Activities
Lesson 1
Begin by asking students what they know about Hunting Park: What experiences have they had there? For what purposes do they use the park? If they do not use it, why not? Typically, I will have them write this down as a “Do Now” activity, on a 3 x 5 note card in order to keep their responses brief; if so, reserve the back side of the note card for a second, follow up question: How could the park be improved, in order to make its use more public, more useful to the surrounding neighbors?
Next, if you have access to a Smart board, or large-screen projection device, project a map of the area, in order to get the big picture impact. I have access to the 2009 Hunting Park Revitalization Plan, which possesses a plethora of schematic maps, but if you are researching a different park with your students, Google Earth or Google Maps can be just as effective at providing an overview of the area. If your resources are such that there is nothing, not even an overhead projector, provide everyone with a map of the area to be studied. We will begin by getting familiar with the area, and I will use one of my students to help guide us through the territory, either using the technology or just verbally, as would a tour guide. As we do so, we will open the floor to comments from the entire class: what memories do you have of each space in the park? Begin to cultivate their natural enthusiasm for storytelling, and prod them with provocative questions, such as: Who was important to your earliest experiences there? What seem to be the big issues that have affected the park and its use over the years YOU have used it? What problems have arisen that seem to affect more than just YOU, but cause concern for a wider public? Teachers should emphasize the ways the “personal is political”, and how to begin with oneself and our own experiences and expand outward from there, until our experiences overlap with the experiences of others.
Finally, and following some keen summative observations from both the teacher, and if possible, the students in particular, we will begin the process of planning a trip to see the park: provide, trip slips, if your school is like mine, in order to get their parents’ permission, but above all else, in order to explain the importance of getting to the place, in order to see it for ourselves, and that the objective of the project is to see how we, as a class, could contribute towards its use, as well as study its history and redevelopment. What are things we should look for? This is where some key themes, tropes, and vocabulary of public history becomes important, and students can work in groups with large poster paper in order to brainstorm some aspects of the park that they will look for, drawing in part on the earlier discussions in the class period. As they work, encourage students to accomplish 3 goals: (1) determine who in your group is interested in what; for example, what role can they take the lead in that will contribute to the overall understandings for which the group or the class is looking to learn answers? Assign these roles names in order to brainstorm them with the larger class towards the end of the period, or before we leave on our trip. Some options students can consider are: environmental studies (the trees, foliage, and natural growth); art (this student will look for existing public art, possible locations for future art, and any information on the history of art in the park); architecture (the student who assumes responsibility for this aspect of park exploration will study the built structures on the park, as well as in the park’s past and potential future); recreation (this student will study what activities occur on the park land, looking for sports fields, courts, and facilities); finally, people (this student will study who is actually there, and what they are doing inside the park environs) (2) ask students to develop a materials list; in other words, what will we need to have with us to take notes? I suggest drawing much of what we see, but a complement to doing mandatory art studies can be using smartphones, if you have them, to record visual and also auditory aspects of the park while we are there together, or also if students return there outside of the class trip. In fact, students will create a “public history walking tour” as part of the unit’s assignments, and ask: What should be included? How will the tour be created, led, and preserved? (3) The last and final aspect for students to explore is writing: how can a park inspire the imagination? What questions need to be asked as part of our exploration? Which questions are rhetorical (needing no immediate answer/s) and which are questions to pursue (in order to dig for answers)? What do YOU hope to find out through the process of studying the park, both collectively and individually?
Students should have time to gather as a whole group before the end of class, or perhaps during the next class period depending upon how the time has been used, in order to contribute to each other’s understandings and but then regroup and post their posters for a “gallery walk”; what can they steal from one another to enhance everyone’s effort/s?
Lesson 2
As a next lesson, take trips to the actual park. Upon arrival, walk the perimeter of the park together, discussing what the students see at the outset. Students should, of course, understand all safety protocols and expectations, but upon the end of the walk, eat lunch as a group, discussing several key elements of the tour: (1) Access: were students able to access all of the park, both physically and emotionally? In other words, were they able to traverse the territory, or were there physical impedimenta to doing so, such as fencing, gates, trash, construction, etc.? Furthermore, did they feel any emotional limitations, such as feelings of exclusion due to any safety concerns, cultural barriers, unwelcome signage, or rude staff and maintenance crews or threatening patrons? What were they exactly? (2) Who does the park seem to serve? Does it serve artistic, recreational, cultural, or natural purposes? What ethnic groups seem welcome in the space at this time? Who seems unwelcome? What evidence do you have for coming to the conclusions to which you arrive? (3) What improvements, restoration, or changes would you recommend to the park? Why do you recommend these changes? Plan to discuss all of the student questions back in the classroom afterwards, but have students compile their lists of questions (and ultimately, their answers) in note form during the trip through the park.
Next, dismiss students to exercise their investigative and illustrative skills. They should have determined a set of roles for themselves for work within the park during the course of this visit (see previous lesson…) but I believe ALL students should make an effort to engage with the park through drawing elements of it: perhaps a flower they find, the architecture, people, either up close (while doing an oral historical interview---?) or from a wide angle perspective, and schematic design interpretations either of what they see or how they imagine changes to the park’s built environment. Give a generous amount of time, perhaps an hour, in which they can really become absorbed in their observations, analyses and drawings.
Finally, before leaving gather students together to discuss their work aloud collectively. Begin with their small teams/groups, in a brief conference of about 10-15 minutes; following their discussion, pool all observations together, so that their first impressions benefit all. Students will inevitably have some overlap in their processes and products, but there should be communality in the results of their thinking, so that we as a class contribute to each other’s understandings of what we have seen and experienced, especially while it is fresh in our minds. Plan to review these discoveries later, and be careful to record your own thoughts as well as to allow students the opportunity to share out and record their classmates’ commentary.
Lesson 3
Upon returning to the classroom, students will need to meet in their small groups/teams and cooperatively review and gather their information. Now: what to do next? Based upon what each group decides, students may choose to design and construct a short term public art installation; perhaps another project might be writing, designing, and building a series of signage; a walking tour that could be accessed online, or through an App.; other possibilities could be writing and performing a historical lecture or poem, either at the park or inside the Recreation Center; holding an athletic event, such as a public croquet or badminton competition; participating in documenting the biology of the park, or getting involved with the developing urban garden on the property, and then making a presentation of the results; writing a proposal to the Fairmount Park Commission in order to indicate aspects of the park that need attention or further consideration, including illustrations that would show what students had in mind; producing a video or film which seeks to reveal an aspect of the historical record at Hunting Park, for educative or entertainment purposes; authoring a series of blog posts or alternatively, creating a website that seeks to explore some aspect of the park’s renovation, history, or use. Every project should represent an element of public history: making the history of the park and its people relevant to today’s people in the park by some publicly accessible means.
As students brainstorm, write, design and produce their projects over the next week or weeks, depending upon the time you have together in the classroom, a portion of instructional time can be spent teaching the history of the park in snippets. The Hunting Park Revitalization Plan of 2009 is a great place to begin: performing a close reading, asking questions akin to those illustrated in the content section of this unit, and starting with a close reading of the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNgSs2s8A0 (see the Appendix for other videos on Hunting Park that will be useful in media study), which reveals a Chevy advertisement featuring their commitment to Hunting Park.
Some questions that might be discussed are: How do the producers of the video communicate their interests in the public use of the park? Is their expression of concern/investment/hope authentic? What tells you this? From what do you derive the conclusions to which you have arrived? Each video can be used as a warm-up to the classroom brainstorming and independent work time, or alternatively as something they watch for homework and respond to in writing, either in preparation for a larger group discussion or as material for the culminating project.
One way to compile and document the internal work students do is to have everyone write a project proposal, including a description, in writing and supporting visual media, of what is being proposed. Furthermore teachers may also want students to write a series of reflections on how the purpose(s) of the project evolve over the course of the unit, either as handwritten journal entries, blog posts to a web location, contributions to a specific class account or website, a additions to a Google Document or even completion of a Google Form.
Based on such videos, students may choose to direct their work (as “Activist Historians”) towards some action they hope to stimulate in their audience, such as the closure of one of the nearby recycling plants, whose polluting byproducts have caused the highest Asthma rates in the city within the Hunting Park neighborhoods of Nicetown, Logan, Feltonville and Juniata Park neighborhoods (where sits Edison HS) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfNTU3n6Mmw (a “Reclaiming Hunting Park” video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGCLfacOXCQ, a Youtube film revealing that the “Revitalization” of Hunting Park by Hunting Park United may leave room for some straightforward questions about the financial support and how much is used for the actual park, as opposed to administrative staffing and structural organization.
Perhaps also, in every classroom attempting to study and engage with a local park, a government or community representative could be invited into the classroom (or met at the park site!) for some discussion or additional insight into the decisions being made to maintain the park, educate the community, or present activities for the public. I reached out to several government agencies, as well as the Fairmount Park Conservancy. In Philadelphia, most parks are managed by community or civic organizations who manage to consult with city agencies to secure maintenance service, salaried employees and legal permits for various activities. The city’s park system has flourished due to these community activists and philanthropists working together. Do they make considerate choices? Whose interests do they serve? Who addresses concerns when there are any? How are these questions of park maintenance resolved in your area?
Lesson 4
How does an English teacher work in writing within this curriculum, as opposed to a Social Studies Teacher? We have already discussed blogging, editorials can also be a good exercise for students. So can writing articles for the local newspaper, website, or government newsletter. This is a “Public History” project, with an emphasis on the public nature of the work to be done. All students in Pennsylvania have had to research a topic concerning their community and write a ten page paper, perform a presentation of their findings, and complete 20-40 hours of community service until this very year. While this is no longer a requirement due to the new Keystone Tests to graduate, we continue to require students at my school to complete a project; Juniors need to practice the skills they will need, on some level, before they attempt this project in their final year. This final lesson is around the English component of reading and writing across the curriculum.
Students can begin by reading the essay on “Using Radical History Tours to Reframe Urban Crime” by Rebecca Amato and Jeffrey T. Manuel in the 112th issue of Radical History Review, from Spring 2012. If you are like many teachers, and I count myself among them, we need to motivate our students to action, in anything, on any topic, or at least find ways to get the ball rolling. A crucial line from the article is at the end of the first paragraph “Challenging students and the public to think in complex ways about the definition and meaning of ‘crime,’ for example, may well require scholars to reach beyond the traditional venues of the classroom or the written word.” There are many controversial gems within the text to provoke and challenge students to (re)consider their attitudes towards crime and by extension, poverty, community, public engagement and responsibility, as well as what it means to be a 21st century citizen and take on the world in which we all live, especially within a learning environment such as a school.
Another line in the Amato and Manuel article, found in the section on East St. Louis, Illinois suggests that neighborhood as an example of a positive public history tour that allows participants to perceive old things with new vision: “Redmond’s narration emphasized the tenacity and triumph of the city’s African American community, which persevered through persecution and segregation to create lasting cultural achievements.”21 The essay goes on to say that “Although it was not the focus, the tour also acknowledged East St. Louis’s history of blight, job loss, white flight, and disinvestment.”22 These kinds of ideas, which provide alternative perspectives on neighborhoods like the one around my school in Hunting Park, allow students to read privately how others may see their area, as well as how they can take ownership over the narrative of their own historical record, both in what they discuss as well as how they choose to discuss it with others. They are further challenged to write convincingly in different modes in order to speak to a wider audience than those with whom they might traditionally interact. Doing the work of public historians will bring them into a wider circle of scholarship and social interaction, broaden their view of others as well as of themselves; this should be at the forefront of any teacher’s mind in any subject when they seek to prepare their students for life beyond the classroom, the high school level, and their provincial worldview. They are essentially code-switching and attempting to become fluent in the language of public history, another role they can add to their growing list of survival tools as they become adults and assume leadership of the society in which we live; at best, they will become even more responsible citizens.
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