Takaki - Chapter 8

This week's chapter on the Chinese immigration to the United States focused very specifically on the racial suffering of the Chinese. When I read passages such as this, I am immediately driven to want to help students develop their creative writing skills as a reading response activity in an attempt to understand historical events from a more personal perspective. However, since our assignment for this week was to develop method with which we are unfamiliar with, my teaching method for this week will look at personal stories from a different perspective.

Once I find a search engine or archive that I particularly like, I tend to rely solely on that database once I become comfortable with it. In this class, Danna's weekly use of the Library of Congress website has opened my eyes to another available tool, one that I want to push myself to use as I develop lesson plans. I also want my students to become familiar with different search engines and archives as well, so that this research knowledge can be applied to various projects. For this week's teaching method, I intend to do just that.

The overall goal is that students will create a small scrapbook of 5-7 items that collectively show their understanding of Chinese immigration, particularly that in California. Students will search for their mementos using the "Chinese in California 1850-1925" page, which is part of the American Memory section of the Library of Congress' website. Although students will have a choice of which items to incorporate into their scrapbook, they will be required to incorporate at least one letter, one photograph, and one advertisement into their scrapbook. At least one of their items must specifically address the Chinese Exclusion Act. For each memento the students will then write a one paragraph explanation for each item on how it specifically addresses Chinese suffrage in California.