Quick Digital Learning Day Lessons on Immigration by Students for Students

Officially, Digital Learning Day is February 17^th, but you can teach digital learning day and engage students (#DLDay) any day of the week on immigration with our mini-lessons! We pair historical political cartoons with short video clips produced by young adults on immigration themes and provide rigorous questions for student reflection and class discussion. No more than five minutes in length, these films inspire dialogue, critical thinking and creative teaching on immigration.  Additional activities are provided to extend learning and explore the themes covered in the films.

Our digital learning mini-lessons on immigration makes it easy to: insert and adapt short lessons, ask students to draw connections between historical and present immigration themes, engage students with multimedia, and underscore the power of young voices.  

Shadows of immigration past hangs behind the same Americans barring entry to new arrivals. Credit: The History Project, University of California, Davis

How to Use the Mini-Lessons

The mini-lessons include questions that can be used as warm-ups, homework, extra credit, in-between time during standardized testing days, or extended into full lessons in order to provide students with both historical context and real-world accounts on the impact of immigration today. Currently, we have three mini-lessons but plan to include more in the future. 

Teachers have to flexibility to adapt the guide to best meet classroom needs and extend learning with suggested activities.

Extend the Lessons

 

While we include suggested activities that build upon the themes discussed in the films, it is the perfect opportunity for students to cultivate their own voice through a digital storytelling project and/or service-learning. 

• Cross Borders with Digital Storytelling – Using digital storytelling to capture immigration stories is a powerful way for teachers to create opportunities for “empathetic moments” among students and shape classroom environments. Our most popular lesson plan for K-12 students makes it easy to implement in the classroom. 

 

•  Combine Digital Learning with Service Learning – Our current community grants recipients are using digital technologies to reach beyond the classroom walls to study immigration issues that matter to them. Read about our current inspiring teachers who use podcasts and digital immigration narratives to learn more about immigration and a previous project where students brought awareness and assistance to migrant farm workers in their local community. Use this lesson plan to create a similar service-learning initiative in your community – and of course, feel free to apply to our next round of community grants.

We’d Love to Hear What You Think! Let us know your thoughts by emailing us or by filling out a brief feedback form. We’re also on twitter – use the hashtag #DLDay, our handle @ThnkImmigration, and @OfficialDLDay.

Three Classroom Resources to Engage Students this President’s Day

President’s Day will be celebrated on Monday, February 15^th. Usually when President’s Day is addressed in the classroom, it takes place in the primary grades with activities centered around some of the nation’s most revered presidents. But what if this year, observing this national holiday in the classroom was different? What if President’s Day was used as a springboard for engaging students in exploratory learning where they connect the study of our presidents and the power of the executive branch to the topic of immigration?

Here are three engaging resources, two of which are created using HSTRY, a digital learning platform, to help you plan an exciting lesson to teach about immigration. We encourage you to set-up a free teacher account on HSTRY in order to adapt the lessons and share with students.

1) American By Belief: A Family Story - Unless you are 100% Native American your family came to the United States from someplace else. People come for a variety of reasons — to work, reunite with family, get an education or sometimes in search of safety and freedom. This brief lesson is a perfect way to initiate a classroom discussion on why people migrate. You can also extend the activity with our Crossing Borders with Digital Storytelling lesson plan, as well as with the President Lincoln Cottage’s lesson plan for their American By Belief exhibit. The brochure of their educational programs includes a map to “Tell Your Immigration Story.” You can also email them for a free hard copy which makes for a larger classroom display.

An immigrant writes on note on the wall of the "American by Belief" exhibit at President Lincoln's Cottage explaining how she named her son after the President. Credit: http://lincolnscottage.tumblr.com/ 

Engage your students using this lesson we co-created with HSTRY. After you set-up a teacher account, click “copy the timeline,” then sort images and text (using a drag and drop function) into the six identified push/pull factors of immigration. Designed for primary learners (grades 3 and up), this lesson can easily be modified for older students. Students can copy the timeline and add more text and images to fill the categories. Debrief as a class and use the student handbook on HSTRY to properly cite online sources.

Click here to access the American By Belief: A Family Story lesson.

2) Lincoln and Immigrant Contributions to the Civil War – This lesson is almost guaranteed to deepen understanding of our nation’s 16^th president! In this lesson, students will evaluate the impact and reception of immigrants and their contributions to the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War and explore how immigrants view Lincoln.

Examining three essential questions about immigrant contributions in the Civil War, students sort the text and images to best answer the questions using the HSTRY platform. They add more resources through recommended sites such as the Library of Congress’s Civil War collection. This lesson is designed for high school students, who can then use sentence stems provided to write and discuss how immigrants contributed to the Union victory. Additionally, this lesson could not have been developed without the scholarship of Professor Jason Silverman, author of Lincoln and the Immigrant, and Patrick Young, Esq.

Click here to access the Lincoln and Immigrant Contributions to the Civil War lesson plan.

3) Two Timely Lessons to Teach about Executive Action: The President’s executive action on immigration has been greeted with joy, relief, sadness, and contempt. Just what is an executive action and how can students examine the multiple responses to it are the focus areas of our two popular lesson plans. It is a rich opportunity in the high school classroom to: extend critical discussions on the separation of powers, examine the effects of policy on individuals, and analyze the arguments made by both sides to help students become civically engaged and informed.

Click here to read our blog post about our lessons and access both of the lesson plans.

We seek to connect teachers and students with the most relevant, fact-based information to teach immigration critically and creatively–-at no cost. If you like our work, please share this email, tell a friend and give them this link http://bit.ly/1KdE5Zz to receive updates and free resources such as lesson plans, books reviews, and community grants. Follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration #teachimmigration.

Lessons for Students: How One Community Chose to Respond to Hate

On the morning of August 5, 2012, six worshippers were murdered at a Sikh temple in the small Midwestern town of Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Many of the persons present at the time of the shooting were women and children. The lone gunman identified himself as a white supremacist. The senseless violence was halted by the bravery of Lieutenant Brian Murphy, shot 15 times during the attack. Too often we hear similar stories of hate and racism and less frequently do we hear about how families of victims, schools and communities come together to grieve and to remember, to rebuild and work together to ensure that such violence doesn’t happen again.  

The documentary film, Waking in Oak Creek, reveals those difficult and necessary parts of the healing process in the year following the tragedy. It is a powerful film to show with students as they watch young temple members find their voice and emerge as leaders to end hate crimes and how a diverse community grows, supports, and grieves with them. As the film descriptor reads, “together, a community rocked by hate is awakened and transformed by the Sikh spirit of relentless optimism.”

At a time when it is unfortunately necessary to weed out hate and misinformation from the immigration debate, this film is apt and impactful. It is great way to continue a discussion on the benefits of inclusion and diversity. It is also a means to talk about resilience, the power of community, and youth voice from multicultural perspectives. 

To stream the film in its entirety (34:00) and download supplemental resources on the film page, please click here.

To request a free DVD for your classroom screening, faculty training, or community event, please click here.

Waking in Oak Creek is presented as part of Not In Our Town's Working Together for Safe, Inclusive Communities collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Not In Our Town offers free supplemental resources including an educator lesson plan, a video showing students sending a symbol of peace to Oak Creek, and a short film collection: Talking About Immigrants.

If you would like to share your ideas about how you are discussing immigration issues in your classroom or how you plan on discussing these issues, we would love to hear from you. Please email teacher@immcouncil.org if you have any questions or if you’d like to learn more about opportunities for professional development, community grants, and other programs that can enhance your teaching and learning. View our immigration-themed lesson plans, book/film reviews and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration #teachimmigration.