Unit 7: What is Our Story? How Do We Tell It? The Power of Social History: From the 1930s to the Present/Studs Terkel
Course: American Studies
Length: 6 weeks
Designers: Heidkamp, Holtschlag, Schwartz, Soffer
Desired Results
Standards:
CC.11-12.R.L.4 Craft and Structure: Determine the meaning of
words and phrases as they are used in the text, including
figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of
specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words
with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh,
engaging, or beautiful.
Student-Friendly Standards:
CC.11-12.R.L.4: Analyze the impact of specific word choices,
phrases, and manner of speaking as the speech patterns
reflect a person’s beliefs, experiences, and perspective.
CC.11-12.W.3 Text Types and Purposes: Write narratives to
develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective
technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event
sequences.
CC.11-12.W.3: Retell someone’s story by adopting and
emulating their particular manner of speaking, details, and
event sequencing.
CC.11-12.SL.1.c Comprehension and Collaboration: Propel
conversations by posing and responding to questions that
probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range
of positions on a topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge
ideas and conclusions; and promote divergent and creative
perspectives.
CC.11-12.SL.1.c: Gain a new perspective on a topic by posing
questions that probe for a story, especially in order to clarify,
verify, or challenge previous ideas and conclusions about a
particular topic.
CC.11-12.L.1.a Conventions of Standard English: Apply the
understanding that usage is a matter of convention, can change
over time, and is sometimes contested.
Understandings
Social history is important to understanding the overall picture
of a historical period by collecting essential insights from
individuals profiled.
CC.11-12.L.1.a: Emulate the style in which a person speaks
by capturing their tone, word choice, and syntax accurately in
writing.
Essential Questions
How is history made? How does one “do” history?
Your life, your world, your world: these are things you can
investigate, meet, and know.
Good interviewers tell a story with clarity, not only about a
person’s life, but about yours and ours.
Both the interviewer’s and the interviewee’s viewpoint intrude
on the interview and play a distinct role; it’s important to
understand the context and bias of an interview in order to get
at a story’s essential truth.
When writing history, how do we determine what to include
and what to exclude in the narrative?
What is the intersection between individuals’ stories and a
historical period?
How does truth emerge from a multiplicity of perspectives,
and what questions can one ask to get at an essential truth?
Who are the “greats” in each era and in yours? Of what value
are the experiences of the common person in a nation’s
story?
We are where we are today because we are standing on the
shoulders of giants.
Students will know…
1. The personal impact of major social, political, and
economic issues of the 1930s including the Great
Depression, the New Deal, the birth control
movement, nativism and immigration, southern
segregation and sharecropping.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of Oral History, in
relation to more conventional forms of historical
writing.
The advantages and disadvantages of the Social History of
Students will be able to…
Craft questions of social history.
Write an autobiographical sketch.
Execute a successful interview by selecting an an appropriate
subject, preparing the questions and potential follow-up
questions through research, and effectively editing the
interview.
Continue to improve their ability to “show” in their writing,
through detailed examples.
ordinary people - history “from the bottom up” - as an
alternative to conventional political history. (Social history is
the history of everyday experiences and beliefs of ordinary
people. Social historians look at teachers, store clerks, factory
workers, police officers, the unemployed, children, computer
programmers -- all kinds of people you can meet in everyday
life. Most social historians study one group of people, one
particular area, or a specific topic within social history.)
Assessment Evidence
Performance Tasks:
Formative Assessments:
Students read and evaluate oral and documentary histories (a variety of Studs Terkel interviews as well as other primary source
documents, such as the Library of Congress WPA photo collection)
Students conduct interviews of each other, attempting to capture individual stories
Students perform their interviews in character as the person/classmate they interviewed.
Students will write a paragraph comparing two different oral history/social history versions of a story, explaining how/if both
can be true.
Students will write a paragraph comparing an oral history/social history version of a story with a textbook version of the same
story, discussing strengths and weaknesses of both formats.
Summative Assessments:
Our Social History Project
Students, as a research collective, construct a comprehensive social history of Oak Park/River Forest in 2013. The social
history explores the different aspects of the American experience, encapsulated in the themes of our units throughout the year - which parallel, in many respects, the themes that organized Studs Terkel’s work. Students, in groups, determine what aspect of
the American experience provides the focus their interviews and documentary work. They might focus on
 Americans who have a role in or are affected by the experience of war
 Americans who considers themselves rebels or outsiders
 Americans who have experienced a significant trauma in their lives
 American whose race, gender, sexual orientation or class has shaped their experience
students identify individuals to interview and other resources to explore -- and then compile oral and documentary history
about their aspect of the American experience -- as experienced chiefly by member of the Oak Park/River Forest community
students write a “group essay” that draws conclusions from their oral and documentary sources
students share and present group work to class
students synthesize the group work in a large, comprehensive “book” of that personalizes some of the major historical and
literary topics that we studied over the course of the semester.
This leads into…
Junior Theme, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”
Learning Plan
Primary texts:
Excerpts from Studs Terkel’s Working, Division Street America, Hard Times, and others.
Group project - students interview OP residents by theme; put together for a book w/ introduction, blurbs/formatting,
afterword.
Nonfiction/Supplementary Texts:
Studs Terkel: Voices of Our Time: The Original Live Interviews (audio CD)
Variety of oral histories, particular to student interest, as an introduction to the form. (Saturday Night Live, Those Guys Have
All the Fun, I Want My M.T.V., etc)