Jewish Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Birth of the Comic Book

Students discuss and write about how culture and socioeconomic status, in connection with religion, shaped immigrant experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They recognize continuity and change in historic events,...

Class members are introduced to a project-based learning unit on US immigration with an activity that asks them to analyze sheet music and other primary source materials to uncover issues raised by immigration.  

A 13-minute audio guide begins the second lesson of a unit on Zora Neale Hurtson's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Once they have listened to the guide and read Chapter 1 of the novel, kids discuss the story as an example of oral...

Tenth graders brainstorm heroic characters that have been portrayed in film and television, examine characteristics that different cultures ascribe to heroes, distinguish between real-life and fantasy heroes, research heroic character...

To build an understanding of and empathy for the issues surrounding immigration, class members engage in a series of activities that ask them to research their own family's immigration history and examine current events to track refugee...

As if surviving a journey to America wasn't enough of a feat for early 20th century immigrants, they then needed to settle into American life. Learn about the ways New York public education attempted to meet the needs of its students,...

Teenagers are the first to agree that they are the frontrunners in popular culture. But how much of their image is constructed by individualism, and how much of it have they bought from capitalistic sources? Roland...

From Manga to Godzilla and Pokemon, Japanese pop culture has been taking the globe by storm. This phenomenon is called "soft power." Learners will examine the differences between hard and soft power, as well as learn the historical and...

Create 21st century learners by utilizing technology and library databases. Scholars explore the concept of comic books as literature and create a superhero who could uniquely solve a 21st century global issue. Databases such as SIRS are...

Tenth graders analyze works from the period of the Industrial Revolution in England and identify the cultural values depicted and inferred that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution to occur at this time. They create captions that...