Throughout the fall trimester, Head of Middle School Humanities and Class 6 English Teacher Jenet Dibble and Class 6 History Teacher Sarah Cornelius, collaborated with Dr. Jonathan Olivera, the Director of The Hayot Center of Innovation (HCI), to create an interdisciplinary study of North American history.
The history of humans in North America is multifaceted and complex. Considering this, Ms. Dibble and Ms. Cornelius wanted to design a curriculum that could capture its nuance. As a result, they developed overlapping course work and hands-on projects to help contextualize and give an understanding of what life would have been like at this time.
In Ms. Cornelius’ history class, her students began by researching the major Indigenous cultural regions of North America. In small groups, they conducted research about geography, climate, natural resources and cultural practices, compiling it into annotated diagrams. These helped, she explained, “to illustrate how communities adapted creatively and intelligently to their environments” and functioned as fully developed societies, long before the arrival of European explorers and settlers.
Alongside this scholarly research, students in Ms. Dibble’s Class 6 English class read “The Birchbark House” by Louise Eldrich, which is set in the mid-1800s and depicts the lives of Omakayas and Ojibwe communities. Reading this narrative-style work helped the girls deepen their understanding of how the arrival of European settlers disrupted established networks of communities and what the impact would be on an individual family.
As a companion project, Ms. Dibble worked with Dr. Olivera to have her students create a 3D model of an Ojibwe village. Early in the trimester, Class 6 visited The Ashokan Center and were able to see and explore a real, birchbark wigwam. Back at Chapin, the class recreated this structure in the springtime, bringing to life scenes from Eldrich’s book, which took place mostly in the spring and summer.
Diving into this 3D project, Class 6 studied the shapes of traditional dome and conical wigwam structures for their renderings. Once again, Ms. Dibble pulled from themes in their reading by pairing up her students to create their models. As the girls had learned from The Birchbark House, working as a family and relying on one another is a central part of Ojibwe culture. Collaborating to create their wigwams was intentional so those values would be reflected in their hands-on learning.
After developing their wigwams, the students came together as a class to create their village. Within each Class 6 English cohort, the girls attached their wigwams to a large poster board, placing their village around a river that they were directed to include as a central fixture in the model. They also added natural features like trees and molted leaves as grass and forest floor and smaller details, such as fish in the river, animal skins hanging to dry and bridges connecting both sides of the village. Scenes from their class reading came to life literally through their models, and figuratively through their teamwork.
Ms. Cornelius continued teaching historical events through a multi-lens approach. Like Ms. Dibble’s connection between the reading and a physical HCI experience, Ms. Cornelius found creative ways to make history interactive. Examining Christopher Colombus’ expedition to the Americas, Class 6 began by reading accounts from the explorer as well as evidence collected by Indigenous historians and research from scholarly sources. This information was then used to inform a mock trial.
Centering the human experience, Ms. Cornelious explained, “We staged a mock trial that placed Columbus, his men, the King and Queen of Spain, the Taíno and the larger system of Empire on trial. Each student joined a defense team and investigated the motives, constraints, fears and ambitions of their assigned party. They crafted arguments to shift blame away from their defendant, after which a jury of their peers deliberated and assigned percentages of guilt. The trial produced spirited, thoughtful debates, but, more importantly, it pressed students to confront the tangled forces behind these events: greed, power, desperation, cultural misunderstanding and the prevailing imperial worldview that shaped people’s values and expectations.”
Through this interrogation of historical facts and accounts, the students contextualized how human nature and culture shape the way ideas and beliefs form and influence events, both past and present, and their retellings. Ms. Cornelius shared that her students were profoundly affected by this exercise as it informed their understanding of ‘blame’ in history. They came to understand how a series of choices by individuals or groups of people, create a larger cultural shift. As there isn’t one person typically at fault, it is harder to untangle the truth. “Altogether, their reflections showed a growing sense of empathy, nuance and historical reasoning,” Ms. Cornelius shared.
The combination of these experiences — building their model, visiting a real wigwam, reading a variety of historical sources and a fictionalized account of these historical events — helped to create a learning environment that captured the nuance and complexity of this piece of North American history for the students.
Ms. Cornelius and Ms. Dibble’s passion for their subjects and their creativity opened new avenues of learning, enriching their classrooms and their students’ minds. In speaking with the students, it was clear that their teacher’s passion had become their own as they described with pride the work they had completed and what they had learned.
