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Archive for August, 2006

August 22, 2006

Harlem Renaissance Web Resources

August 22nd 2006 Posted to English 104A, External Resources for Teachers, African American

Harlem: 1900-1940. An Exhibition Portfolio from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
This aesthetically appealing site provides lesson plans focused around the “Harlem: 1900-1940” photo exhibition at the Schomburg Center. Lessons are geared towards middle or high-school age students, although this material could also supplement a college-level course. In addition to teacher resources, this site also provides and overview of the photo exhibition, including historical material on each photo displayed.

“Rhapsodies in Black” Art Exhibition and Book
This site includes photos from “Rhapsodies in Black” a traveling art exhibition designed by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey that toured London, the University of Warwick, Bristol, San Francisco and Washington D.C. in 1997-1998. The site also features selections from scholarly articles in the exhibition’s accompanying book. There is excellent material here on the art, music and culture of the Harlem Renaissance.

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institue Harlem Renaissance Unit (Gr.9-12)
This is a curriculum guide for a 9 week high school English unit on the Harlem Renaissance. It was designed by Caroline Jackson who works for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. It includes an excellent historical background, a sequence of lessons, a student reading list and a bibliography for teachers.

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August 21, 2006

Langston Hughes

August 21st 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American, Biography

A prohughes3.jpglific poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, James Langston Hughes was a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s of unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievement among black Americans. Hughes integrated the rhythm and mood of jazz and blues music into his work and used colloquial language to reflect working-class African American culture. His often-bestowed title of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” reflects the extent to which Hughes’ career both shaped and was shaped by the music, art and lifestyle of black Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. Unlike many of his fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, Hughes continued to write into the 1950’s. He died in New York City May 22, 1967. (Read the article)

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August 18, 2006

Gertrude Stein

August 18th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Biography 204a

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an avant-garde German-American poet, playwrstein-1935.jpgight, feminist and avid art collector. In the 1920’s her salon at 24 Rue de Fleurus in Paris became a meeting place for artists and expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Apollinaire. She wrote her self-proclaimed masterpiece, the 1000-page The Making of Americans, from 1906 to 1911, but it wasn’t published until 1925. This novel loosely follows the history of an immigrant family over several generations. Raised in German-American family herself, Stein offers a unique perspective on what it means to be an American while simultaneously pushing the rules of English grammar and the form of the novel to their limits. (Read the article)

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Angel Island Web Resources

August 18th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, English 104A, English 50, External Resources for Teachers, Asian American

KQED Education Initiatives Organization Website
This multimedia site includes lesson plans, a movie about the island, sound clips of poems and photos.

Angel Island Organization
This site, which is associated with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, includes a history of the island, photos and an Angel Island Webcam.

Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF)
This site includes historical background, phots and information about how to get involved with the foundation.

Oral History Site by Lydia Lum
This site, created by Lydia Lum, is an ongoing oral history project collected from former Angel Island detainees. It includes photos and interviews.

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Lesson Plan: Angel Island Poems

August 18th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, English 50, Asian American

angel-island-detainees-web.jpgThe following are some questions about the Angel Island poems that an instructor or TA could use to prompt class discussion. One approach I recommend is to have students form small groups and come up with answers which they then share with the class. Alternatively, you could focus one whole class around one of these questions. For example, I ran a 45 minute class discussion on the “Line between graffiti and art” question by bringing in photocopies of images from the graffiti websites and getting students to debate whether or not they thought those images were art. (Read the article)

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2434 August 11, 2006

Angel Island Poems

August 11th 2006 Posted to English 104A, English 50, Asian American, Literature, Film

Historical Background
The Angel Island Poems are a group of more than 135 poems written by ChiMens Barracks, Immigration Station.jpgnese immigrants detained between the years of 1910 and 1930 at the immigration detention center on Angel Island, located in the San Francisco bay (Lai 8). The poems were discovered in 1970 by park ranger Alexander Weiss who noticed the calligraphy on the walls of the abandoned detention center. Through Weiss’s efforts along with those of Paul Chow and the Angel Island Immigration Station Historical Advisory Committee (AIISHAC), the dilapidated barracks was saved from demolition and special legislation was passed granting $250,000 to preserve and restore the barracks (“Immigration Station”). Written mostly by Cantonese villagers trying to immigrate to the United States, these poems express the hope, despair and frustration of detainees awaiting the outcomes of medical examinations and immigration paperwork. (Read the article)

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August 9, 2006

“Teaching Tolerance.” Southern Poverty Law Center. 8 Aug 2006.

August 09th 2006 Posted to External Resources for Teachers

www.tolerance.org/teach

true_blue_150x200.gifTeaching Tolerance is a website founded in 1991 by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is primarily a resource for lesson plans and educational materials (posters, movies, etc.) that promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity in the classroom. The lesson plans are labeled by grade and span from kindergarten to high school. In addition, the site has links to tips for teachers in diverse classrooms, a “news watch” that summarizes recent race-related news and a “kids” section which offers diversity-related games, readings and activities. (Read the article)

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August 2, 2006

“POV For Educators.” POV. PBS. 2 Aug 2006.

August 02nd 2006 Posted to External Resources for Teachers

http://www.pbs.org/pov/classroom.php

This website offers lesson plans geared towards students grades 6-12 or 9-12 based around PBS “Point Of View” documentaries. Teachers can rent the documentaries for free on the POV website. Some POV movies dealing with issues of race and immigration include: Al Otro Lado, a “rich examination of songs, drugs and dreams along the U.S./Mexico border” (POV) and Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball, a film that explores the role of high school baseball in both American and Japanese cultures. The site offers lesson plans, links to the movie trailers and access to the POV film archive. (Read the article)

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“Teaching in Racially Diverse College Classrooms.” Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University. 2 Aug 2006. 24b5

August 02nd 2006 Posted to External Resources for Teachers

http://bokcenter.harvard.edu/docs/TFTrace.html

This website provides educators with useful tips for teaching in racially diverse college classrooms. Produced out of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, this site offers suggestions for how to: “1. Plan for a racially diverse classroom, 2. Design classroom instruction materials with a diverse group of students in mind, 3. Confront potential issues of discrimination and handle hot moments, and 4. Assess one’s own racial or cultural bias” (Derek Bok Center). Although this handout is geared towards college instructors it could also prove useful for high school teachers. This site is particularly good about offering suggestions for how teachers can handle “hot moments” in class discussion. It also lists a useful set of questions teachers can ask themselves to assess their own cultural, ideological and racial biases.

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August 1, 2006

“Immigration.” Library of Congress Learning Page Project. 1 Aug 2006.

August 01st 2006 Posted to External Resources for Teachers

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/introduction.html

This interactive site, geared towards middle and high school age students, provides information about the history of immigration to the U.S. for a wide variety of ethnicities and nationalities, including African, German, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Puerto Rican/Cuban and Polish/Russian. The site also features a section on Native Americans and how they have been affected by immigration. Each link to a specific nationality includes a timeline of major immigration events/legislation and a map of where each immigrant group settled. The site includes interactive games, a recipe book (under the “Potluck” link), and several teacher-created, teacher-tested lesson plans on U.S. immigration (under the “Resources” link). This website is a great way for educators and students to gain access to primary source material from the Library of Congress in an entertaining and approachable form. (Read the article)

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