Key Activities
Though teachers may take this curriculum unit and run with it in whichever directions they think are best, I do recommend four activities to ground students’ learning in this unit.
Activity 1: Comparing City Plans, Past and Present
Just as I discussed the Burnham and Chicago Metropolis 2020 Plans in the overview of Chicago history and park development, I will have my students read and analyze key components of those documents. First, we’ll examine the non-print elements of the text excerpts-- maps and architectural drawings-- and then we’ll apply the visual thinking strategies discussed in the Teaching Strategies section. Next, students will read the print versions of the text using the close reading strategy. Then, students will compare features across the texts using a semantic feature analysis-- a type of organizational tool that promotes structured critical thinking. Students will then engage in a seminar-style discussion about the two plans for Chicago, focused on this question: what do the similarities that exist between these plans suggest about the emphasis one should put on developing public space?
Application Beyond Chicago
The 1909 Plan of Chicago and Metropolis 2020 are plans most appropriate for taking a close look at Chicago’s development. I’d recommend looking into planning documents-- both new and old-- that exist for one’s own context. It could be useful for a group of students in a city other than Chicago to begin with the Commercial Club of Chicago documents in the absence of similarly-visually-stunning documents in one’s own city; but, if a class outside of Chicago does begin with Burnham and Metropolis 2020, I’d suggest altering the discussion question to “If such a plan existed for our city, what would it have looked like (in 1909, in 2001, etc.)?”
Activity 2: Creating a Vision of the Future with Google Maps and Drawings
Google’s web-based technology has changed the way I teach. This next activity relies upon two Google applications-- My Maps and Drawings-- to empower students to create their own visions for the future of parks in their neighborhoods.
Google Maps has made it possible to explore areas previously inaccessible to the average school classroom-- from The Grand Canyon to Stonehenge and beyond; but there is much more a teacher can do with Maps. My students will use the Google Maps companion application “My Maps” to examine existing parks in their neighborhoods and pinpoint areas for expansion or redevelopment. The application will allow students to create layers that examine the park’s past, present, and imagined future.
For example, if a student were exploring Portage Park, that student would map out the iterations of Portage Park’s pools and recreation centers by placing “pins” on the electronic map. The layers could be viewed separately or over top of one another. If students feel as if the current park spaces in their neighborhood do not meet the community’s needs, they can use maps to create a new layer that reflects a park they’d propose building in an underutilized public space, such as an abandoned building, defunct railway, or vacant lot.
Then, students will take the future visions of their park plans for the future using Google Drawings. The application is bare bones, but it contains the essentials for creating architectural drawings: lines, shapes, and text boxes. It is also collaborative and cloud-based, which permits students to work with their peers across a variety of operating systems and formats. Once students create the drawings, they will present them to their peers along with a vision statement that explains how the park revision/new creation will meet the needs of the community in question.
Application Beyond Chicago
The tools used in this activity are not dependent upon one’s position in Chicago. And, therefore, this activity is easily adaptable to any location. The only necessity here is access to technology. But, it is important to note, many students will have the latest and greatest Internet-ready software in their hands: mobile phones. Such phones are increasingly-equipped to use more Google apps, including Drawings and My Maps.
Activity 3: Conducting Community Interviews
If the same thing is true for other teachers’ research as was for mine, there may be a lack of primary source documents that address community use and reaction to parks over time. Neither the Chicago History Museum nor the individual historical societies I contacted had much information on individuals’ stories of neighborhood parks over time; key moments in parks’ history-- openings and celebrations such as the Portage Park pool and the Pan-American Games highlight most of the historical record. There are a few photographs here and there-- and there is Chicago Park District historian Julia Bacharach’s significant contribution toward consolidating the history of the city’s parks; but there is little more than a few pages of information on any one individual neighborhood park.
People, however, surely have memories of their parks. Relegating the parks’ history to a few snapshots in time, as they exist in the accessible historical record, freezes history in those moments. Thus, one of the ideas of this curriculum unit is for students to record and preserve their own accounts of their memories within the spaces-- spaces including Portage Park along with community memories. Then, these narratives-- archived online-- can become a part of a growing school and community effort to capture residents’ experiences with their neighborhood park spaces and can eventually include other collecting efforts such as photographs or archival materials. My students and I, acting as public historians, will write and tell our own histories to-- as Linda Shopes suggests is possible-- democratize the historical record.
The first way in which we will do this is by collecting stories. First, students will listen to existing aural stories-- such as the “Holdout” episode of the podcast 99% Invisible discussed earlier-- and analyze their features using the adapted visual thinking strategy. Then, they will analyze the stories to imagine the types of questions an interviewer may have had to ask an interviewee to be able to tell the story in an effective manner. Once students have developed criteria for asking questions, they will divide themselves into small groups along neighborhood lines to begin working on their community interviews.
Just as I researched Portage Park, my students will research their own neighborhood areas. They will create interview schedules ahead of time so that they incorporate questions that suggest a sense of historical knowledge while also providing space for interviewees to tell their own accounts of history. They will record these interviews using phones or other digital recording devices and compile them to use in the next activity. Students will begin with one another-- for they are expert users of parks, too-- and branch out into interviewing other community members. It would be ideal if students could interview a variety of individuals across demographics to create a sample of stories representative of the neighborhood’s diversity.
Application Beyond Chicago
It would be great for all teachers using this unit to research their own neighborhoods or community areas before beginning this unit. Then, one could model for their own students just as I will for mine how a great deal of research must be done before one can interview people for a project such as this. Census data is a good starting point. Most current neighborhood demographic data can be accessed via census.gov; and, city records offices or libraries can likely shed light on park and neighborhood plans if a local historical society does not have them readily available.
Activity 4: Creating a Podcast
This unit’s culminating activity is the creation of an aural story for the world to hear. Podcasting is something that can be as sophisticated or as simple as an instructor wants it to be. At the most basic level, students and teachers only need a connection to the internet and the ability to upload pre-recorded sounds-- the interviews from Activity 3 plus any diegetic or nondiegetic sounds that one may need to add in to enhance the storytelling. The audio files can be mixed using a cloud-based audio editor or by using software hosted on a computer. (Due to the ever-evolving nature of cloud-based programs, I will not recommend one program over another; good-quality non-cloud-based programs include-- in 2015-- Audacity and Garageband.) Then, the audio files can be uploaded to a class website or to an online storage space like SoundCloud where users from across the world can access and stream the students’ work. This activity engages students as readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers; for, it requires students use discrete skill sets across those domains to successfully create the final product.
Application Beyond Chicago
My school is 1:1, meaning all students and teachers have their own personal computing devices. But, that does not mean a school without 1:1 devices cannot complete this activity. Again-- many students have mobile phones that are “smart.” Those phones can host applications that can edit audio in much the same way as I mentioned above. And, they can publish to websites and hosts like SoundCloud in the same ways.
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