Document History with First Person Accounts - Center for Inspired Teaching

The following activity is part of a series we’re creating to support students, teachers, and caregivers, during this unprecedented time. Read more about the project here. If you try this activity with your student(s), we’d love to see what you do. Share your journey via the #Inspired2Learn hashtag on your preferred social platform.

Created by: Jenna Fournel
Discipline: Social Studies
Age level: Middle – Secondary
Time: This is a long-term project and could take about a month to complete.
Materials: A digital recording device, video-making software such as iMovie (though there are many free apps that do this and clips can even be pasted together using PowerPoint)

Some of the most interesting and useful artifacts from history are the first-person accounts we find in journals and interviews. Students can gather those today as they chronicle and attempt to understand an event from the past or the things unfolding in our present.

Using free tools like ZOOM, they can record video interviews and compile them into a documentary that is easy to share with a real audience (including, but not limited to, their class and the people they interviewed!).

What to do:

Students choose a historical event that took place within the last 20-30 years during which they know family or friends were alive, and ideally, experienced firsthand.

They begin with online research of that event. You may want to provide them with an outline of what pieces of information they should gather and how you want sources cited. Examples include:

When did the event take place?
Where did it take place?
Who were the key leaders involved in this event?
What were the circumstances that led to this event taking place?
How were people affected by it when it happened?
How did life change after the event took place?
Why was this event significant to history?

After this preliminary research, students craft interview questions for people who lived during this event. These questions should help to deepen their understanding of what took place as well as complicate some of the conclusions they may have come to from their preliminary research. Crafting these questions is a good teaching opportunity and would work well for the one-on-one office hours many teachers are holding right now. As you support students in crafting their inquiry, and figuring out who to interview, you might guide them with questions like:

Who do you know whose experiences of this particular event might have been very different?
In what ways do you think the experience of the leaders or key figures in this event would be different from those of people you know personally?
Whose voices were missing from the various sources you used for your preliminary research?
What questions do you still have after doing your initial research?
What surprised you about what you learned?
If you had been there when this event took place, what role would you have wanted to play? Who could you talk to who might have played a similar role?

Once the students have identified the people they want to interview and the questions they want to ask, they schedule their interviews and record them. (Again, ZOOM is a good tool for this.) Talk to the students about getting written permission from all the people they interview for inclusion in the documentary. Then these recordings can be put together with video editing software or plugged into a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation.

Consider including a part of the assignment that asks students to reflect on what they’ve learned. Questions for this portion may include:

What did you learn from the people you interviewed that stood out from the information you’d gathered from other sources?
What did this experience teach you about the difference between first-person accounts and other sources of historical information?
What new questions would you like to explore in this way?

Resources:

Here is an example of a documentary video created by DC students for National History Day.
The National History Day website has a great reference page on how to create a documentary with several examples.
A lesson plan from POV on how to create documentaries.
Student Documentaries: Nonfiction Comes to Life! (Scholastic)
Stories Worth Telling: A Guide to Creating Student-Led Documentaries (Apple)

Extensions:

Consider hosting a “documentary film festival” in which students show their projects to the class and then provide a live Q & A afterward. If possible, open the “festival” up to friends and family so they can see the presentations in action.

Create a YouTube or Vimeo channel with all the documentaries in one place so students can view them at their leisure. Remember to include securing permissions in the interview process so students are allowed to share the clips of people they recorded.

Inspired Teaching Connection:
An immersive activity like this includes ALL the Inspired Teaching core elements. Learners are creating something with Purpose (informing and entertaining others) that also involves Persistence and Action. This is intense but Joyful work. The product as well as the process provide Wide-ranging Evidence of Student Learning. Children are quick learners, even when it comes to new tools like video editing apps, so giving them the freedom to learn and execute each news show on their own positions them as Experts of both the medium and the message. And most importantly, watching their production with appreciation for that expertise demonstrates Mutual Respect. Such a rich learning experience is also full of the 4 I’s, as Intellect, Inquiry, Imagination, and Integrity will all be hard at work.

See our instructional model here.

Micaiah Anderson

Community Outreach Specialist

As a Community Outreach Specialist, Micaiah is responsible for program promotion and outreach support for Inspired Teaching events and workshops. Micaiah has a passion for collaborating with community members to build-power and connect. She is an educator with a heart for youth and has experience supporting students fight injustices within their schools and communities. She has a BA in Political Science from, the real HU, Hampton University & anticipates graduating in May 2024 with a Masters of Arts degree in Educational Policy Transformation from Georgetown University.

AUTONOMY

"I want to have a say in what happens to me."

Autonomy is the need for independence; the ability to make choices, to create, to explore, and to express oneself freely; to have sufficient space, to move around, and to feel unrestricted with opportunities to exercise free will.

Brady Maiden

Outreach Coordinator

As the Outreach Coordinator, Brady helps maintain Inspired Teaching’s social media presence and supports the organization’s mission to connect with DC community leaders, educators, and parents. Brady has her Master’s in Public Policy from George Mason University and her BS in Political Science from Northern Arizona University. She is passionate about community, equity, and coalition building recognizing that learning and growing with the community at large is how we continue to be impactful.

What brings you joy in life?

I find joy in spending time with my friends and family and meeting new people. I like going to concerts and festivals, and finding new books to read.

The Learner’s Cycle, Wonder-Experiment-Learn, and the Teacher’s Cycle, Observe-Plan-Instigate, comprise Inspired Teaching’s approach to engaging students in inquiry-based learning.

When they are engaged in the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, students are immersed in learning. They take the lead in designing authentic learning experiences around their own interests and their school’s standards of learning. Each discovery leads to a new question which in turn leads to more wondering and more learning. In the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, Learn is not a destination or an endpoint; it is a deeper understanding, leading to a deeper wondering and new possibilities that create new entry points to further exploration. The cycle continues because what students have learned generates more wonderings that require more experiments that foster more learning – and on and on.

The Observe-Plan-Instigate Cycle is the work of an Inspired Teacher. While a student is expected to follow the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, the teacher joins them on the learning journey while following their own cycle of Observe-Plan-Instigate. This cycle ultimately serves to ensure an inquiry-based atmosphere is at play in the classroom.

Jaqueta Abbey

Teaching and Learning Specialist

Jaqueta is the Teaching and Learning Specialist for Inspired Teaching. In addition to her current role with Inspired Teaching, Jaqueta is a first-grade teaching assistant. Her background features a variety of traditional and non-traditional experiences in the field of education, including working as an adjunct professor, teaching summer reading programs to children and adults, and tutoring children in the foster care system. Jaqueta earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.A. in Interactive Media from Elon University.

What brings you joy in life?

Creative self-expression! In addition to my passion for storytelling, I love dancing of all kinds. I've studied belly dance, bachata, and Brazilian Zouk among other styles. I also enjoy glass fusing, crocheting, photography, and cross stitching. These art forms allow me to express myself and build connections with other people at the same time. I think life would be a lot less vibrant without artists and storytellers!

Michelle Welk

Communication & Marketing Specialist

As Communications and Marketing Specialist, Michelle is responsible for finding and creating new ways to highlight Inspired Teaching and promote its programs in order to expand and deepen the organization's impact. Michelle has worked in communications in an array of settings, from creative agencies to state politics to national nonprofits. She has a BA in Journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia and is passionate about education, access, and equity.

What brings you joy in life?

My son, the beach, making a persuasive argument and good food!

Max Peterson

Real World History Assistant Teacher

Max received his Bachelor’s degree in History and African American Studies from Boston University in May 2016. He has worked in museum curation at the Museum of the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Max has worked with young people of varying ages from young children to young adults transitioning to college.

Feedback and Accountability

We grow through feedback and an understanding that the quality of our work is a reflection of what we are learning, but the shift to remote learning this spring disrupted a lot of the tools teachers were used to using to evaluate student growth. How might we do things differently this fall? Participants in this workshop will explore ways to bring meaningful assessment into the virtual and/or socially-distanced classroom and approaches to student feedback that strengthen motivation, and build relationships and achievement.