Tuesday, October 19, 2021

October 19, 2021: Work in Progress: Lesson Plan for CT Humanities

[Lots of balls in the air this Fall, all of which could use input and ideas from y’all! So I thought I’d share a handful here, and also ask to hear about some of what you’re juggling for a crowd-sourced weekend post o’ solidarity and support!]

On the happily long afterlife of a very early online piece of mine, and a request for input on its newest iteration.

I haven’t gone back and done a thorough search (I’m all for Googling myself, but past a certain point it feels a bit too narcissistic even for our selfie age), but I think it’s quite possible that my first non-blog piece of online writing, the first piece I composed specifically for another online site, was this September 2013 piece for ConnecticutHistory.org on “Yung Wing, the Chinese Educational Mission, and Transnational Connecticut.” I can’t remember exactly how or through whom I got connected to that great site, much of the content of which is I believe produced or at least curated by students at the University of Connecticut; but I know both the initial contact and the piece itself were follow-ups to both my Chinese Exclusion Act book and the ongoing series of book talks I was giving on that project throughout that summer and fall of 2013.

I may not know exactly how it started, but I do know that this very early piece of online writing has surprisingly and delightfully continued to find new readers over the 8 years since, many of whom have reached out to me (not sure why certain pieces of online writing lead to that kind of contact and conversation more fully, but I sure always enjoy it when they do—so if you’re reading this, write to say hi!). The most reach such contact was from Rebecca Furer, a Program Consultant with the educational resource Teach It Connecticut. Teach It works, in Rebecca’s words, “to put Connecticut-based primary sources into the hands of grade 3-12 educators,” and she’s hoping to add an activity about the Chinese Educational Mission. My piece has apparently been one of the resources she’s been working with, and she reached out with a generous invitation for me to help create that activity (likely for high schoolers, although the level can vary and is at least somewhat up to me) and its assorted primary sources, contextual materials, guiding questions, and links/additional resources.

I’m not looking to outsource that work, I promise; but at the same time I’ve never created a lesson plan or resource specifically geared toward high school students (or middle school either), and so if you have any thoughts on what can make for the best and most successful (or, y’know, worst and least successful) such plans and resources, you know I’d love to hear them! Whether in comments here or by email, I can tell you that I will greatly appreciate and benefit a lot from whatever you’d like to share, and thanks so much in advance!

Next work in progress tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Ideas about this work, or work in progress of your own you’d share?

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