ASU in the Community - Connecting with Seniors Helps Valley Students Learn American History

Connecting with Seniors Helps Valley Students Learn American History

Although visiting a senior community might not be what some eighth graders would consider an exciting destination for a field trip, the students in Joan Miller’s social studies class at West Wing School certainly did. When the bus came to a stop outside the Royal Oaks Lifecare Community in Sun City, the students disembarked full of enthusiasm to begin interviewing residents for their oral history class project. Miller, with guidance from Arizona State University’s Department of History, designed the project so that her students could learn about the era that spans from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the present day from individuals who experienced it first-hand.

“What teachers do in K-12 education impacts the students that we at ASU have as undergraduate and graduate students; and what we do with undergraduate and graduate students impacts K-12 education” - Linda Sargent Wood, assistant professor of history at ASU

“Given the age of the students, talking to real people can make things come alive in a way that I just can’t in the classroom,” said Miller. “I think it fit really well with the modern American history curriculum.”

Miller, along with 24 other middle and high school teachers in the Deer Valley Unified School District (DVUSD), is participating in the “Learning History by Doing History,” partnership between ASU’s Department of History, DVUSD and the renowned Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI) in New York City. The partnership has been made possible through a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers' understanding of and appreciation for traditional U.S. history.

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Debbie Peters, curriculum instruction specialist of social studies and the Teaching American History project director for DVUSD, points out that most districts that have received the grant have been underachieving. In contrast, Peters said DVUSD is overachieving. “That is a unique twist,” Peters said. “The purpose of our grant is to advance the practices of good teachers to become great teachers.”

Sun City Seniors Trade Stories with West Wing Students

Royal Oaks residents involved in Joan Miller’s oral history project have lived through some of the most important recent events shaping American history. Their stories are diverse and fascinating with their experiences ranging from military service during World War II to working as a nurse for President Nixon.

Interviewees Paul and Bobbi Wold found working with Miller’s eighth grade students to be a positive experience. “We appreciated the fact that they were interested,” Paul said, adding, “We grew up in a unique part of American history.”

The students who interviewed the couple learned that Paul Wold served as a combat infantryman in the army from 1941 to 1945. After hostilities ceased in the Pacific theatre following the dropping of the atomic bomb, Paul's division, the 41st Infantry, moved from the Philippines to Japan to do occupation duty around what remained of the city of Hiroshima.

Bobbi Wold, on the other hand, talked to the students about her experience as a teenager, about the same age as them, during World War II and the hardships associated with life on the home front. The Wolds were happy to share their very different stories and viewed them as equally valuable for the students here.

Paul and Bobbi Wold were just as interested in learning about the students’ lives as they were in sharing their own stories. They found that their experiences as 13 and 14 year olds were very different from those of their interviewers. For one thing, they were amazed at how structured the students’ activities are. And when Bobbi mentioned that she played a game called Red Rover as a child, she was stunned when the students told her that their school did not allow them to play games that involved touching.

“We really didn’t know what to expect, but we were delighted,” said Bobbi Wold. “I thought they were charming.”

Miller is grateful for the opportunity to further her own learning. “I really felt that I needed the additional instruction if I wanted to be a credible American history teacher,” she said. She sees doing an oral history project as a great way to communicate to her students what she is learning through her classes at ASU.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits for DVUSD has been the forming of a community across the district since the partnership began. Before the partnership, teachers at different schools did not have many opportunities to interact with each other. Since the beginning of the grant, teachers have studied at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, attended workshops and meetings and taken ASU graduate level courses together.

Peters has noticed the transformation. “I have teachers now who help each other with their unit planning that would have never known each other if it hadn’t been for the grant,” she said. “There is less competitiveness by schools and departments … It is now like a community sharing.”

Miller agrees. “One of the things that is really difficult in school districts is simply providing opportunities for teachers to get acquainted and learn from each other. That has been a critical piece of this – the learning from and working with other teachers. That is a key benefit of the whole grant,” Miller said.

Linda Sargent Wood, assistant professor of history and principal investigator for the TAH grant at ASU, agrees the program is connecting communities of educators and their students and adds that the grant emphasizes the cyclical nature of education.

"What teachers do in K-12 education impacts the students that we at ASU have as undergraduate and graduate students; and what we do with undergraduate and graduate students impacts K-12 education," she said. "Working with teachers in the community is a natural fit with many benefits."

How do the eighth graders feel about learning history by doing history? Although eager to participate in the oral history project, many of them admitted they did not know what to expect. Some students found it was easier to relate to the senior citizens than they originally thought and were surprised at how much more difficult the seniors’ lives were as teenagers than their own.

Brooke Kinbokowitz thought she knew a lot about rationing from what she learned in Miller’s class, but was shocked to hear about her interviewee’s struggles. “She told me about rationing during World War II. Her mom made her own clothes and she picked cotton,” Brooke recalled. She noted that hearing about the woman’s life experiences made history a little more real for her.

In addition to getting to know the seniors as regular people, the students learned about the responsibility that comes with planning and executing a large-scale project. The teams of students researched their interviewee together and each individual student had a specific job such as interviewer, transcriber, audio technician or videographer.

Miller feels the project is giving her students more knowledge about American history as well as professional skills. “History happens with all of us and I want [my students] to really appreciate that people like them – ordinary people – have power and are involved in world events and that they are too,” she said.

Mara Zemicael, ASU in the Community feature writer
Asmara.Zemicael@asu.edu
480-965-0335

Share your comments, questions and thoughts. Send an email to maureen.mills@asu.edu

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