Saturday, April 11, 2009
I Love History!
Reading about the unique perspective each student takes into the classroom made me think about how much I love history. There was an excerpt in the article that pointed out that we tend to focus on the "great" men of history while we tend to disregard the struggle of people inlower socioeconomic classes. Yes these great men were responsible for many of the great events in human history, but their actions would have been forgettable had it not been for the support or resistance from common everyday people. I look forward to utilizing primary source documents that highlight the experience of people that my students have never heard of. This is an essential means of creating social awareness in the classroom. It is important to create an awareness of the issues of the past, so that they won't be repeated in the future. When students see that everyday people from the past dealt with many of the same situations that they face today, it can create a sense of empowerment. It might also be cool to create a problem based lesson based on a situation in history. I'm really interested to see how problem based learning works, and how it can be practically implemented in the classroom.
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Man, that is a thought that is not expressed enough. Immediately, that thought reminds me of even a college course, Roman History, which spoke about all the great men of the age, but never discussed the normal people. Who would George washington be without his fellow travelors across the river? What about all the african americans willing to fight in the civil war for a opportunity to keep united a union that has oppressed them since they had been shipped over? All for hope of change. With out all these largely minute(quite contrary) human beings, the heroes of any battle would have been nobodies themselves. That's an innovative way to keep students feeling a closeness to history, enpowerment as you put it. Excellent...
ReplyDeletei agree, history rules. teaching through the lives of regular people is something I hope to utilize also. I just borrowed a good book from someone in one of my other classes, "People's History for the Classroom". it had a lot of good articles and even a lesson plan or 2 about how to do go about teaching in this manner. check it out
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