People at Work: Building a Foundation of Research Skills

SESSIONS 1 – 2

Before You Teach

THE WORKPLACE OF TODAY

Optional: If you want to create your own Today’s Workplace reproducible, select current headlines and comic strips related to work. Refer to Teacher Information: Selecting Headlines and Comic Strips on page T 29 for guidance in conducting online searches for this material.
Copy American Dream Quotations – RM 1.2 and cut the pages into individual quotations.
Select two volunteers to do the interview role play in Session 3.

HOMEWORK 1.3

An artifact is an object from another time or culture that provides clues to what people's lives were like in the past. Artifacts include maps, writings from the time period, descriptions of a historical event, and pictures of a person or household object. Select three pre-industrial life artifacts. Print copies of your artifacts and answer the following questions for each artifact:

What is your artifact, and how was it used?
What information does your artifact provide about daily life in the Pre-Industrial Era?
Why do you find this artifact interesting?

As you are visiting Web sites to find artifacts of pre-industrial life, also pay attention to the structure of the different sites. Make notes about the following:

Which Web sites make it easy to navigate and find the information you want? How do they do this?
What do you like and dislike about how the Web sites are designed?
In what ways is the presentation of information on these Web sites different from the presentation of information in books?

Go to Pre-Industrial Life Artifacts.

SESSION 4

Before You Teach

HOW DO YOU WRITE A PRESENT-DAY NARRATIVE?

To prepare to model the process of writing a present-day narrative based on the interview role play, read Teacher Information: Sample Think-Aloud for Present-Day Narrative on page T 31, which is based on that role play.
Be ready to divide the class into Web teams.

TEACHER INFORMATION: BUILDING A CLASS WEB SITE

To build your Web site, you will need a home page that links to each of the Web team's Web exhibits. If you or your students in the class are familiar with designing Web pages, you can create your own Web site, which should be completed and ready for uploading by Session 28.

Use this partial site map to help you organize the site.

Another option is to use the People at Work Web Site Template with the People at Work Web Site Template Instructions. You can input your information into the template using a number of different software programs, including Microsoft® Word, if Web design software is not available. During Activity 6, students have the opportunity to design and build their exhibits. If students are familiar with Web design and creating Web pages, they can use Web design software to create their own Web exhibit from scratch, using the People at Work Web Site Template as a model. Otherwise, students can enter their information into the template. Note that creating the contents of the home page is not assigned to any particular team. Determine how the home page will be developed by Session 27.

SESSION 6

Before You Teach

Read Teacher Information: Highlighting Information on pages T 42–T 43, which you can use as a reference as you model how to highlight and take notes about important information in historical material.
People at Work includes a number of historical documents that use vocabulary students are not likely to be familiar with. Because of the quantity of unfamiliar vocabulary in these documents, such terms are not included in the activity-by-activity listing of vocabulary words. You may need to help students understand and interpret some of these documents, but emphasize that they do not need to comprehend every word in order to get the gist of the reading. Here are links to sites that provide guidance in assisting students to read primary source documents:
NARA: Digital Classroom
Purdue University—Practice Exercises in Paraphrasing
University of Iowa—How to Read a Primary Source
The University at North Carolina at Pembroke— Reading a Primary Source

ACTIVE READING

Distribute or display the Sample Pre-Industrial Research Packet (RM 2.2) and have students read the "Introduction to Colonial African American Life" section (on the first two pages of the RM). Model how to highlight information in this section as if you were going to create a mind map that indicates how the young man’s life illustrates the workplace themes. (See page T 37.)

Unless you’re familiar with a particular time period, reading historical documents can be tricky because much of the information and some of the language is likely to be new to you. As you read the Sample Pre-Industrial Research Packet, use the active-reading strategies of setting the purpose and highlighting information.

Skill Resource: Finding Information on the Web

SESSION 10

Before You Teach

IS A PICTURE WORTH A 1,000 WORDS?

Refer to Teacher Information: Research Topics on pages T 55–T 59 to see a more detailed list of potential topics.

INTRODUCTION TO THE INDUSTRIAL ERA RESEARCH PROJECT

If students need more practice analyzing images, have them view the cover of Harper’s Weekly, March 30, 1901, which depicts a hand-drawn illustration of Andrew Carnegie.

What kind of story does this illustration from Harper’s Weekly, March 30, 1901, tell you?

SESSION 11

Before You Teach

Keying in to Keywords [Whole Class]

Refer to Teacher Information: Carnegie Keywords on page T 60 to see potential keywords highlighted.
Decide how both students and topics will be assigned to teams.

Developing a List of References

Documenting your information sources in a list of references is essential. Each reference should include content that allows the reader to locate the original source of your information. Depending on the type of resource, however, the format of your references will vary. What format you use depends on what style guide you refer to. The two most common style guides are those published by the MLA (Modern Language Association) and the APA (American Psychological Association). For more information about style guidelines, go to the following links:

The Write Source
Honolulu Community College Library—MLA Citation Examples
Long Island University—MLA Citation Style
University of Southern Mississippi Citation Formats
Purdue University—APA Formatting and Style Guide

EXTENSION 3.2

Learn about Diego Rivera’s work. Find pictures of Rivera’s mural Detroit Industry. What are your first impressions of the mural? What does the mural tell you about working on an assembly line? The mural opened amid much controversy. Why do you think some people thought it should be destroyed?

The Detroit Institute of Arts
The Artchive–Detroit Industry, North Wall
The Artchive–Detroit Industry, South Wall

EXTENSION 3.3

Interpret more photographs from the turn of the century in the United States and explore themes through pictures and documents. Go to the Picturing Modern America 1880–1920 Web site. In Image Detective, go to the Immigration or Industrialization section. In Investigations, see if you can learn to recognize photographer Lewis Hine’s “way of seeing.”

Skill Resource: Revising Guidelines

SESSION 16
WRITING REFERENCES

It may be helpful to review the style guidelines that you use in your classroom. Below are resources on how to format citations (also found in Developing a List of References).

The Write Source
Honolulu Community College Library—MLA Citation Examples
Long Island University—MLA Citation Style
University of Southern Mississippi Citation Formats
Purdue University—APA Formatting and Style Guide

Web Resource on Plagiarism: Turnitin.com (highlighted in the Activity 4 Did You Know?) offers educators many resources on teaching about plagiarism.

SESSION 18

POST INFORMATION

Before You Teach

Write each workplace theme at the top of a different piece of chart paper, and write “American Dream, Present Day” at the top of another piece. Post the chart paper so that students can add bulleted information from their interviews under the appropriate label.

SUM UP THE INDUSTRIAL ERA

QUIZ 2

Question 1: Describe a process for interpreting a historical photograph or image. Then interpret this image, using this process. Click here if you want to show the image for Question 1 on an LCD projector.

No student module resources for this activity.

SESSION 21

INTRODUCTION TO LEGISLATION

Before You Teach

Preview Teacher Information: Assigning Congressional Roles on page T 75.
Optional: Preview the video Eyes on the Prize—Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1962–66). View minutes 29:00–44:00. Minutes 29–44 cover the Children’s March, Kennedy’s announcement of a civil rights bill, and the March on Washington.
Optional: Cue the video to 29:00.

SESSION 23

Before You Teach

Arrange the classroom so that students can sit facing you, with Democrats on the left side of the aisle and Republicans on the right.
Find a newspaper article that describes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act being applied, which students will read for homework.
Preview Teacher Information: Excerpt from President Johnson’s Address on page T 76.

PREPARE AND HOLD A DEBATE

Web sites in which Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is discussed.

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Infoplease: Civil Rights in the United States
CivilRights.org– Civil Rights Enforcement
NAACP Legal Defense Fund

SESSION 24

WORKPLACE LEGISLATION IN THE NEWS

Become an expert on one of the following laws:

1. 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and its periodic updates
2. 1963 Equal Pay Act
3. 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act
4. 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act
5. 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act

Two great places to start learning about these laws are the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Web sites, both of which contain information about each of these laws.

Other useful sites:
Workplace Fairness
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration

SESSION 25

CHARTING THE EFFECTS OF LEGISLATION

Before You Teach

Write each workplace theme at the top of a different piece of chart paper. Post these pieces of chart paper so that Legislation teams can add information about the laws they study. Post the chart papers that contain the present-day interview information about all of the workplace themes and the American Dream. (Students listed this information during Session 18 in Activity 4.)

SESSION 27

Before You Teach

DESIGN YOUR WEB EXHIBIT

Download the People at Work Web Site Template onto each team's computer, if you have not already done so. Here are directions for using the template and a partial site map.

SESSION 29

Before You Teach

WEB EXHIBIT PRESENTATIONS

If you are posting teams’ exhibits to the Web, upload the exhibits, along with a class Web site home page that links to all the exhibits. Once the files have been uploaded, make sure that all of the links work correctly.

No student module resources for this activity.

Finding Information on the Web (Activity 3)
Revising Guidelines (Activity 4)
Search the Library


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