TEACHING PORTFOLIO: MEGAN THOMPSON
HIST 581: CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Secondary Source Artifacts and Reflection
SECONDARY SOURCE ESSAY
In Civil Rights of the Twentieth Century, I utilized multiple secondary sources to develop an essay about the Lalee’s Kin: A Legacy of Cotton, a documentary about a family in Mississippi struggling to succeed amidst the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and sharecropping. I developed an essay that drew together information from this documentary with information from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a secondary text about the high rates of arrest and imprisonment for men of color. My argument considered the roots of many of the struggles that African Americans currently face despite, or, in some cases, because of, government efforts.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION
As part of this course, I created products that applied the course content to a lesson or unit in my high school classroom. I developed free-response questions that mimic the newly-redesigned Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics exam. The test requires students to connect a previously-studied (and College-Board mandated) Supreme Court case to a previously-unstudied case to draw conclusions about their Constitutional connections, rulings, and applications. I created an FRQ that connected Brown v Board of Education (a required case) to U.S. v Virginia. It begins with a secondary-source excerpt from a Washington Post article announcing the Virginia decision and then created tiered questions to accompany it.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION
Similar to the Brown v Board classroom application, I also created an FRQ that helps students analyze the similarities and differences between Shaw v Reno and Shelby County v Holder. Shaw is a required case regarding racial gerrymandering, and Shelby County is a more recent case that re-examines the role of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in creating district lines with racial considerations. Students read an excerpt from the Brennan Center for Justice to learn information about Shelby County in order to connect it to Shaw.
REFLECTION
Writing the Lalee's Jim Crow essay was the first time that I used a film as a resource for developing an argument, and it changed how I think about delivering information in my classroom. While I am a visual learner who enjoys reading, I realize that traditional texts are diminishing in popularity because of the cultural shift toward brief texts in social media and video accessibility online. When I find video clips that pertain to the classroom content, they are either quite brief or are accompanied by a set of questions that help students pay attention as they watch; however, if the material is engaging enough, which Lalee’s Kin certainly was, such questions would have been a distraction. In watching this family’s story and considering the causes of some of its struggles, I realized the value in both presenting information that humanizes the content as well as engages students without the pressure and interruption of pulling specific pieces of data from the source. I plan to use more documentaries as alternatives to traditional text reading. I have already begun to use podcast episodes, particularly More Perfect in my Advanced Placement Government classes, and have found that they spark strong discussions, are easy for students to complete while driving or walking the hallways of the school, and increase engagement in the material. Hopefully, well-made documentaries and historical films will have the same effect.
In writing the Free-Response Questions and working through multiple drafts in the process, I learned how to cut the excerpts to include the necessary information for students without making the answer so obvious that they did not have to think deeply; these alterations occurred after I assigned one of the FRQ’s and students performed far beyond expectations, all using the same language to support their answers. While I would love to think that I simply taught them in a way that made every student excel, upon looking back at the secondary source excerpts I had selected, the answers were too obvious, and my questions needed revision so that they asked students to think critically.