sources to help teachers make their curriculum pop. So if your new to the MC POP Ning - the idea behind this "bouncing blog" is that I share 2 or 3 pop resources daily as a conversation starter for all the pop educators out there. If you have something to add to the theme/discipline of the day please add your voice and resources into the mix!
That being said, today I'm sharing some cool comics for folks teaching American History.
1. Let's start with this impressive series of comics geared to the middle school (8-12 year-old) set. Turning Points is on its third volume. The main author is an impressive writer who I first came across when I read his great Atlantic article on wikis - hopefully they have many more titles in the works.
The titles so far:
A House Divided (on the Civil War)
Little Rock Nine
Sons of Liberty (on the creation of the Declaration of Independence)
2. Next we have an eccentric series of graphic novels that is probably suitable for ages 12- through adult. The most USEFUL of these titles a graphic novel retelling of Malcolm X's story which allows students to do some great pre-reading before taking the full literary pilgrimage from East Lansing to Mecca. By far the most bizarre of of the series is the biography of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover - did I even have to qualify that that story might be bizarre?
Other interesting titles from publisher include:
The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation
Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History
Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography
The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation
After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001- )
3. Lastly, we have a really interesting graphic retelling of a section of Howard Zinn's famous book A People's History of the United States titled A People's History of the American Empire. You can hook this kids on this provocative read by playing this great short film featured on the Amazon site with Zinn's dour voiceover.
Feel free to post related resources below!!!
Good Vibes,
RRG:)…
Added by Ryan Goble at 10:16am on January 26, 2009
e Real World) has a great activity to start off this discussion.
The more I explore documentary films (and I've seen about a thousand over the past seven years of serving on the selection committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival), the more I think "nonfiction film" may be a more useful term, even though I hate describing something as what it isn't. Just as with the wide world of nonfiction books, documentary films encompass essays, advocacy pieces (clear arguments for one point of view over another, with no pretense of objectivity), biography, memoir, history, and so forth. None of these genres of nonfiction has a corner on The Truth, and we shouldn't hold documentary films to the standard of always being "true." However, the documentarian does have an obligation not to mislead the viewer. We should be clear about portions of a film that are reenactments or reconstructions (not primary documents, but potentially true), and a good documentarian will indicate whether he/she has attempted to include counter-arguments or balanced evidence or is even interested in objectivity. Some recent, well-reviewed docs have even included animation. Holy Moly!
So there are a rich array of vocabulary words for this unit: true, fact/factual, objective, subjective, narrative, argument, advocacy, document, documentary, nonfiction, fiction, point of view, reality, actuality, opinion, balance, fairness, transparency. . . .
Interestingly, the Native American series currently playing on PBS contains quite a variety of techniques. Tecumseh's Vision consists almost totally of re-enactments (there are no photos or paintings of Tecumseh made during his life). The first half hour or so (admittedly all I have seen of it) "reads" like a fiction film with an omniscient narrator. One of the last in the series, Wounded Knee, is more traditionally done with "talking heads" and primary footage from the period.
Attached is a handout I've used to describe some of the key analytical questions to explore with various types of documentaries. I hope you find it useful.…
Added by Alan Teasley at 10:00pm on April 21, 2009
and a bunch of literacy skills. Today they continue their quest to make curriculum pop….
Napoleon had done his homework; he watched The 6th Day and, didn’t even have to wait until the 7th day to think it was good and teachable. After a lot of discussion and preparation we decided to chunk the viewing around the major story lines (an vocabulary words) that would frame the core science and our final assessment:
Genetics 101
Stem Cell Research
Animal & Plant Cloning
Human Cloning
Genetic Screening
Before I started designing an elaborate curriculum with Napoleon, I wanted us to do a little pre-pre viewing with the kids. I asked Napoleon which section of his biology class had the largest range of students. He quickly responded, “hands down third hour, it has the most IEP and ELL kids and they take a lot longer to do everything.”
Third hour was the perfect testing ground for our new story. When I looked at the materials Napoleon had been teaching with I knew the students didn’t have enough stories, structures, or supplies to engage with the content he was trying to teach. Four “failing” middle schools feed into our high school. That information coupled with previous observations of Napoleon’s class made it clear to me that these kids were fun and literate about a lot of things but science but they were very underexposed to the world of science. Even with this knowledge we needed to do some pre-pre viewing to see where his classes were.
I designed an open ended graphic organizer for the first 15 minutes of The 6th Day (see PDF attached at bottom) to collect basic impressions from the kids. However, even before showing the big chunk, we zeroed in on this 60-second opening clip from the film –
Find more videos like this on Making Curriculum Pop
What did you think the kids were going to struggle with after viewing this?
In order to get a quick snapshot of students’ thinking we gave two Post-Its to every student. We asked every kid to write down something that confused them or they had questions about. I expected questions like this:
Here we see a kid whose phonetic spelling suggests they might be an English language learner with Spanish as their native tongue – a safe bet since our school is 70% Latino. I thought this type of question would be typical because they wouldn’t have a lot of background knowledge about cloning but might “kind of know” what the word meant. There were a handful of similar responses that asked questions like “That is Dolly?” “What is a clone?” and “Why can’t we clone humans?” Each of these responses revealed the unstable nature of students’ background knowledge.
What we weren’t anticipating the large amount of responses that looked like this:
Watch the clip again.
Find more videos like this on Making Curriculum Pop
See the red dots, maybe cells dividing? Meiosis, Mitosis? You might not have even noticed them on your first viewing because you know how to read for understanding. These little red dots completely mesmerized over half of the class!
When I told Nicole about our little experiment she started laughing. When we first moved to Manhattan she briefly, because of schedule conflicts, worked as a researcher at Sesame Street. She completed the three-day training on collecting data from kids before, during and after watching segments from The Street. She explained to me that the CTW research teams learned early in the show’s history that if they were trying to teach tots about the letter S and a furry monster like Elmo was in the frame holding the letter the essential content didn’t get through. In post-viewing interviews they asked the little ones what they saw. They would respond, “ELMO!”
When they used furry monsters to introduce a letter and then removed them from the frame to show only the letter they were trying to teach kids then students started learning. They would repeat the question “what did you see?” Since the monsters were out of frame the kids would report, “the letter S.” While I’m sure reading specialists have a name for this phenomenon, old school communication scholars simply call it “interference.”
Interference can cloud a message for 3-year-olds, adults and certainly 10th graders. Our little pre-pre viewing activity allowed us to quickly realize that the students didn’t understand:
1. A whole lot of vocabulary – this we anticipated.
2. What visual information was important to focus on - perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise – as we encounter this issue all the time in print, but we were caught off guard here. After all, the titles were right there in the center of the frame!
After showing this opening clip in all his classes Napoleon developed an interesting hypothesis. He thought the kids didn’t know what to pay attention to because they were unaware that the movie had started. He said he would have to go around to lab tables explaining, “this is the film!” They were accustomed to the filmic convention of opening credits where names on the screen don’t impact the story. In some ways, scanning the background can actually be a more helpful way to read a film because many directors use background shots to establish setting. Because the words were the main content many kids were tricked by the slight modification of convention.
This early data allowed me to “show” Napoleon how The 4 Ss play out in the classroom. It allowed us to see what additional supplies students needed as we built structures around a story. For one shining moment we were cool “data-driven” teachers with lots to learn from and think about as we prepared the remainder of the unit.
Napoleon, like an educational Odysseus has been at sea with this unit for a long time and we hope to return to his epic journey at a later date.
Please share any of your thoughts or related experiences below.
Thanks for reading!
Ryan…
e Beats: A Graphic History
written by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle
illustrated by Ed Piskor
Published by Hill and Wang
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0809094967
At its best, which is quite good indeed, The Beats reflects the creative energy of the movement it chronicles—it makes you want to dash off a poem before you have time to reconsider, or dust off your beret and organize some kind of jam session. Younger readers, in fact, might find inspiration in its pages while, one hopes, avoiding the excesses for which Jack Kerouac and his buddies are well known. If they do, credit largely goes to editor Paul Buhle, who has done an admirable job of presenting the “big picture” in terms of the Beats: One comes away with a sense that what counts is culture over the long haul, that personal demons take one out of the game and, obviously, diminish one’s legacy. The counter-examples provided to Kerouac’s sad flame-out are just too strong to ignore, whether it’s the way Allen Ginsburg turned to spirituality and became a champion of social justice or how William S. Burroughs, apparently relying on pure, dumb luck, survived to become a hero to the punk crowd, among others, in old age.
Remarkably comprehensive, The Beats isn’t content simply to spotlight the late-’50s explosion of the “beatnik” subculture onto the American scene. Instead, it traces its antecedents back to early 20th century circles of bohemians and left-wing artists/raconteurs, and also thoughtfully covers its influence on ’60s and ’70s counterculture through the lives of bridge-figures such as Tuli Kupferberg and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Many of these connections are explicit, but some of them readers must make for themselves. That’s because the content isn’t presented in a single, cohesively epic sweep, but in an anthology format that takes individuals and “scenes” (e.g., City Lights Books) as the topics for its sections.
The rewards of this approach are many, as it allows the book’s contributors to spotlight more tangential personalities, even if only for a few pages at a time. In doing so, The Beats provides a platform for a variety of artists to fashion mini-bios of the figures that clearly move and inspire them; in this respect, the quietly transcendent profile of Philip Lamantia by Nancy Joyce Peters, Penelope Rosemont, and Summer McClinton comes to mind. But that’s not the only gem here.
There’s also the piece on Kenneth Patchen, drawn by Nick Thorkelson and cowritten with Harvey Pekar, which itself captures the innocent wisdom of this beloved poet-artist. Similarly, Peter Kuper (again working with Pekar, who scripted most of the book) supplies a mere two-page spread on Gary Snyder that nonetheless captures the meditative and nature-oriented tone of the subject’s work. Equally inventive is Mary Fleener’s portrait of Diane di Prima, in which each page-width panel resonates like a small mural. Resembling a conventional sequential narrative even less is Jerome Neurkirch’s piece on Slim Brundage, which manages to be fun and challenging at the same time.
In fact, so effective, surprising and delightful are such passages that one wishes a bit more of the book functioned this way, as a kind of “tribute album” by a wide range of talents in contemporary comics. Instead, the first half is dedicated to the lives of a handful of major figures and features the same creative team of Pekar and artist Ed Piskor for its entirety. Not that this section isn’t an engaging read, as the clearly well-researched text alternates crisply between the literary and the lurid. Rather, it’s a problem of proportion more than anything else—Piskor’s art, which relies on darkly humorous caricature and static portraits that often resemble demonic mug shots, is striking over the short run, but can get a bit exhausting over a hundred or so pages. On the other hand, stylistically his art is a perfect match for Pekar’s voice, which somehow manages to be simultaneously deadpan and sensationalistic. So if you’re already a fan of Pekar, his collaboration with Piskor here may be exactly what you’ll thrill to.
And to be fair, occasionally Piskor is nothing less than inspired himself, as in a two-panel page with an image of Buddha framed by the limitless night sky atop a shot of Kerouac, booze in hand, framed by a brick wall. This kind of subtlety, in which the art suggests levels of irony beyond the straightforward text, is present elsewhere in these pages…and of course mirrors the Beats’ own fascination with playfully juxtaposing art forms such as poetry and jazz. In fact, this marriage of the “multimodal” comics medium to the content is such a natural fit that one wonders why the graphic format didn’t discover the Beats earlier.
-- Peter Gutiérrez
Original Review here: http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/beats-graphic-history-review
BEATS AUDIO
If you're teaching the Beats you should be sure to check out the bizarre William S. Burroughs (categorized as "comedy" by iTunes) album Dead City Radio that features collaborations with Sonic Youth and John Cale. Furthermore, if you really want to shred your brain, check out this EP/collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain, "Priest They Called Him." This is out of print but available used on Amazon. Here is an interesting review of their demented short story reminding us that it might not be totally teachable.
Also, there is a great historical retrospective CD box set on The Beats with loads of poetry recordings that seems to be out of print - of course it is available used at Amazon here.…
e Beats: A Graphic History
written by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle
illustrated by Ed Piskor
Published by Hill and Wang
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0809094967
At its best, which is quite good indeed, The Beats reflects the creative energy of the movement it chronicles—it makes you want to dash off a poem before you have time to reconsider, or dust off your beret and organize some kind of jam session. Younger readers, in fact, might find inspiration in its pages while, one hopes, avoiding the excesses for which Jack Kerouac and his buddies are well known. If they do, credit largely goes to editor Paul Buhle, who has done an admirable job of presenting the “big picture” in terms of the Beats: One comes away with a sense that what counts is culture over the long haul, that personal demons take one out of the game and, obviously, diminish one’s legacy. The counter-examples provided to Kerouac’s sad flame-out are just too strong to ignore, whether it’s the way Allen Ginsburg turned to spirituality and became a champion of social justice or how William S. Burroughs, apparently relying on pure, dumb luck, survived to become a hero to the punk crowd, among others, in old age.
Remarkably comprehensive, The Beats isn’t content simply to spotlight the late-’50s explosion of the “beatnik” subculture onto the American scene. Instead, it traces its antecedents back to early 20th century circles of bohemians and left-wing artists/raconteurs, and also thoughtfully covers its influence on ’60s and ’70s counterculture through the lives of bridge-figures such as Tuli Kupferberg and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Many of these connections are explicit, but some of them readers must make for themselves. That’s because the content isn’t presented in a single, cohesively epic sweep, but in an anthology format that takes individuals and “scenes” (e.g., City Lights Books) as the topics for its sections.
The rewards of this approach are many, as it allows the book’s contributors to spotlight more tangential personalities, even if only for a few pages at a time. In doing so, The Beats provides a platform for a variety of artists to fashion mini-bios of the figures that clearly move and inspire them; in this respect, the quietly transcendent profile of Philip Lamantia by Nancy Joyce Peters, Penelope Rosemont, and Summer McClinton comes to mind. But that’s not the only gem here.
There’s also the piece on Kenneth Patchen, drawn by Nick Thorkelson and cowritten with Harvey Pekar, which itself captures the innocent wisdom of this beloved poet-artist. Similarly, Peter Kuper (again working with Pekar, who scripted most of the book) supplies a mere two-page spread on Gary Snyder that nonetheless captures the meditative and nature-oriented tone of the subject’s work. Equally inventive is Mary Fleener’s portrait of Diane di Prima, in which each page-width panel resonates like a small mural. Resembling a conventional sequential narrative even less is Jerome Neurkirch’s piece on Slim Brundage, which manages to be fun and challenging at the same time.
In fact, so effective, surprising and delightful are such passages that one wishes a bit more of the book functioned this way, as a kind of “tribute album” by a wide range of talents in contemporary comics. Instead, the first half is dedicated to the lives of a handful of major figures and features the same creative team of Pekar and artist Ed Piskor for its entirety. Not that this section isn’t an engaging read, as the clearly well-researched text alternates crisply between the literary and the lurid. Rather, it’s a problem of proportion more than anything else—Piskor’s art, which relies on darkly humorous caricature and static portraits that often resemble demonic mug shots, is striking over the short run, but can get a bit exhausting over a hundred or so pages. On the other hand, stylistically his art is a perfect match for Pekar’s voice, which somehow manages to be simultaneously deadpan and sensationalistic. So if you’re already a fan of Pekar, his collaboration with Piskor here may be exactly what you’ll thrill to.
And to be fair, occasionally Piskor is nothing less than inspired himself, as in a two-panel page with an image of Buddha framed by the limitless night sky atop a shot of Kerouac, booze in hand, framed by a brick wall. This kind of subtlety, in which the art suggests levels of irony beyond the straightforward text, is present elsewhere in these pages…and of course mirrors the Beats’ own fascination with playfully juxtaposing art forms such as poetry and jazz. In fact, this marriage of the “multimodal” comics medium to the content is such a natural fit that one wonders why the graphic format didn’t discover the Beats earlier.
-- Peter Gutiérrez
Original Review here: http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/beats-graphic-history-review
BEATS AUDIO
If you're teaching the Beats you should be sure to check out the bizarre William S. Burroughs (categorized as "comedy" by iTunes) album Dead City Radio that features collaborations with Sonic Youth and John Cale. Furthermore, if you really want to shred your brain, check out this EP/collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain, "Priest They Called Him." This is out of print but available used on Amazon. Here is an interesting review of their demented short story reminding us that it might not be totally teachable.
Also, there is a great historical retrospective CD box set on The Beats with loads of poetry recordings that seems to be out of print - of course it is available used at Amazon here.…
e Beats: A Graphic History
written by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle
illustrated by Ed Piskor
Published by Hill and Wang
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0809094967
At its best, which is quite good indeed, The Beats reflects the creative energy of the movement it chronicles—it makes you want to dash off a poem before you have time to reconsider, or dust off your beret and organize some kind of jam session. Younger readers, in fact, might find inspiration in its pages while, one hopes, avoiding the excesses for which Jack Kerouac and his buddies are well known. If they do, credit largely goes to editor Paul Buhle, who has done an admirable job of presenting the “big picture” in terms of the Beats: One comes away with a sense that what counts is culture over the long haul, that personal demons take one out of the game and, obviously, diminish one’s legacy. The counter-examples provided to Kerouac’s sad flame-out are just too strong to ignore, whether it’s the way Allen Ginsburg turned to spirituality and became a champion of social justice or how William S. Burroughs, apparently relying on pure, dumb luck, survived to become a hero to the punk crowd, among others, in old age.
Remarkably comprehensive, The Beats isn’t content simply to spotlight the late-’50s explosion of the “beatnik” subculture onto the American scene. Instead, it traces its antecedents back to early 20th century circles of bohemians and left-wing artists/raconteurs, and also thoughtfully covers its influence on ’60s and ’70s counterculture through the lives of bridge-figures such as Tuli Kupferberg and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Many of these connections are explicit, but some of them readers must make for themselves. That’s because the content isn’t presented in a single, cohesively epic sweep, but in an anthology format that takes individuals and “scenes” (e.g., City Lights Books) as the topics for its sections.
The rewards of this approach are many, as it allows the book’s contributors to spotlight more tangential personalities, even if only for a few pages at a time. In doing so, The Beats provides a platform for a variety of artists to fashion mini-bios of the figures that clearly move and inspire them; in this respect, the quietly transcendent profile of Philip Lamantia by Nancy Joyce Peters, Penelope Rosemont, and Summer McClinton comes to mind. But that’s not the only gem here.
There’s also the piece on Kenneth Patchen, drawn by Nick Thorkelson and cowritten with Harvey Pekar, which itself captures the innocent wisdom of this beloved poet-artist. Similarly, Peter Kuper (again working with Pekar, who scripted most of the book) supplies a mere two-page spread on Gary Snyder that nonetheless captures the meditative and nature-oriented tone of the subject’s work. Equally inventive is Mary Fleener’s portrait of Diane di Prima, in which each page-width panel resonates like a small mural. Resembling a conventional sequential narrative even less is Jerome Neurkirch’s piece on Slim Brundage, which manages to be fun and challenging at the same time.
In fact, so effective, surprising and delightful are such passages that one wishes a bit more of the book functioned this way, as a kind of “tribute album” by a wide range of talents in contemporary comics. Instead, the first half is dedicated to the lives of a handful of major figures and features the same creative team of Pekar and artist Ed Piskor for its entirety. Not that this section isn’t an engaging read, as the clearly well-researched text alternates crisply between the literary and the lurid. Rather, it’s a problem of proportion more than anything else—Piskor’s art, which relies on darkly humorous caricature and static portraits that often resemble demonic mug shots, is striking over the short run, but can get a bit exhausting over a hundred or so pages. On the other hand, stylistically his art is a perfect match for Pekar’s voice, which somehow manages to be simultaneously deadpan and sensationalistic. So if you’re already a fan of Pekar, his collaboration with Piskor here may be exactly what you’ll thrill to.
And to be fair, occasionally Piskor is nothing less than inspired himself, as in a two-panel page with an image of Buddha framed by the limitless night sky atop a shot of Kerouac, booze in hand, framed by a brick wall. This kind of subtlety, in which the art suggests levels of irony beyond the straightforward text, is present elsewhere in these pages…and of course mirrors the Beats’ own fascination with playfully juxtaposing art forms such as poetry and jazz. In fact, this marriage of the “multimodal” comics medium to the content is such a natural fit that one wonders why the graphic format didn’t discover the Beats earlier.
-- Peter Gutiérrez
Original Review here: http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/beats-graphic-history-review
BEATS AUDIO
If you're teaching the Beats you should be sure to check out the bizarre William S. Burroughs (categorized as "comedy" by iTunes) album Dead City Radio that features collaborations with Sonic Youth and John Cale. Furthermore, if you really want to shred your brain, check out this EP/collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain, "Priest They Called Him." This is out of print but available used on Amazon. Here is an interesting review of their demented short story reminding us that it might not be totally teachable.
Also, there is a great historical retrospective CD box set on The Beats with loads of poetry recordings that seems to be out of print - of course it is available used at Amazon here.…