear understanding of the conditions suffered by slaves and the motivations for or against resisting. (Artifact: 6-Word Memoirs on Slave Resistance; see examples of student work here.) The success of this exercise in serving as both a formative assessment and a closure activity for this lesson encouraged me to use the activity again later in the semester, as I explain in the following pages.
In a more recent unit in my African American History course students conducted a series of activities that asked them to use the first person to explore the experience of incarceration for the incarcerated. In the lesson following the field trip to Eastern State Penitentiary, students wrote 6-word memoirs from the perspective of a prisoner. This was not the first time that students had encountered the assignment to write 6-word memoirs, a text-rendering activity that asks students to distill a text or an idea about a text into just 6 words. The words may be a list or a sentence, but in the case of this assignment students had to write in the first person. Students responded to the prompt: “Write a 6-word memoir from the perspective of either an inmate or a guard at Eastern State Penitentiary.” (Artifact: 6-word memoirs “From the Inside.”) Students’ responses reflected the emphasis of the guided tour: more students wrote from the inmate’s perspective than the guard’s. Many examples include architectural details, which reflects the attention I asked students to pay to the prison’s physical space during the field trip. I have found 6-word memoirs to be an extremely effective tool in my classroom—both as a succinct and creative assignment for students, and as a formative assessment for me to gauge student comprehension of the perspectives I aim for them to understand. For the rest of the week following the field trip we continued to explore the perspectives of prisoners who are on the inside. Students read excerpts from four historic prison narratives written by Jack Henry Abbott (1981), Malcolm X (1965), an African American man indebted by the peonage system (1904), and a female prisoner named Teri Hancock (2011). (See Materials: Prison Narratives Reading Handout for complete excerpts.) In two different assignments, I asked students to apply their first-hand experience inside Eastern State Penitentiary, as well as their close reading of the historic prison narratives, to go deeper into the experience of incarceration. In one activity, students made presentations in small groups—they prepared a dramatic reading of a short excerpt from one of the four prison narrative readings, as well as a tableau vivant. A tableau vivant (“living picture,” or tableaux vivants, "living pictures") is an activity where students create a still-life dramatization from a scene in history. In this case, students must create a visual representation of the narratives they have read, and be able to explain the significance of the way they have positioned themselves in the scene. (Artifact: Photos of Tableaux Vivants & Dramatic Readings of Historic Prison Narratives.) The objective is for students in presenting groups to examine one narrative in particularly close detail, and for students in the audience to learn more about each narrative from their peers. Beach et al (2010) write about the significance of this activity for both the actors and the audience: “In ways similar to when young children engage in spontaneous dramatic play, as Vygotsky (1967) realized, the symbolic meaning of people’s social actions and any objects they use as multimodal tools become more important than the actual actions and objects themselves” (75). I noticed that students were able to draw on their first-hand experience inside the prison and their close reading of the historic prison narratives to dramatize the experience of incarceration through the tableaux and the dramatic reading. I saw students develop strategies for how to show the emotions, feelings, and ideas that the authors of the prison narratives only explain in writing. I saw students smiling, laughing, and questioning the tableaux and dramatic readings that their peers presented. On this day I also asked students to write an Exit Ticket about the dramatization activities, which revealed a wide range of interpretations of the success of the activity. Students’ responses on this exit ticket offer a fantastic example of the variety of intelligences among my students—some said enthusiastically that the dramatizations helped them learn, others said they gained nothing new from the activity. (Artifact: Exit Ticket on Dramatization Activities; scroll down for additional analysis.)
In addition to dramatizing the historic prison narratives, I assigned students the task of writing a one-page original prison narrative, using the first person to create a voice for a real or imagined incarcerated person. I learned as much about students’ awareness of chronology in history, during this exercise, as I did about students’ senses of creativity and about the clarity of my instructions. Students’ responses varied: some wrote narratives as if they were a prisoner inside of Eastern State Penitentiary, at least one wrote as if he were a slave or peon, and various others wrote as if they were imprisoned for crimes, such as robbing convenience stores, that situate the narratives in the present, or near it. (Artifact: Original Prison Narratives; click on images for close-up.) I am very pleased to see evidence of student learning in the original prison narratives—students borrowing physical descriptions from details they observed at Eastern State Penitentiary, or emulating narrative styles that appear in the historic prison narratives they read and dramatized for the class. In the future I would alter this assignment to include an awareness of historical context, and ask that students identify the time period from which the prisoner is writing, and require that the details about why and where they are incarcerated are historically accurate and pertinent. I think that the strength of this unit is that it asks students to explore the same question, “How does incarceration affect the incarcerated?” through various activities: reading historic prison narratives, acting out excerpts of those narratives, and creatively writing original prison narratives. In the end, it was clear that many students understood that incarceration can have a dramatic physical and psychological effect on an individual. In the future, I would spend more time creating a critical historical framework for this lesson in the context of the unit on prisons, so that students might interpret different experiences of incarceration in light of larger contexts (in addition to race), such as gender, class, and historical time period. This is a place where the pinwheel graphic organizer could have served as a consistent thread throughout the unit if, in the context of this assignment, I asked students to explain what the prisoner experienced inside prison in terms of larger societal issues at that moment in history. The unit culminated in a simulation activity that asked students to take on the perspective of one of eight roles to debate “what to do about prisoner overcrowding at Graterford prison.” Graterford is the Pennsylvania state prison located closest to Philadelphia and the center of much actual news coverage about prisoner life and working conditions as far back as the 1980s. I chose to have students focus on a contemporary, real-life example of a debate over prison expansion vs. decommission so they would have to venture into the complex web of special interests that intersect on the issue, and experiment with taking a stand on an issue that is pertinent today. I also included perspectives typically underrepresented in decision-making processes, such as the currently incarcerated and exonerees. Beach et al (2010) support the assignment of imagined roles for students’ intellectual experimentation at this stage: “Simply engaging in ‘knowing-telling,’ regurgitation activities that reify existing knowledge, affords them little opportunity to adopt alternative voices associated with the sort of ‘epistemic agency’ grounded in particular ways of framing the world, which are needed to sustain acts of change” (53). I assigned the eight roles to groups of four students to prepare collectively, and distributed research packets with 10–15 news articles about Graterford, specifically, and arguments for and against prison expansion, in general. I tailored the selection of some articles to particular roles. Students used one graphic organizer to keep track of notes while reading the articles. (Artifact: Notes Organizer for Prison Reform Commission Roles Research.) Students spent two days with the research packets and the assignment to complete a 3-page planning sheet. I designed the planning sheet to help each student develop a character or persona they would play in the simulation, and figure out what that person believed about the issue. (Artifact: Prep Sheet for Prison Reform Commission Roles.) Some aspects of the characters were “real,” such as the name and racial identity for the Mayor of Philadelphia and the Superintendent at Graterford, but most roles required students to fictionalize their “character.” In the days of preparation, I frequently answered questions about whether students were preparing their own opinions or the opinions of their “character,” so much so that I was confident at the start of the actual simulation that students understood that they would be speaking from the perspective of an individual who is not themselves.
The procedure for the Prison Reform Commission Meeting was fairly simple, with each student participating in one of four rounds of debate, so that all eight perspectives were represented in each round. Each round lasted about 10 minutes, with a one-minute break at the four-minute mark. During the breaks I called for either an unmoderated or a moderated caucus, terms I borrowed from Model United Nations proceedings. In an unmoderated caucus, anyone at the debating table could talk to anyone in the room; in a moderated caucus, anyone at the debating table could talk to only one person in the room. The unmoderated caucuses were opportunities for debaters to make strategic allies at the debate table and for observers to communicate ideas to the debaters; the moderated caucuses were opportunities for the debaters to seek the input of one observer, likely a person who had prepared the same role and could help improve their argument or tactic. In this way, everyone in the room kept character throughout the debate, even if they were not at the table. Student feedback on the debate included the following answers to my survey questions: How did it feel to take on the perspective of someone who isn't you? Was your personal perspective on the debate the same or different than the perspective of the character you took on? Students showed a great willingness to engage in dramatic inquiry during this simulation, and it was successful for reasons similar to the success of the Abolitionism Debates, described above. However in this case, when students used the first person they were not speaking as themselves, as in the abolitionism debates, but as the character assigned to them. In both the Abolitionism Debates and in this activity, a certain amount of dissociation occurred because I assigned students the positions they had to defend. I expected it to be easier for students to take on the role of a character, and argue from within it, than to argue as themselves, vying for an outcome that they might not believe in. But in the Prison Reform Commission deliberations students seemed to conflate their own perspectives with the stance of their character even more. During the various rounds of the debate, in both of my classes, a handful of the conversations seemed to slide into a debate of logic, and students seemed to make arguments based on their own opinions, not the supposed opinions of their characters. While I might have mediated this issue with better structuring of the proceedings, I think I needed to pay closer attention to this task of distinguishing between a student’s own perspective and the perspective of the character they represented. I could have devoted more time for students to prepare positions, and now see the value of an additional assignment for students to write a briefing on their character’s position, prior to the debate. Nonetheless, I believe it was worthwhile for students to continue this experimentation with borrowing perspectives that are not their own, particularly for its application beyond the classroom. “Active uses of literacy tools in meaningful experiences will create classroom spaces in which students can be aware of their potential as change agents; their agency can transform lives when working with a teacher who builds on their academic and social strengths, their cultural resources, and their desire to help others” (Beach et al 40). In the future, a lengthier unit will allow the lessons to mature, including the significance of perspective-making and the historical patterns over time. I was dissatisfied with the relatively small amount of historical content that students used during the deliberations—this is a larger issue that I discuss in more detail in the conclusion.
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