Members of the Hofstra University New Teachers Network teach in New York City and suburban Long Island middle schools and high schools. Most participants in the group work in schools where a significant number of students are immigrants to the United States or the children of immigrants. Because of this, the experience of immigrants to the United States plays a major role in their curricula, especially in social studies and English. They developed the following lessons and projects collaboratively with colleagues in their schools and at monthly network meetings.
Michael Pezone and Joseph Spero teach Social Studies and English at Junior High School 190 in Queens, New York. It is one of most ethnically diverse schools in New York City, with students whose families come from India, Pakistan, China, the Middle East, the Philippines, Africa, the former Soviet Union, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Even the students who identify themselves as American usually have ancestors who migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. Because of the nature of the student body, and their belief that young people should be able to see themselves in history and literature, Michael and Joseph make an examination of the immigrant experience in the United States a central feature of the curriculum.
Projects in their classes include student presentations of artifacts that their families retain from their original cultures. Over the years, students have presented and discussed articles of clothing, money and stamps, eating and cooking utensils, religious paraphernalia, photographs, and different types of food. After the presentations, students prepare museum cards describing the articles and the cultures they are part of, and the artifacts and cards are displayed in a showcase as a Museum of Immigration (see photographs). Students learn about the history of immigration to the United States and read and write poems, essays, and stories about immigration in both Michael's social studies and Joseph's English classes (see Exhibit C and D).
At the end of units, Michael and Joseph divide students into teams that organize class "dialogues" on contested issues. Students research different positions on a topic and take turns presenting information and their viewpoints to the class. Following their unit on the history of immigration, students discuss whether immigration to the United States should continue at its current rate (For more information on the dialogue process, see Michael Pezone and Alan Singer, "Empowering Immigrant Students Through Democratic Dialogues," Social Education (February, 1997), pp. 75-79). For the dialogue on immigration, Alan Singer of Hofstra's Department of Curriculum and Teaching wrote material on the history of immigration to the United States and contemporary immigrants in New York City (see exhibits A and B).
Gayle Meinkes teaches English at a junior high school in suburban Brentwood, New York, where many students are immigrants. While social studies teachers have their classes examine the history of immigration, Gayle's students write individual accounts of their own experiences and biographies about people in their families and communities (see Exhibit E).
Tara Pantony teaches social studies at a junior high school in suburban Bellmore, New York. She organizes interdisciplinary group projects about immigration that involve students in historical and anthropological research. Students can join teams that conduct oral histories, do traditional research and book reports, collect and display cultural artifacts, or demonstrate immigrant culture through a performance of a work of literature or of a dance (see Exhibit F).
Darren Luskoff teaches at Science Skills High School in Brooklyn, New York. The population of his school is overwhelmingly African American and Caribbean American. Darren has his students conduct formal interviews with immigrants to the United States. The interviews are recorded, transcribed, and turned into narratives that are read in class (see Exhibit G). Darren finds that when his students tell these stories about immigrants in class, they begin to make connections between their own experiences and the historical past.
Laurence Klein teaches social studies in an ethnically diverse junior high school in Queens, New York. The school is tracked and the lowest track classes have a large number of students who are recent immigrants to the United States. Many of these students have difficulty expressing their ideas clearly in English, which makes it more difficult to develop class community. Laurence frequently draws on the personal experiences of his students to connect their lives with subjects under consideration in class. In a lesson designed to help his eighth grade class understand conditions in the United States at the end of the American Civil War, he asked students who had immigrated from countries with civil strife to discuss the impact of these conflicts on their families. Among the students who reported to the class were young women born in El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Israel, and Afghanistan. While it was sometimes difficult to follow them because of their accents, the other students were mesmerized by their accounts of violence, hardship, and lingering bitterness. Laurence was able to use these personal testimonies by immigrants to give the class a sense of the deep-seated antipathies in the United States at the start of Reconstruction.
Jennifer Bambino taught social studies at a junior high school in Queens, New York where a large number of students are bilingual. In collaboration with teachers of English-as-a-Second Language and of Spanish (who had secured a support grant), Jennifer had students write their personal family histories. Students wrote in both English and in their families' native languages. The stories about immigration included reports on the experience of people from the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Canton, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Portugal, and Trinidad. They were collected, published as a school magazine, Nuestros, distributed to families, and used as a textbook in class (see Exhibit H).
Christina Agosti-Dircks teaches at Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx, New York. Students in her global studies classes research the stories of political refugees from around the world and write reports, poems, and journal entries about their lives. They also interview immigrants to the United States. Their written work, pictures, photographs, and artifacts are mounted on 8 x 11 inch craft paper to create "immigration panels." The panels are assembled to make a class mural (see photographs and Exhibit I and J).
Stephanie Hunte teaches sixth grade social studies and English at IS 292, a middle school in an inner-city neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Many of her students are recent immigrants from Latin America or the Caribbean who read, write, and calculate with difficulty. Stephanie has students tell the class about their own immigration history and family culture in order to encourage them to write personal and family narratives. To assist in their presentations, students draw timelines of their lives and family trees that they illustrate with sketches and photographs. The timelines help students develop a sense of time span and sequence and are useful for practicing calculation and measurement skills, and for understanding ratios and proportions.
Howard Fuchs teaches eleventh grade United States history classes at Middle College High School at Medgars Evers College in an inner-city neighborhood in Brooklyn. Almost all of his students are Caribbean immigrants or the children of Caribbean immigrants. His school works in collaboration with the American Social History Project of the City University of New York. This relationship has allowed Howard to implement a highly structured research program examining immigration to the United States. Students develop thesis statements that they will research, write questionnaires, interview immigrants to the United States, interview people about attitudes towards immigrants, examine immigrant culture, and report on the histories of the different countries of origin and on reasons for emigration. They also compare the experiences of different immigrant groups with those of internal migrants from other parts of the United States and Puerto Rico (see Exhibit K).
Alan Singer, who teaches social studies methods at Hofstra University, is also a voluntary curriculum consultant at the MLE Learning Center in Brooklyn, New York. In 1996-1997, the theme at the MLE Learning Center was immigration to the United States. Third, fourth and fifth graders in the after school program created a large wall map of the world showing where the ancestors of the children, as well as other immigrants to the United States, had come from over the decades.
The map was created by making an overhead projector acetate of a world map. Children hung paper on a wall and projected the image on the paper. After tracing an outline of the world, they took down the paper, darkened the borders, and painted in the continents. The map was re-hung and decorated with crayoned self-portraits created by the children, accompanied by note cards telling where their families were from originally (see photographs).
This magazine concludes with an excerpt on developing oral history projects. It is from Social Studies in the Secondary Schools - Teaching to Learn / Learning to Teach, by Alan Singer and the Hofstra Social Studies Educators (Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1997).
