Intro
“Its a persona Black!” “There's a.. Well…a colored?” “She’s a… well, a um, mixed?” All phrases my students used last year to describe a person in an image from the 19th century. They know there are words they are not supposed to use to describe people of color, but they don’t know what words they should use I teach high school Social Studies and my students immediately describe people in images by their “race.” Images make history more vivid. The more lifelike the image is, the more likely students are to engage with it, and the more likely they are to assume it is a depiction of fact. But we need to learn how to talk constructively and with civility about the people we encounter. Images of people from the past can tell us a lot about the realities they lived in, but it is better if we use the correct tools to analyze these sources —much as we would any historical document.
If my students are anything like yours, they engage with visual information all the time. They are constantly on Instagram, SnapChat, Tik Tok, and a variety of other online photo messaging apps that undoubtedly will become popular in the next few years. They are experts at using cropping, staging, filters, angles, and captions to shape the way their images are viewed by their intended audience. Shockingly, however, they are fairly un-critical of the images we look at in Social Studies. This unit is an attempt to apply the visual analysis skills students use daily in their personal social lives to examine people in history. In an effort to make history “come alive,” this unit examines images from the past, the people in them, the clothes they wear, and what those images must have meant at the time to their intended audience(s).
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