Telling Stories About Race and Slavery

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Telling Stories About Race and Slavery

Tracey M. Weis

The broader context for this research consists of three Underground Railroad-related initiatives: an undergraduate course in African American History I; a summer workshop for K-12 teachers, and an NEH-funded faculty and curriculum development project. This poster will chronicle and investigate a set of exercises, conducted in the undergraduate history course, designed to deepen historical and visual literacy.

Generating Researchable Questions

Generating Researchable Questions

Initially I was concerned with the conceptual and structural relationships that prevailed between my two major responsibilities: teaching (African American History I) and faculty development (NEH-funded UGRR project and New Media Classroom Regional Center at MU). Despite my teaching-with- technology experience, a clear notion of what kinds of classroom-based research I might pursue was quite elusive. At the beginning of Year 2, I defined the premise of my course in the following way: "Implicit in the design of my course is the notion that there is a relationship between historical research and historical interpretation and that the intermediate ground between the process (research) and the product (interpretation) is historical narration (writing or representing in a way that both describes and explains)." When it was my turn to present my research project-in-progress to the VKP @ MU faculty seminar, I thought that I might be edging toward a researchable question: "How can I make the process of narrative construction more visible, for myself and for my student writers?"

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Questions about Learning

Questions about Learning

Sequencing the Inquiry more...

Sequence of Assignments

Sequence of Assignments

Links
African American History I
Syllabus for undergraduate course

Unit 1

Unit 1 Assignment
more...

Unit 4 Assignment

Unit 4 Assignment

Assignment Description

Phase 1 1. Identify keywords in panel and locate relevant hyperlinks (primary sources, secondary sources, and internal). 2. Select most appropriate hyperlink and insert into file copy of panel text.

Phase 2 1. Write 2-page essay, based on web research, that explains and expands the information on the panel. 2. Use essay to develop script for audio clip for panel.

Phase 3 1. Record script.

more...

EDW 562 The Underground Railroad

EDW 562 The Underground Railroad

I am using the KEEP Tool Kit to prepare my summary of the NEH-funded faculty and curriulcum development project on the Underground Railroad. Scholarly consultants, UGRR mentor teachers, and K-12 teachers involved in intensive week-long workshops have prepared digital "posters" on their participation in the project.

UGRR Poster List
Posters that present project learning by consultants, mentor teachers, and novices.

From Examples of Student Work

From Examples of Student Work to Evidence of Student Learning

I tried to map the PPT Unit 1 presentations --Telling Stories about Race & Slavery at America's Historic Places--so that I could see, frame by frame, how students were assembling primary and secondary texts, images, scripts, and audio narration into narratives.

Links
Mapping the Colonial Williamsburg Example

Annotating Images

Annotating Images

The pre-release version Fotonotes (0.9.6.6) permits users to "Turn Your Photos Into Stories" by treating photographs as mini-databases of people, places, things, and stories. The "Image Selection Tool" technology enables the rapid captioning, annotation, storytelling, and meta-data conveyance of individual objects visually depicted within digital images. Information about Fotonotes is available at: http://www.fotonotes.net/

Implications for Course Redesign

Implications for Course Redesign

As I tried to "map" narrative construction, I became aware that students' capacities for understanding and using visual sources as evidence were, generally, at the novice stage. My next step will be to incorporate more direct and indirect instruction in the critical analysis of visual sources.

Next Steps

Next Steps

This past fall I did incorporate more direct and indirect instruction in the critical analysis of visual sources. The peer review sheet for the beginning-of-the-semester project specifies the coding schema for image analysis and use.

Links
Unit 1 Peer Review
Students code image use as part of peer review.

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