In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee writes that in order to understand another’s point of view, one has to be able to climb into their skin and walk around in it. In other words, empathy is the ability to understand a person’s condition from their own perspective. By building empathy of historic peoples, students can also learn historical thinking skills, inquiry strategies, and historical context.
How can we connect students to the past and allow them to understand what it was like for someone to be a soldier in the trenches of a World War, an immigrant who travels for days to a foreign land with only a backpack full of clothes, or a slave in the heart of the Civil War?
This activity involves using a visual thinking strategy called the circle of viewpoints paired with a primary source in order to identify and reflect on multiple perspectives apparent in a primary source.
For this activity, I’ve selected “The Americanese wall…” from the Library of Congress, but it can be done with any primary source relevant for your lesson. Click here for more great examples of other primary sources you could use.
The instructions are simple:
- First, in groups or as a class, make a list every possible perspective involved in the primary source. For help making this list, students can answer these questions:
- Who (and what) is affected by this primary source?
- Who is involved?
- Who might care?
- Who might have a distinct opinion?
- Next, in groups or individually, select one point of view to explore in depth.
- Finally, answer these questions in writing or as a discussion:
- What is your immediate reaction to the Americanese Wall cartoon?
- What questions would you ask if you were seeing this cartoon in 1916?
For more information on this strategy and ideas for teaching empathy, click here.
