Assignment
goals:
-
Students will gain a mental image
of what Youngstown was like in the 1880s, include how big the town was,
how it was laid out, what industries dominated the community, and what
groups of people lived here.
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Students will practice developing
informative and interpretive questions that link a text with history and
geography.
-
Students will develop their skills
in working with multi-media texts by moving back and forth between words
and images.
-
Students will become conscious
of the importance of focus when working with texts by using the zoom feature
of the website.
The
task:
Working with a partner (preferably
the same person you worked with last week), spend some time with the panoramic
map of Youngstown from 1882 (there's a link to the map from our course
website, under on-line readings). Play around with the zoom feature on
the website, which will allow you to zoom in on particular parts of the
map. Please keep a record of each move you make, so if, for example, you
zoom in on Market Square downtown, make a note of that.
After you have spent at least
20 minutes just looking at the map, start to make some notes answering
the following questions:
-
Where were the boundaries of
the community? Why were the boundaries there, and not in some other place?
-
What were the main industries
in Youngstown in 1882? Where were they located? Why do you think they were
in those locations?
-
What kind of people lived in
Youngstown? How do you know?
-
What else do you notice that
helps you understand what life was like in Youngstown in 1882?
Next, make a list of questions
you have about the history and geography of Youngstown and the nature and
meaning of work during the nineteenth century. Try to develop questions
in two categories: informative and interpretive. Informative questions
seek out concrete and definite answers - sort of the who, what, where,
when kind of thing. Interpretive questions focus more on explanations -
how and why.
Take another look at the map,
and see if it helps you begin to speculate about answering any of your
questions. Write down any tentative answers you develop. Remember that
it's OK to speculate, to make informed, thoughtful guesses about what you
think MIGHT have happened and why.
At the end of class, turn
in the following:
-
A list of all the "moves" you
made while looking at the map.
-
Answers to the questions above.
-
Your own informative and interpretive
questions.
-
Your own tentative answers to
at least one of your questions, based on the evidence from the map.
My
research questions:
In reflecting on this exercise,
I want to find out the following:
-
How does working with the map
in this form - the zoomable, on-line version - affect student learning?
What, if anything, does it make possible that a paper version of the map
would not?
-
How does introducing the map
at this point in the term affect students' development of interdisciplinary
skills? Do they use any of the interpretive skills or elements of the rubric
that we've been developing with the other texts? Do they ask new &
different questions, and if so, how are those questions related to the
work we've been doing? Why do students think we're looking at the map?
What connections, if any, do they make between the map and the other materials
we've been studying?
Questions
for student interviews:
-
What did you do in yesterday's
lab session?
-
Would you describe what you and
your partner did? Can you talk me through the process?
-
How did you decide what to focus
on in the map?
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What was it like to work with
the on-line, zoomable map?
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What did you learn by studying
the map?
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How was the map similar to or
different from the other texts you've been working with?
-
Why do you think you were working
with the map? That is, how does this fit into the course?
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Does the map connect with any
of the other texts you've been looking at? How so?
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