This week, I have been researching for the teaching sources for women’s suffrage movement and planning the different parts of this teaching. I have nailed most of the primary sources I will use for my digital project and the lesson plan is there will be four parts:
- The first part is the introduction of the course, objectives, and a few images that may spark students’ interest in finding history in images and women’s suffrage movement in the U.S.
- The second part is history learning of women’s suffrage movement. Due to the limited time and the aim of the course, the scope of this section will be limited to a crash course video, pro-and anti-suffrage argument and their primary sources including images, letters and
- The third part is image analysis. It will give two examples of image analysis and then will ask students to do their own. After that, students will be divided into groups and discuss the work. Because students can not leave comments and do crowdsourcing on Omeka, I will create a facebook page to display the results of students’ discussions in one or a few posts. Besides these posts, under each image I upload, students can also leave comments, share links and exchange ideas. The facebook page can also serve as a showcase of historical thinking lesson to other teachers and students.
- The last part is assignment, the final project. In this project, students have the opportunity to show their historical thinking ability. They can analyze images of women’s suffrage movement, write a letter imagining he/she was a certain person at the time. Or write a play interpreting or reconstruct an event at the time. Students are free to pick a role but need to be specific because as Dr.Schrum reminded me, different people have different viewpoints. Students can also divide this role-playing along a racial line. The student can imagine he or she is a black woman, interpreting history from both woman and racial perspectives.
After browsing all the students work of previous class and the history education projects, I get clearer about my project such as form, scope and potential challenges. I am impressed with their creativity and the diversity of the forms of the projects. Because my project is women’s suffrage which includes both texts and images, I find https://powerofpersuasion.omeka.net/ and http://trials.erinbush.org/ are extremely useful examples for my project. They are the ideal forms I had in mind when I first planned the project. Erin Bush’s platform is wordpress, and she embeded many webpages and links in it. Pethel’s project on Elizabeth I is based on Omeka. These two projects had me think and hesitate about which platform I would use. I finally decided to use Omeka because I am more familiar with it and I have a lot of images in the project.
The next step is building the project on Omeka. I have found all the primary sources I need and made a draft lesson plan. So, the next step is to realize my ideas and solve the problems along the way.
