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__Smithsonian: A resource for English and History teachers__ [] []


 * What is this?** The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies publishes "Smithsonian Sources: Resources for Teaching American History." The site features three main tabs: "Teaching with Primary Sources," "Historical Topics," and "Primary Sources." I don't find the first, "Teaching with Primary Sources," particularly helpful, since we as teachers bring our own ideas and creativity to our lesson planning in ways that will make the material relevant and meaningful for our particular group of students, but the collection of primary sources is invaluable. For example, the historical topic, "Civil Rights" includes, among other documents, "To the Great White Father" and "Speech of Cesar Chavez." The former is a statement that was issued by the American Indian Movement in 1969 that demands Alcatraz Island under the terms of an 1889 act; the latter is the speech that Chavez gave in 1969 in which he proclaimed that the dream of Martin Luther King was unfufilled and that the United Farm Workers would carry on the work of that dream in the arena of civil rights for all.


 * How this might be used in the classroom:** The on-line Smithsonian collection of primary documents is useful because simply typing "Alcatraz" or "Chavez" (see above) into Google gives you information that is almost always told from the point of view of the person writing the article. In other words, it's often much easier to find secondary sources rather than primary sources, but Smithsonian.org makes the latter available with an ease that was unthinkable even twenty years ago. If you were doing a unit on Native Americans in a U.S. history class, for example, you could teach the abuse of Native Americans by European colonialists in whatever way works best for you and your group of students, and then turn to Smithsoniansource.org to locate the precise wording of the document in which the AIM demanded the possession of Alcatraz. Further, students can search this site as we as they develop projects or papers on a particular topic. In this way, we can teach the students the importance of primary documents as well as discuss what a primary document contribues to our understanding of a particular event or person that secondary sources alone cannot capture.

While the Smithsonian collection of primary documents lends itself in an obvious way to the study of American History, it is no less useful a resource for English/ Language Arts classes. An important part of a high school language arts class is understanding the structure of arguments and how arguments are made. One of my cooperating teachers did a unit with her class on arguments in visual representations; by teaching the students to look at an image and discern the argument being made in that picture or photograph, students learned how to recognize how arguments can be made in subtle ways and how to make arguments of their own. Smithosonian.org offers resources for these kinds of class activities. The site's primary documents includes pictures from the Smithsonial National Portrait Gallery, for example. One such photograph, catalogued under the historical topic "Civil Rights," is of Medgar W. Evers in Jackson, Mississippi the day before he was shot. A short video in which Tia Powell Harris gives an introduction to this photograph appears with this photograph: [] Whether or not I as a teacher want to rely of Harris's commentary, construct my own, or have my students do the work of analyzing the image, Smithsoniansource.org is a place where images like this exist and a point of departure for teachers who would like their English classes to engage in the kind of critical thinking that analyzing an image involves.

The English teacher can also find much to use from even the most "historical" documents archived by the Smithsonian on-line, since the line between history and language arts is often an indistinct one at best. "To the Great White Father," mentioned above, is not just a piece of writing that documents an historical action; it is also a superb literary piece illustrating irony (among other things). As an English teacher, I could use this piece as an example of how the force of irony is not just a tool used to tell stories for entertainment but also a literary device that can be used to make the most caustic and penetrating comments on society.
 * [[image:http://www.eastasiafair.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/alcatraz-island.jpg width="200" height="133" caption="Alcatraz Island"]] ||
 * Alcatraz Island ||



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