Material Culture Online Project
Kristina DuRocher Wilson
(durocher@uiuc.edu)
(ready to use)
Coauthors
ASK
Partner Projects
| GK-12 Teaching Fellowships |
Subject Areas
Grade Levels
Unit Keywords
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Material culture, early twentieth century, American history, advertising, primary source investigation, popular culture, online research, internet, student led investigation
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Rationale of the Unit
| Material culture is a tricky, but also very interesting subject for historians. How do we know what these images meant to people who had such different experiences then we do? How do we know what we think is important or interesting is what they found to be so? How do we know how widespread or convincing these images were? |
Background and Resources
Through research and analysis we can make educated observations and gain a greater understanding of the past and its people. We must think about the Context in which the images have been produced, who the target Audience is and the Agenda of the producer -how, when, where would people have encountered this cultural artifact?
Thus, you need to ask yourself
What is this meant to express/sell/convince/evoke? To Who? What is this assuming about the audience? Why is it appealing to that specific audience? What does this tell us about the understandings, beliefs, contestations of the this time period. Now, with these images in mind
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What I am discovering
Lets Begin!
Go to www.geocities.com/kris_durocher
and follow the directions from there.
sourced below
Material Culture Handout.doc
MCAssignment.doc
GKmaterialcultureEvaluations.doc
Websites used in material culture project |
Assessment, Related Questions, and Story of the Unit
| Unfortunately, the students really seemed resistant to this project, even through the assignment (a 3-4 page paper) was based only on the self contained website I created. We explained the assignment repeatedly but the students wanted to only pick one cultural item not four or five as required. In general, they did not spend any time looking that the context information. They did not to understand what we had just gone over about how to read material culture. The second day was better, but the students are so caught up in doing a paper they are not enjoying this assignment even though it has really interesting things (music, film, artist, writers, radio, comic strips, toys, advertisements, playbills,) etc. I think that this time of year, and having just finished finals the students are not really feeling up to something like this, (although this is why we thought it would be fun). I think that if we had spent more time modeling how to navigate the website, and if I had made the assignment parameters clearer, we could have avoided some of the “whining.” |
Credits & Acknowledgements
Uploaded Files:
MaterialCultureHandout.doc
MCAssignment.doc
GKmaterialcultureEvaluations.doc
websitesusedinMCproject.doc
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