Voice and Vote

Throughout our history, people have fought for the right to vote.  In 2020, much like in years past, voting rights cannot be taken for granted.  How do we teach kids about expressing their voices, prepare them to become the voters of the future, and help them to see ways they can take action right now?

An inquiry by fifth grade teacher, Karen Halverson, excerpted from Inquiry Illuminated: Researcher’s Workshop Across the Curriculum (Goudvis, Harvey, Buhrow, Heinemann, 2019).

These essential questions guide this inquiry 

We begin with essential questions about voice, voting, and the history of the struggle for voting rights. We ask students to consider:

Essential questions for the unit are shared in the classroom.

Students read a variety of picture books and then break into small groups to discuss them. They respond on a shared Padlet or other interactive tools like the shared Google Slide below.  

Digital sticky notes

Students leave tracks of their thinking with digital sticky notes on a shared Google Slide.

Resources

Left to Right: Granddaddy’s Turn: A Journey to the Ballot Box; Heart on Fire: Susan B. Anthony Votes for President; Lillian’s Right to Vote

Picture books like these, as well as other resources like the ones listed below, engage students and help them learn about voting issues throughout history. These stories highlight how people have fought for the right to vote.

Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot

Videos such as Selma: the Bridge to the Ballot (Teaching Tolerance) immerse kids in the struggle for voting rights in the 1960s. 

The Split History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement

Historical sources such as The Split History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement provide different perspectives on women’s lack of equal rights in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

Students respond to these resources in their notebooks. They use a Gist / Thinking scaffold to learn synthesize new information and respond with their thoughts and questions. Their illustrations highlight the important ideas in the books and videos they view and read.

An example of a student notebook.

Once students build up a strong knowledge base, the class can demonstrate their understanding by creating a timeline of the history of voting rights. Other aspects of voting rights history can be researched in depth, like the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese immigrants from voting, or the steps taken through U.S. history to keep Native Americans from participating in government. Here is an example of a shared Padlet page where students contributed posts to a voting rights timeline. Teachers can model by adding initial posts and students do further research before adding their own.

Taking Action

Eventually, students may want to take action. Connect with a nearby high school or college so younger students can encourage older students to register or vote, perhaps for the first time. Connect with local organizations that are sharing information about voting during the pandemic or reminding citizens of voter ID laws in their state.

Students can research different ways to help get out the vote, like Karen Halverson’s class of 5th graders did. They created posters and placards, realizing they could take their persuasive messages to a nearby university campus to encourage students there to vote.

Indigenous Peoples Day: Resources

Many cities and states around the country are choosing to honor the resiliency and contributions of indigenous peoples to United States history in place of the legacy of Christopher Columbus. It is especially important for classrooms to allow space for this conversation in October and November, as the legacy of Columbus as well as the prevailing myth of Thanksgiving take up space and time in the national narrative.

Here are some resources for classroom discussions and literacy lessons.

Younger Grades

Taino Children’s Books to Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day

In addition to the many books above, including some Spanish books, check out Nina Jaffe’s The Golden Flower: A Taíno Myth from Puerto Rico. There are videos of the book being read aloud online for these remote learning times.

Anne also recommends leading a read-aloud from Jane Yolen’s Encounter. This challenging book offers an excellent lead into the idea of perspective-taking, and its figurative language offers students good practice with the strategies of questioning, visualizing, and inferring.

Older Grades

A few selected texts for older students and educators. Honoring Indigenous Peoples Day can serve as an important catalyst for more detailed conversations around Native American resiliency and contributions to United States history.

For older grades, consider honoring Indigenous Peoples Day and looking at the history of holidays in the U.S. and how national historical narratives are created over time. Centering the discussion on the indigenous peoples who shepherd the land today as well as in the past is essential in order to avoid the impression that Native American life and contributions were merely a thing of the past. Share articles like this one about the recent fires in California about the leadership role that indigenous groups continue to play in land stewardship and ecological conservation.

Another option is setting up a “flash debate” on the topic of Indigenous Peoples Day or Columbus Day. Students can listen to one of the multimedia links below to build background information, then read and identify evidence for each argument using this Newsela article, and then prepare their own points for a flash debate the next day in class.

Flash Debate Google Doc Templates

Here are a few other multimedia resources for students during these remote learning

And finally, here are additional resources for educators

Why do we educate?

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

— John Dewey

With the end of another school year approaching, we’ve been thinking a lot about our line of work. What does it mean, in this day and age, to be an educator? It makes us wonder: what did it mean, ever, to be an educator? Has it all really changed that much over the past century or so? The past millennium?
Spend a few days in a classroom and it is easy to lose sight of what Dewey said above. As teachers are asked to do more and more, often that can mean less and less focus on learning about life, or learning for life. On the best of days, we can close the classroom door and really get kids to dig into figuring out who they are, where they stand in this world, and what they are going to do with their passions and abilities.
We are offered a front row ticket to this incredible spectacle. It can be terrifying and nerve racking if you really sit back a moment and think about it. An educator’s responsibility and influence can be momentous, even life altering, although we might be too humble to admit it. And for that we get paid the big bucks.
But really — when it comes down to it — what is an educator’s goal? It is to give kids the tools to be engaged, compassionate and energetic people on this planet? When we watch a news story about a tragedy that occurred nearby, or when a death or illness or threat to one of our kids’ families comes through the door one morning, we have no choice but to examine life and society.
We do this in an immediate way, examining our community. And we must do it in a global way, because the world is an interconnected place. It can be overwhelming and exhausting. Remember, it is the kids you teach who yearn for this understanding, who crave and need to learn about the world and how to navigate it. Whether or not it is fair or just or right, kids need and want to know. And it is our job to afford them that opportunity. To offer every student a daily look at life and what it has in store for them, both tough and sad, and lovely and hopeful.

Strategy Lesson: New Learning

Getting kids excited about their learning is one of the greatest joys we teachers get to experience. Often, with all our other requirements, days can pass between moments of this palpable excitement. A lesson this week sharing two of Steph and Anne’s lessons from their Comprehension Toolkit rekindled that passion for learning. Here’s a brief summary.

Strategy Lesson

  • We combined two: merging thinking with new learning and connecting the new to the known

Text

  • Her Right Foot, the fantastic new picture book by Dave Eggers and illustrator Shawn Harris about the Statue of Liberty (as usual, the text choice here is essential to guide students towards meaningful, engaged thinking)

Response

  • A simple two column chart where students note “What I Think I Know” and “What I Learned”

Start with a brief turn-and-talk to stoke kids’ interest. What do you know about the Statue of Liberty?

Then begin by modeling your own ideas. This can be as simple or complex as you like. We went with the straightforward: it’s green, tall, and in NYC. Kids who know about it as a gift from France will be hooked and bursting to share.

Note these thoughts in the “What I Think I Know” section and then delight in reading the pages that follow. The book heads to France for the first few pages, but the pages are filled with interesting details for you to model your “new learning.” The authors reveal that the statue was originally designed to be copper, and you have a nice opportunity to show kids about how reading can change our knowledge. We have to be open to learn new information or alter our previous understanding.

This is a great point for kids to take over and read on their own, or if you’re working on a limited book budget and have just one copy, continue the interactive read aloud and let kids begin to note their own ideas. Remind students that the column is “what I think I know” so we need to be open to adjusting our prior misconceptions! (This flexibility of mindset is as important in language arts as other areas of the curriculum and can offer an example of how we “learn from our mistakes” in reading.)

After some practice, the book switches gears. The title, after all, is quite intriguing. Why talk about Lady Liberty’s FOOT?! Why not all the other interesting parts of the statue (like the crown with seven spikes representing the seven seas and seven continents of the world)?

And after all that practicing noting new learning, the central theme of the book is deftly revealed. Kids can talk and respond about the symbolism behind the statue. In the next lessons, ask kids to explore other books about the statue or immigration. Draw connections between the message we send to many immigrants today and the message we would like to send as a country and community.

This lesson, and this book, is a great entry point into a deeply researched and focused inquiry project on the history of immigration. The writing is moving and the illustrations filled with tiny details to keep kids’ thinking bursting to the fore. And in the end the message is about inclusion and opportunity, freedom and progress.

When everything comes together…

Once in a while, you just have that moment, that lesson as a teacher that makes you so happy to be in the presence of insightful and caring students. Sometimes these moments fall early on the year, and change the tenor of a class; less frequently they might arrive at the end of the year, just when you think students have checked out and are ready to move on.

This moment for me came after a year of significant focus on issues of diversity and equity. Given a chance to do a year of professional development with a cohort of teachers to examine our own and our school’s practices with diversity and equity, I jumped at the chance and quickly worked hard to put into practice what I learned every month or so.

I changed the lens through which I examined my curriculum and made as many changes as I could. New books showing new perspectives. Lessons critically examining the words and information included (and not included) in our social studies textbook. Working hard to set a careful tone of respectful and open class dialogue.

In the perfect storm of a Monday afternoon social studies block, this all came together. We had just read through Don Tate’s wonderful picture book about George Moses Horton, one of the first published African American poets and writers in the South before the Civil War. Horton, who was enslaved, taught himself to read and write and then used his prodigious talent to get paid for his writing, meaning he could have some semblance of freedom working and writing and living on his own most of the time, even though he remained enslaved.

The book is exactly the incredible story that encourages discussion, but it was not until each student read and annotated Tate’s brilliant author’s note that the discussion really went to an entirely different level. Writing about his own experience as an illustrator and author, Tate describes how he was reluctant early in his career to take on books about slavery. He felt he learned about this and only this topic growing up. As a result, he felt ashamed of his heritage. It took years, he writes, to realize the pride in the resilience of other African Americans in the face of almost incomprehensible cruelty.

My students were fascinated by his admissions as a writer and we dove into the complex nature of what it means to be black, or white, or brown, or Jewish, or female and learn about difficult issues in history. My students wanted to know why Tate was “the only brown face in a sea of white.” One student chillingly recounted a documentary he saw where a black student explained that his teacher had turned to him every time the topic of slavery came up in class to explain for everyone else what it was like, no matter that the boy was not alive at that time and had no more knowledge of the terrible institution than any other student in that class.

We wondered why “white kids snickered and made jokes about [slavery]” and why, as Tate adds, “Sometimes, black kids did too.” In four successive answers, students explained that: 1) perhaps it was because these students Tate mentioned were uncomfortable talking about a difficult topic; 2) that perhaps these students did not fully understand or were learning about it for the first time; 3) that perhaps it showed that students “really felt bad about history and almost it made them feel badly about themselves” (leading into a brief discussion of internalized oppression); and 4) that perhaps these students did what a lot of people do, which is go along with one person being mean or inappropriate. The class dialogue continued as we made connections to this article and the discussions we’ve had around antisemitism and the treatment of Jews in WWII during our reading of Number the Stars.

Finally, when we read Tate write: “But as I read the stories and studied the history of my people, I had a change of heart. I decided that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and much to feel proud about.” We all observed the new bookshelf that I put together and we noticed the different topics, many of them involving tough times in history, but many also involving an inspiring story about an essential world leader like Nelson Mandela or the ingenuity of one young boy in Malawi to build windmills and help his family survive. We looked at a portrait of Sonia Sotomayor and then considered how Freedom over me shows many perspectives on what it might have been like to be enslaved, and that, of course, every person who went through this experience showed inconceivable resilience by dreaming of a better time ahead or for their children and also the pride in having a skill and a trade and to feel important.

The conversation took an hour and we covered four paragraphs. Yet I got choked up thinking about the empathy and attentiveness with which my fourth grade class went about these often terrible, incredibly complex discussions. I was delighted to hear the voices of a number of students who typically shy away from conversation but who raised their voice powerfully to demonstrate what meaningful and kind thinking looks like.

In the second column of the author’s note, and then on the second page, there are plenty of other fascinating issues to dig into: how education in general and literacy in particular can be a tool wielded to fight back against injustice, how the institution of slavery looked a bit different at different times and in different places, as Tate discovered researching about Horton’s life in North Carolina, and the other works authored by a tremendous author and poet, someone who deserves to be known about and read, precisely because of his circumstances AND no matter his circumstances. As always with teaching and learning, there remains more to do.

Book Review: When the Beat Was Born

Too often throughout the school day, students and teachers slog through the predictable. The typical American history project. The classic novel. Test prep. It’s refreshing when a book comes along that brings a fresh topic into the classroom. Recently, book publishers seem ever more eager to delve into fun and informative topics. When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc & the Creation of Hip Hop (Laban Carrick Hill, author; Theodore Taylor III, illustrator) is not the usual staid book and a predictable topic.

Instead, students get to read about the history of hip-hop, tracing how early DJs like Kool Herc altered how music was played by merging different songs and melodies together to create something new. Originally based in dance parties around the Bronx, hip-hop came to embrace all different types of music from a wide range of influences and geographic locations. This mix, along with fervent fans, helped hip-hop spread quickly and become a major center of popular music culture today.

Along the way, be prepared for this book to alter some of our own preconceived notions about what history we teach, which stories get told, and the power of discussing topics that reflect all students’ interests and identities.