Adding Relevance to American History

Teaching early American history to non-American eighth grade students living in the Middle East can be a challenge. The question "Why do I have to know this?" hangs over my lessons, and I know the answer "Because we are an American school with an American curriculum" does nothing to add relevance or satisfaction.

image of Boston Massacre taken from firstclass.rfsd.k12.co.us website

But teaching early American history to non-American eighth grade students living in the Middle East also provides a great opportunity to connect to current events. After working with the essential question "When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government?" within the context of the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence, it was time to link it to something a little closer to home: The Arab Spring revolutions around the region. Here were modern examples of citizens rebelling against their own governments for the same reasons the American colonists did: governmental tyranny, no say in their government, and basic rights abused. Many of my students were from, or had relatives, in those countries. Time to add relevance!

I wanted to do a group research project using 21st Century Skills. One of the 21st Century Skills is collaboration, but I disagree with group grades. I needed to find a way to have a collaborative project that also allowed me to assess individuals on their content knowledge and contribution.

In my "Adapt and Adopt" mode (see previous post), I found an article from the National Council of Social Studies called "Reporting the World: Teaching Current Events from a Global Perspective", written by Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker. Using Toni's ideas, I set up News Teams that investigated four of the major Arab Spring rebellions: Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, and Syria (I considered including Yemen, but I didn't have enough students). Each News Team consisted of 5 students who had distinct roles:

• News Reporter: Reports the basic facts of how the rebellion started and its main events
• Geographer: Explains where the main events occurred and any statistics that connect to the events (e.g., GDP, religious groups, educational levels, etc)
• News Analyst: Explains how the events affect the rest of the world, including any foreign involvement in the rebellion itself
• Editor: Forms an opinion about the event, supported with factual details
• Photojournalist: Works with the other reporters to find images to support their information, and puts together a slideshow to show during the live newscast
• for Syria (because I had an extra student in one class), I also included Field Reporter: Updates the News Reporter's story to included very recent events

image taken from kindreda.edublogs.org website 

Each News Team had one shared Google Doc for note-taking, which was also shared with me and the secondary librarian who supported the research. The Team needed to be collaborative in several ways: 1) their information couldn't overlap each other's too much so that the reports were not repetitive, so they had to know what the others were covering 2) their information had to cover all the important parts without big gaps, so they had to know what the others were covering, 3) the Photojournalist had to work with the other 4 to understand their stories and find images to correlate, and know when to change the images based on their reports, 4) the News Reporter, Analyst, and Editor could only use 6 sources between the 3 of them, so they had to talk together if they found a good one that several of them could use, and 5) the final News Cast needed to be organized with the sequence of stories and with an "anchor" to introduce them and move the presentation from story to story. These collaborative elements were graded with 2 bullet points on the rubric: group bibliography, and overall creativity.

Each student was graded individually on their News Cast presentation for 1) quality of research, 2) quality of information, 3) accuracy of language skills (Photojournalists did not talk during the News Cast, but had to write a justification for each picture on their notes), and 4) quality of oral (or, for the Photojournalist, visual) presentation. As each News Team presented their News Casts, the audience took notes. After all the presentations were finished, the students used those notes to answer the essential question, "When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government?"with examples from each of the four Arab Spring rebellions.

Student feedback after the project was overwhelmingly positive. They had heard about these conflicts, but hadn't understood what was going on until they did this project. They liked knowing what was going on in the countries where their parents or grandparents came from. They loved the News Cast format. They thought it was interesting how modern countries rebelled for the same reasons the American colonists rebelled 250 years ago. They wished they'd had more time (always the most frequent suggestion).

Connecting historical conflicts to modern day conflicts added relevance to the unit. It also reinforced one of the historian's most important skills: finding patterns and generalizations across historical events. And it was done in a way that was engaging for every student.