The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage

Classroom Activities

The following four activities are just a sample of the work done during this two week unit. I chose to include these four because they show the collaborative learning, analysis, field trip, and writing strategies mentioned above.

Dinner Party

Before I teach the Plaintext version of the Tulsa Race Riot, students participate in a Dinner Party activity. In this collaborative learning activity each student is assigned a person—either an eyewitness to the events or someone closely related to the riot—whose role they assume. After giving each student a short biography to read, they assume that person's role, walking around the classroom explaining their perspective of the riot and listening to others speak about what happened (Appendix C). Students take on the roles of key players: Dick Rowland, the young Black shoe shiner whose arrest sparked the riot; Sherriff Willard McCullough, the officer charged with protecting Rowland for the lynching mob; Mary Parish, a Black Tulsan who witnessed riot; and many others. This activity sparks their curiosity about what really happened because each person has a slightly different take on the causes or events related to the riot. At this point I teach the Plaintext version of the riot, including primary source photos and a timeline of the events. After hearing the straightforward version of events I reinforce the intertextuality of the event by questioning the differences they see in my version of the riot versus the experiences of the person whose role they assumed during the Dinner Party. This inevitably prompts discussions about truth and lies in history and the media's role in the riot. To end the day's activity, students write about the riot and its effects from the perspective of their assigned roles.

Jigsaw Analysis

Jigsaw is a collaborative learning activity that encourages students to learn information and teach it to their peers. ⁶⁸ It usually involves breaking down a larger text into smaller pieces that students learn, discuss, and teach each other. In this classroom activity, students will experience the intertextuality of the Tulsa Race Riot by analyzing narratives, photos, newspaper articles, and government documents and sharing their analysis techniques and conclusions with their peers. This activity sparks their curiosity about what really happened because each person has a slightly different take on the causes or events related to the riot.

To begin, students will be broken into four different groups and each group will be assigned several documents of one type. Separate groups will work on riot narratives, photographs, press coverage, and government reports. The narrative group will be given various first person narrative accounts from Riot on Greenwood or Events of the Tulsa Disaster to read and analyze (choose an appropriate number of documents based on the number of students in the groups—1 or 2 per student). I give students the SOAPSTone ⁶⁹ model (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone) to use as they analyze each primary source document. The photo group would be given a selection of photos to analyze using OPTIC or other photo analysis techniques (Appendix B). Students in the newspaper group will use selected riot articles from the Tulsa Library (http://www.tulsalibrary.org/aarc/riot/articles.php, accessed July 31, 2011) for their work, while the government document group will analyze selections from the Final Report of the Grand Jury on the Tulsa Race Riot, June 25, 1921 and the Final Report of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, February 28, 2001. Both the newspaper and government document groups will use the National Archives written document analysis form. ⁷⁰

In each group, students will work together to analyze their texts and discuss important points of view, contradictions, or bias that help them understand the causes and effects of the riot. After allowing students the appropriate amount of time to work through analysis and discussion (20-45 minutes), students will form new groups where at least one member of each original group is represented. In these new groups, members from the narrative, photo, newspaper, and government document groups report out on what they learned through their analysis and discussion. To end the activity, each new group collaboratively writes a paragraph to summarize the riot using the different perspectives provided by the various documents they analyzed.

Ekphrastic Poetry

Ekphrastic poems are works written in response to artwork. One of the most famous ekphrastic poems is John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. On every field trip to a museum I require my students to write a reflection, and ekphrastic poetry is an easy and creative way to fulfill that goal. On our fieldtrip to Greenwood, students will encounter artwork in many forms—paintings, sculpture, poetry, monuments, and more. For this ekphrastic poetry assignment, each student will choose one piece of art to write a poetic response. Before they begin to write, students sketch the artwork and then use their close viewing skills to note details from the artwork, colors, text, tone, mood, and available information on the artist. Next, it is important that each student reflect on their own feelings towards the piece. With this information students are armed with words and feelings with which to write, but they should also consider whose point of view the speaker of the poem will have—the viewpoint of artist, the viewer (past, present, or future), or an object or person within the artwork. I make it a point to remind students that poems come in many forms and they do not have to rhyme. I also require poems to be written on site and completed before we board the bus back to school. Their poems should include details from the artwork, the mood or tone of the piece, an identifiable speaker, and their own feelings in response to the artwork. For students that find writing poetry a challenge, I encourage them to pen found poems (where they simply choose words from existing text or images and rearrange them to convey thoughts or feelings), haiku, or sticky note poems (short poems that must fit on a post-it note).

Creating Maps of Need & Desire

As we enter the final phase of the Tulsa Race Riot unit, I want my students to evaluate the long term results of the riot on the economic development of north Tulsa. This activity should begin with a group discussion of what services a community needs to support its citizens, such as hospitals, schools, food and retail stores, and transportation. Once students compile a list of services, they will use Google maps, Google Earth, or paper maps to plot what services are already available in north Tulsa. Once students have labeled the available services on a map, students will work in groups to determine what services are lacking and where they are needed. Students will label neighborhoods, street corners, and other locations that need new or improved services. From these maps students can create their civic action plans to support economic development in north Tulsa. This project can be high tech, using internet mapping sites, or low tech, using a paper maps and a local phone book. It can also delve deeper into more complex lessons on population geography and economic geography.