Teacher Page


Index Student Page Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture
    This project is designed to give students the opportunity to experience the making of history--to allow them to explore sources, and record their observations.  It is a deductive lesson whereby students will construct the significance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the antebellum United States.  In the course of this lesson, students will be using Stephen Railton's Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture to determine the significance of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel on the antebellum United States.
    The students will explore the site based on three different research groups: print response, visual images, and multi-media.  Each group is guided through the site and is responsible for recording what they find in their "field notebook."  After they complete their individual assignments, they will meet in groups of three (one from each of the research groups) and share their findings.

Why use digital history archives?

Using digital history archives gives students the opportunity to "make history."  In this lesson, they are the historians and giving the students this power over their own learning will (hopefully) provide a powerful way to engage them with the materials.
Objectives:


What to do before going into the lab:
1.  Students should be broken up into 3 research groups to do the lesson:  print response, visual images, and multi-media.
2.  Print out enough copies of the Field Notebook sheet for each student to have a copy of the field notebook for their specific research group.
Visual Images Field Notebook
Print Response Field Notebook (print in landscape)
Multi-media Field Notebook  (print in landscape)


Closing Activities:
    Print out copies of the Closing Activity for each student in the class to have one.
    Divide the students up into sharing groups with one student from each research group (print response, multi-media, and visual images) and have them complete the closing activity.
    The closing activity gets the students to share their researched findings.  If students are not sharing with each other at this point in the lesson, try to facilitate discussion by more structure and additional quesitons to discuss.  Then, each student creatively responds to this lesson to check for comprehension.


Suggestions
My experience with trying the lesson.
    I did this lesson on 5/1/2000 with a group of 11th grade students at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Virginia.  I did the lesson in an 85 minute block (assigning the individual response for homework) and was pushed for time.  I was pleased overall that most of the kids were able to follow my lesson.  They generally seemed creatively engaged as they worked through the lesson and their responses generally were thoughtful and displayed learning.  During the lesson, I did have to constantly re-emphasize the need to refer back to the online instruction page rather than just the field notebook.  Since some of the students did not have any prior knowledge of the novel, a brief plot summary and discussion of the United States in the 1850s would have made their job easier.  The lesson would have also run more smoothly if the students had read the Interpretive Exhibit the night before for homework.  Then they would've had a bigger knowledge base with which to start.  The timing of when the different groups finished was also tricky.  The key to this was to refer the early finishers to the Interpret Exhibit because it not only helped balance timing, but was very valuable to the students' learning.  The print response group definitely has the most challenging task, and so the teacher will want to put strong readers in this group.  The multi-media also has a difficult task of constructing meaning out of more abstract sources and so creative interpreters will do well in this group.  The visual media group has a more clear job because the pictures really do speak for themselves. Although I would change a few things if I taught the lesson again, I was extremely satisfied--they understood the materiel and reached my objectives.
    If you have any questions about this lesson, or my experience teaching it, please feel free to contact me at hes2t@alumni.virginia.edu