O Say Can You See?

Old patterns, new socks: A DIY story

It’s a little tough to find a Civil War sock . . . that a few hundred people can touch each year. The museum does a lot of hands-on activities for visitors and teachers. Of course, being a museum with objects that we’re trying to preserve, the “hands-on” part often involves turning to our teaching collection.

To obtain these objects, we find ourselves at flea markets, scouring eBay, or slogging through our relatives’ attics, but sometimes the objects we need are just a little too expensive or hard to find. So we find ourselves making our own replicas.

My latest adventure in this vein was making a sock for my colleague’s Civil War activity cart, not unlike this one. She found a great poster requesting that knitters create socks for the soldiers on the front-line to contribute to the Sanitary Commission. But the appropriate sock was elusive—either the stripes weren’t as prescribed on the poster’s instructions or the socks included elastic (not available until after the Civil War). So as one of the office’s resident knitters, I learned a few new knitting skills and made a red-white-and-blue striped sock of pure wool.

I started off with a web search for “Civil War sock knitting pattern.” That didn’t turn up any free patterns that made sense to me, so I moved up a little in history, and found a great WWII pattern from the Red Cross. I checked with the educator on the Civil War cart, and none of the features of the WWII sock made it inappropriate for our context.

My sock! Knitted using a WWII pattern from the Red Cross. A bit anachronistic, but it was the earliest pattern with instructions that made sense to my 21st-century brain.

Unlike the artifacts in the museum’s collection of military history uniforms, this new sock can be handled by visitors, can get a little grubby, and will someday be thrown out after it has fulfilled its usefulness. But it will give visitors a sensory connection to this bit of history. Cart facilitators can talk about the stripe pattern (used to distinguish socks from that region of the country) or about how many hours a knitter might have spent contributing to the war effort from the comfort of their hearths (it took me about 15 hours).

I’ve known plenty of teachers who have DIY’ed their way to a more robust teaching collection. Some teachers have tea-stained copies of the Declaration of Independence, or home-baked hardtack. What homemade creations have you brought into your classroom to bring history to life? Or what hobby could you turn into a teaching collection item for your child’s classroom?

Jenny Wei is an Education Specialist with the Department of Education and Interpretation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. 

Teaching Constitution Day

Editor’s note: This post was written by the museum’s Summer Teacher Associate. Each year, we bring one teacher to work with our education team for the summer, to develop new activities and provide input on education projects and products in development.

A discussion about teaching on Constitution Day from Verizon Thinkfinity’s online community.

On any given day in late August, our social studies department chair will announce that Constitution Day is approaching (observed on September 16 this year) and we teachers need to be thinking about what we are going to do in honor of this event. Unfortunately, teachers are on a strict schedule—in several Georgia counties, teachers have 177 days to get through an entire course curriculum to make sure students are prepared for statewide exit exams, AP tests, and countless other benchmarks. It is difficult to stop with what you are teaching, talk about the Constitution, and then pick up with where you left off without confusing the majority of your students.

In some cases, it isn’t too hard for a teacher to include Constitution Day activities in class. For example, if one is teaching U.S. history or government, Constitution Day falls during a convenient time of year: the curriculum is paced in such a way that most U.S. history instructors will be teaching the development of our country around that time, so everything naturally falls into place. But what about those of us teaching world history, geography, economics, psychology, or sociology? It’s not so easy to take a day out of your unit on Ancient India to discuss the U.S. Constitution. Many teachers can creatively make a leap that “makes sense” to us, but most students are left wondering what that was all about.

The "A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution"  website traces the history of Japanese American confinement during World War II.

Many teachers (including myself) are bombarded with resources for teaching Constitution Day, most of which are wonderful and very engaging for students. However, it would be great to see some cross-curricular resources for Constitution Day that include lessons for those of us teaching the various other social studies courses. As I discussed this issue during the summer with members of the History Explorer team at the National Museum of American History, they were able to offer me valuable insight and perspective on my dilemma. If teaching about Hinduism, why not include, for example, the concept of freedom of religion in my lesson? I appreciated the input and fresh ideas and it led me to thinking more and more about how this important day could be incorporated in every class despite the subject.

As Constitution Day is now quickly approaching, I find that I will once again be in a rather inconvenient place in time during my world history classes. However, I find that a different way of thinking about the mandated lessons might actually turn into “teaching gold,” allowing me to make connections and build relevancy in ways that I had never thought possible. I hope that at the next social studies team meeting, I am able to impart a new way of thinking about our Constitution, and all the different avenues available that make the Constitution applicable to all subjects and all students.

What great ideas do you have for Constitution Day?

Kacie Kratzert is a teacher at Milton High School in Alpharetta, Georgia and was the National Museum of American History’s 2011 Summer Teacher Associate. To find resources for teaching Constitution Day, visit Smithsonian’s History Explorer or theThinkfinity Community.

 

Essential questions for teaching September 11

Editor’s note: This post is by Joan Brodsky Schur, an education consultant and participant in the August 3 opening panel discussion for September 11: Teaching Contemporary History, the museum’s online conference for K-12 educators about September 11.

In these beautiful summer days of August 2011 the last thing I want is to revisit the day of September 11, 2001, in New York City, where I still live. As the school year opens many teachers, wherever they live across the United States, may feel the way I do. But we need to go down the hole of one of history’s darkest days in order to come up with some light to shed on it for our students this September.

Here are a few suggestions I can make after considerable thought about teaching in the 10th year of our post-September 11 world. First, be clear about your goals. Memorializing is a way to express shared grief, to honor lost lives and those who tried to rescue them. By creating works of art, singing appropriate songs, and participating in public service activities, students of all ages can forge a renewed sense of community within their school and beyond. But after memorializing we must also teach history, especially to secondary students who can begin to contextualize it.

A damaged American flag found by a recovery worker in the World Trade Center debris at the Staten Island recovery site.

Teachers justifiably wonder about finding the time to teach about September 11. One way is look for those essential questions that can help us to compare aspects of September 11 to other events in American history as we teach them throughout the year. I have identified five essential questions, targeted toward secondary students, that will hopefully prove useful in this ongoing endeavor.

1. What accounts for the resiliency and spirit of volunteerism in the United States?
The American Revolution, Great Depression, and World War II come to mind. In New York City on September 11 governmental agencies at all levels responded to an unprecedented emergency; so did ordinary citizens. At Battery Park over half a million people were ferried to safety by fireboats, yacht cruises, sightseeing boats, and tugs. A similar event occurred on the night of August 29, 1776, during the Battle of Long Island. American forces, pinned down by the British in Brooklyn were ferried to safety in Manhattan by what David McCullough calls “a makeshift emergency armada assembled in a matter of hours.”

2. The United States government needs to protect the safety of its citizens while also protecting our civil liberties. What is the proper balance between the two?
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and the Espionage and Sabotage Acts passed by Congress during World War I can be compared to the USA PATRIOT Act, and the “detention centers” like Guantanamo Bay. Each of these efforts to protect citizens may have seemed justified in a moment of fear, but how is their constitutionality judged over time?

3. Under what circumstances is military intervention justified?
President Roosevelt’s War Message to Congress of December 8, 1941, can be compared to President Bush’s Address to Congress of September 20, 2001, and declaration of war against Iraq on March 20, 2003, in terms of how each one meets or does not meet the criteria used in “Just War Theory.” These criteria include just cause, right intention, proper authority, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality. (See a lesson plan I wrote on Franklin Roosevelt and Just War Theory.)

4. Once at war, how should the United States protect citizens who are at risk for reprisal?
These groups include the French during the French Revolution, Germans during World War I and II, and the Japanese, who were placed in internment camps during World War II. In the wake of September 11, Japanese Americans advocated for the need to protect the rights of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. For resources on considering the experience of Japanese internees, visit the museum’s website A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution

5. What should be the relationship of the United States to the international world order?
Over time Americans have both rejected and accepted membership in/adherence to the League of Nations following World War I, the Geneva Conventions—which in 1949 delineated the humane treatment of prisoners during wartime—the establishment of the United Nations after World War II. How does the Bush doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” following September 11 fit into this ongoing debate about the role of the United States in the world order?

Joan Brodsky Schur was a panelist for the Smithsonian’s online conferenceSeptember 11: Teaching Contemporary History. For more thoughts on the issues to consider when teaching about September 11, view the panel discussion The Past, Present, and Future of September 11

 

Teaching September 11: History or current event?

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series exploring the 10th anniversary of September 11. Learn about the museum’s commemoration.

Last fall, as the museum’s education team began thinking about our plans for the 10th anniversary of September 11, we started a conversation with the Thinkfinity online community about how teachers approach September 11 and what materials they need to discuss it with students. We received a number of interesting responses, including this one:

“[t]his year’s 9th graders were in kindergarten in 2001—and know very little about the day’s events . . . Even though it is a ‘current event’ for me, it is ‘history’ for them.”

While there were also many requests for basic information about the events of the day, this issue remained an essential one: for teachers, September 11 may still be a raw experience, whereas for students, it may barely be a faint memory. So we tried to think about how to bridge teachers’ personal experiences with September 11 with students’ understanding of the event. What lessons can we draw about an event just ten years out, and how do we recognize the different perspectives of the day? This touched upon something we as educators and as historians must grapple with: when does something become “history”? When have we achieved enough distance from an event to consider it “historically”?

Through our conversations with teachers, we decided to develop a two-day online conference, September 11: Teaching Contemporary History, with fellow educators at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the Pentagon Memorial and the Flight 93 National Memorial to both address the events of the day and to think about how we interpret it as time goes on. The conference will include a roundtable discussion with content experts and an educator on “The Past, Present, and Future of September 11,” and another with two child psychologists and two family members of September 11 victims on “Discussing Difficult Topics with Young People.” Individual conference sessions will include examinations of classroom materials at each site, an introduction to memorials as storytellers, a discussion of the work of curators with a special focus on collecting recent history, and more. To view the full program, visit the website.

In response to the educators who requested information about the events of September 11, the conference website includes frequently asked questions about September 11 and timelines from each memorial site, along with related educational materials. We hope this will turn into a “one stop shop” of useful, accurate materials about September 11.

For those unable to participate on August 3 and 4, and recognizing that some teachers may discuss this in September while others may teach it at other times of the year, the program will be archived and available on the conference website. You may contact us or continue the conversation in the Thinkfinity Community groupspecifically designed for discussions about teaching September 11. We look forward to discussing this important topic with you.

Naomi Coquillon is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.

 

History in 140 characters

Although I’m a member of the online outreach team at the museum, over the last few months I’ve given a number of in-person workshops for teachers, in which I mention the museum’s Twitter feed for educators, @explorehistory. Given the number of educators I see on Twitter, and the growing emphasis on developing a Personal or Professional Learning Network that I’ve noticed at conferences, I was surprised to find that only about 10% of any teacher group I meet in person is active on Twitter, though many are on Facebook (although this statistic is in line with a recent study on Twitter use conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project).

When I discuss Twitter in workshops, responses range from “I just don’t have time for that—it’s enough to keep up with email and Facebook” to “you just can’t have a conversation on Twitter.” And I understand. I wasn’t always so fond of Twitter. I wondered how I would ever say anything useful in 140 characters. As history educators, many of the teachers I met found the shortened communication of Twitter unsatisfying. If the soul of our work is to help students evaluate information and discuss and debate it, how could Twitter help? At least on Facebook you can have a conversation. Right?

What I’ve come to love as I use Twitter, and the value I share with these teachers, is being exposed to more thought-provoking articles than I ever had before, and learning of new resources just as soon as they become available. Twitter may not be the venue they choose for conversation—though plenty of educators use Twitter for mock conversations between historical or fictional characters—but it’s a great place to find the material to spark discussions and classroom activities. Of course, that’s the goal of our Twitter feed for educators — to provide our followers with the latest news about our resources or great material from other institutions, as well as being a way to get in touch with us.

The more I look for educator thoughts about Twitter, the more I find, including a discussion posted by the coordinator of the online community run by our partner, Verizon Thinkfinity, “Why Use Twitter? Tell Us Your Tips” on this same topic, which referenced a useful blog post, “The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery” that encapsulated the reasons I was growing to love Twitter. I noticed that the teachers in the Thinkfinity online community were using Twitter creatively, too (a great example is this presentation, “Thirty Interesting Ways to Use Twitter”) and that teachers were commenting on their Twitter use even beyond our social media channels. In a recent teacher survey we conducted, I found this comment from a teacher, extolling the virtues of Twitter: “I teach modern World Cultures to 6th graders in Texas. I use the Twitter feed to find, locate, bookmark, and share things with my students. I try to tweet in class with the students at least once every other week, but use my twitter feed to share things the museum is doing.” And as I was writing this post, I came across this blog post, “Help a Fellow Teacher Get on Twitter” with links to guides for using Twitter.

So, for our educator friends not on Twitter, I encourage you to consider joining. To get started and find great folks to follow, you can check out the EduBlog Award winners, search for #sschat or #historyteacher in Twitter to find out who’s talking about history education, and be sure to include @explorehistory and @amhistorymuseum on your list!

Naomi Coquillon is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.