Target Audience & Setting: 11th grade US History in a distance learning setting
Content: Could be taught during a unit on the 1920s, specifically during a lesson on the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote in the United States on a national level.
*Note: This lesson is going to be an adaptation of the research project that I was supposed to present at the Public Research Fellows symposium last year (it was canceled the day of as it was the Friday before quarantine)
Process: This lesson will begin with an interactive lecture using Google Slides & Nearpod to give the students some background information on the topic. The Google Slides presentation will also include directions for the activity. First, everyone will place bets on the number of people in the group that will “make it” to the end of the activity and who those people will be (this way everyone stays engaged even if they are “out” early). Students will then follow the link to the differentiated Google Form. All ten participants will click on their name (which will be an option in the first question of the Google Form) and doing so will take everyone to a description of a different identity. Students will have time to read this biography, become familiar with it, and write down any details that they think might be important. When everyone has had enough time, we will come back as a group and I will take everyone through a flowchart via a Google Slides presentation that uses Nearpod polls to ask different questions to help everyone determine if their assigned (fictional) woman would have been able to actually exercise their right to vote in 1920. After each step, I will ask the group if everyone’s person is still able to vote or not and also go through some historical context behind the different restrictions put in the way of voting during this time. After we get all the way to the end, we will see if anybody’s person actually made it all the way to the end and would have been able to vote and will see who’s bets were right. If time allows I will have a couple of discussion questions for the group and invite any final reflections.
Resources for Lessons: Google Slides Presentation, Interactive Presentation on Nearpod, Google Form, Jamboard
Delivery Considerations: The research presentation that I was originally due to give in March was designed to be in person. I made a poster with a flowchart on it and participants would have been able to randomly draw identities and follow the chart using the biographical information of that fictional woman to get an idea of who was actually able to exercise the right to vote. Moving it online, a differentiated Google Form and Google Slides presentation using Nearpod will be used as these are both interactive and pretty user friendly ways to deliver a lesson virtually.
Feature Image Source: Harris & Ewing, photographer. Suffrage Speakers. , None. [Between 1905 and 1945] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016855504/.