Teaching Strategies
Although there will be at least three weeks worth of activities for students to complete in this unit, there are three essential activities for students to become the street-level geographers and definers of the community culture I'm seeking. These are the walking tour of the community, the hunt for cultural objects and the Google Map pop-up marker submission assignments.
The first of these, ideally following the introduction of the ethnographic form and readings on street-level geography but still in the first week is the Neighborhood Walking Tour lesson. This will, by necessity be a rather long and involved activity. Students will need to be signed out of classes on a field trip. We will gather together first thing in the morning, review the night's homework, and then walk the neighborhood. Ideally, there will be cultural leaders from the community assisting in the chaperoning of the walk, a stop at a well-known historical landmark which I can help students see as new again along with a new understanding of the location's deep time importance to the neighborhood, a popular eatery for lunch, and several other major nodes of activity to deepen their street-level understanding. For my purposes, I will be joining forces with one of my school's partner organizations, the Southwest Organizing Project help plan the trip and attract local community and cultural leaders such as my friend, local school council member and former aldermanic candidate, Eric Hermosillo. I expect to complete a walk along Western Avenue's commercial zone to the Gage Park Park District Field house at Western and 55 th Street. Here we will pause to examine the history and architecture of the building as well as the mural by Thomas Lea. 34 While here students will form groups and conduct ethnography interviews with as many community cultural leaders as I can find to meet us there. The ethnography form will be introduced earlier in the week and students will initially have to complete one for themselves and for one other person in the class, giving them enough familiarity with the process for when they meet local community cultural leaders. From there we will explore the 55 th Street commercial area, much of which was "prairie" during the setting of Remembering Gage Park. Along the way we will stop at St. Gall's Catholic Church, Senka Park, and Nicky's Fast Food for lunch. I will likely have students provide their own lunch money; but prepare myself for the possibility of purchasing a couple of meals. If possible, I will try to orchestrate some fundraising prior to this trip and provide lunch. At Nicky's the classic order is a Big Baby (double cheeseburger with everything), fries and an RC Cola. It will also be smart to arrange a group discount in advance. There will be a follow-up tour during the intercession, considering that this tour will barely cover the east and north ends of the neighborhood. The second tour will actually begin south of the neighborhood in the Marquette Park Park District Field House. This is the traditional locale for the Community Transformed kiosk honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. Here we will meet with more cultural leaders and students will take turns completing more ethnographies and an exercise examining the content of the kiosk. Also, during the intersession, students will be required to complete three more personal ethnographies; but only one of those stories can come from within their own home. I need my students to stretch beyond their comfort zone a bit if we are to define the flavor our neighborhood culture. I want to focus here, although slightly outside the neighborhood boundaries, to connect students to the Community Transformed Project and so that they can see what our students have been able to accomplish. From Marquette Park, we will head north to examine the Bungalow Belt, and possibly tour one of the Green Bungalow rehab projects completed during Mayor Richard M. Daley's term as mayor. We will then explore the 59 th Street commercial zone and California Avenue. I would like my students to be able to juxtapose more established nodes of activity like the Carniceria and Taqueria La Hacienda with newer ones like a new coffee shop, The Twist, on the corner of 59 th Street and St. Louis Avenue. Along the way, we will be taking photography of as many of the neighborhoods cultural icons as we can identify for use in the next major activity.
The second activity will take two class periods. The first period will be a standard Power Point presentation explaining deeper background on the community icons identified along our two neighborhood walks. This activity will be somewhat labor intensive for me, to ensure that my background information is accurate and that I include enough cultural icons for students to utilize later in the course. During the Power Point presentation, students will practice taking Cornell Notes on the various icons presented, which should include events as well as physical places and artifacts. The following day, we will move this community-walking concept from street-level to hallway-level and students will be sent out in teams with a camera to identify cultural icons throughout the school and explain their importance to us. My intent is to leave this phase of the activity relatively unscripted in order to allow my students to judge for themselves what is important to the culture of our school and why it is so.
The third activity I want to share here is having students submit pop-up marker suggestions to Google Maps. This activity will also require two class periods. The first class period will be spent conducting additional background research on the various cultural places, artifacts, activities and events described in the previous lesson. The goal is to provide as much detailed information as possible and distill it down to pop-up box for Google Maps. The second day, of this activity will focus on the technical aspect of encoding the pop up and submitting to Google Maps for approval. If approved, we will have successfully used technology to integrate our map of desire with the flat map of the familiar.
To close, I look forward to helping my students develop a deeper understanding of intangible culture and its impact on New Orleans' neighborhood communities as well as their own, while expanding their spatial thinking to include those ever-present intangible spaces that bring our tangible spaces to life. To reaffirm our motivations as we move forward, I turn again to quote master Studs Terkel, this time pulling from the opening of Division Street: America.
We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a lambent flame with power to make clean and bright our dingy city streets.
–Jane Addams, 1909 35
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