My final project is to teach historical thinking using the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. The intended audience is the freshmen of college. This is one activity of a history course. Due to the limited time, my focus is to use the images such as posters, postcards and pictures to teach students to capture and analyze the information they can get from the images such as time, author and caption. The images are selected from both suffragist side and anti-suffragist sides. Through these images, the students will have the knowledge of women’s suffrage, what different groups people thought of the movement and why they thought so. The activity aims to train students to understand and interpret history using the primary sources from the time and imagining themselves as part of the time period. The possible difficulty for some students is to understand why some women opposed women’s suffrage and major anti-suffrage organizations and movements were led and supported by women. But this is the point of the activity that with historical thinking training, students will be able to understand the social ethos of the time, use the facts to interpret the history, and ease “the tension between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity to and feelings of distance from the people we seek to understand” (Sam Wilburg).
The platform is Omeka. Students will see the activity schedule, brief history of women’s suffrage movements, samples of how to capture and analyze information of images of women’s suffrage, group discussion of a few exercises, and a final project each individual needs to do. As there are a lot of images and pieces of text, Omeka fits the best. I am currently building this website and slightly modifying some of my original ideas to fit the technology. After building the site, I will ask some people to test using it and I will listen to their feedback to make the website run more smoothly.
