Lesson One: Warming Up

Select one of the following activities to introduce students to the idea that a person's identity is a complex thing, consisting of external and internal forces, and also tied to larger communal and societal identities.

Shoe box identity

Materials required for each student:
  • shoe box
  • materials with which to decorate the shoe box
  • photographs that represent things important to the student
Purpose:
  • Most of us know what it is like to share with others only part of who we are. This activity visualizes the difference between a private identity kept to ourselves and those whom we trust and a public identity freely shared with others. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, "One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, too many ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Directions:
  1. Each student should decorate the outside of a shoe box in ways that show to others something about his or her identity (using college insignia or a photograph of an automobile, for example).
  2. The outside of the box represents a public identity; that is, those things we willingly share with others as a way of identifying who we are.
  3. On the inside of the box, the student should place photographs unseen by others which represent his or her private identity; that is, those things kept private from others.
  4. Students will need to decide if they would like to later reveal the inside images.
  5. After the box is completed, students can attempt to identify their classmates based on the box's outward appearance and then can guess what images (and identity!) might be hidden within.
Parallel Timelines Materials required for each student:
  • history textbook
Purpose:
  • Timelines are useful ways of tracking chronologies; a parallel timeline tracks two different kinds of activities across the same time span. This activity asks students to construct two timelines that compare events from a personal family history with those that are public and more widely known.
Directions:
  1. Students label and illustrate with photographs drawn from their family photo albums one of the timelines with events taken from their personal family history (the year they were born or their parents married, for example, with photographs taken to commemorate the events - baby photos, wedding pictures, etc.)
  2. Students label and illustrate with images the second parallel timeline with memorable events drawn from their textbook, especially those events which they can connect with the ones on their first timeline (a family member who served in the Vietnam War, for example, with photographs.)
  3. Many students experience a sense of disconnection with events that the textbook labels as important--sometimes events swirling around us seem to have no bearing on our private lives.
  4. Then again, students may be encouraged to discern significant connections--certainly African-Americans who may never have personally known a lynching victim nonetheless understood the import such an act carried for them.
  5. Students should be encouraged to note the ways people are depicted on their two timelines, for example, African Americans have often been stereotyped in public depictions which differ markedly from how they know and see images created for themselves in family photographs. This gulf in how people are framed in public versus how they see themselves in private is often a revelation of latent biases inherent in the culture owing to the historical framing of "whiteness" and "blackness."
  6. Note: Occasionally a student, especially one whose background is different from those of classmates, will not want to list events from his or her family's past, an indication of how painful it can be to share an identity with people who may not be accepting of it.

History in a wallet

Material required for each student:
  • his or her own wallet or billfold
Purpose:
  • We carry around primary sources all the time. This exercise requires students to use the items found in a wallet or billfold to offer an interpretation of the identify of the person carrying those items. Our understandings of the past are limited by the amount of information available to us; it can be difficult to make reliable hypotheses about the past. Therefore historians must be imaginative in order to fashion meaningful understandings with limited materials.
Directions:
  1. Divide students into pairs.
  2. Have students examine the contents of each other's wallet or billfold. (You may want to give notice of this activity ahead of time!)
  3. The contents should be considered as the only artifacts available to tell about the life they represent.
  4. Students should consider:
    • What can you reasonably hypothesize about the identity of your partner?
    • What are you unable to know about your partner based on the contents before you?