Contributing to History

Levin, H. (2003.) Making History Come Alive. Learning & Leading With Technology, 31, 22-27.

In response to this digital project accomplished by the students at the Urban School of San Francisco where they interviewed twelve Holocaust survivors and published the videos to a website, I think that I could easily use this same digital approach in the High School English classroom. One idea that comes to mind immediately would be a project where students research and interview local authors, or authors that they know from their own communities. I think this would be a very good way to make literature come alive for students, and to make them “contributors” as well as learners. Their video project could actually be a documentary that would examine the backgrounds and influences of particular authors (geographical, social, familial, educational, etc.) as well as the nature and influence of their works. The documentaries would be written/planned by the students themselves, but they would be given suggestions and parameters for the kinds of footage and information that they might want to include, such as: interviews with the authors; interviews with family, friends, and/or associates; footage of the “landscapes” that may have influenced them; student enactments of selections from the books; other artistic representation (videos, digital storytelling, music) of the authors’ works; etc. Like the Holocaust project, the finished products could also be used to create web pages that would expand public knowledge of perhaps-lesser-known authors and artists. (With their permission.)