Engaging Students in Examining History

Today in class, Dr. Smirnova went over a powerpoint with us about learning to teach history. The powerpoint started with 3 paintings that represent different types of freedom. We were asked to identify the freedoms these paintings meant. These paintings were created by Norman Rockwell who became famous during the second world war and $132 million was raised from these paintings for the war effort. This was really interesting to learn about and I had never even heard of Norman Rockwell. You really do learn something everyday! We then learned that in order to teach a social studies lesson, there are powerful elements that are essential. These include the lesson being meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. We went over the importantce of each of these elements and talked about what they meant. We also talked about the structure of knowledge used to teach these lessons. After that, we went on to learning about what history means to us and what we think is the definition. I always remembered history as events that happened in the past and artifacts dug up from the past. This was right, but there was a lot more too it. "History is a chronolgical study that interprets and gives meaning to events and applies systematic methods to discover the truth in the storyline of history". We also discussed the importance of the difference between teaching your students, and making sure they learned and retained the information you taught to them. The last thing we learned about was what it meant to be a historian, which led us to being detectives and find out who the person is based on artifacts given to us in the artifact bags.

Our group was handed an artifact bag containing a birth certificate, a Russian jewelry box, an American flag pin, and a picture of an elder lady. The birth certificate was written in Russian so it was hard to figure out what it said. Our group actually thought it was the elder lady's passport, and she was coming to the United States which is why there was an American flag pin in our bag. We later found out that it was actually Dr. Smirnovas birth certificate and the picture was her grandmother who was really special to her. The American flag pin was inside the Russian jewelry box so Dr. Smirnova would always have a piece of Russia with her and to tell us that she keeps both cultures. The American flag pin was gifted to her when she first started teaching at the mount, which is really special to her. This was a challenging, but meaningful artifact and our group had a lot of fun figuring out what was in our bag. Next class, we will be creating our own artifact bags based on our topic we taught for fieldwork, and then teaching other fieldwork groups a mini lesson on our findings. I am excited to see and figure out what everyone will put in their artifact bags!