Being a visual learner (like almost everyone) I have always liked looking at historical timelines. At the end of a school year that is filled with writing and speaking thousands of words about historical events, it’s so refreshing to try out another medium. Last semester I gave my AP US History students the following task:
Create and present a timeline that tells the story of an American regional culture.
Constraints: You may use only line, color, image, and minimal text (2-3 word titles or phrases). You may not use a computer to construct or present your timeline.
Possibilities: Your timeline can be any size, shape, or material.
In our history classes we use words to express our thinking, and we teach our students to “think like historians” by using historical thinking skills such as cause and effect, comparison, contextualization, and other cognitive skills in their written essays and oral presentations. (Historical empathy is also a skill I’ve been exploring as of late, but it’s difficult to express this particular lens in a timeline)
I’m happy to tell you that my students applied these thinking skills into their visual representations, and this is very cool — without me asking them to. Their treatment of the timelines were, for the most part, an authentic expression of ways of thinking they learned during one year of AP US History. So, if you’d like a glimpse at how our students think about history, check out the timelines below. Students also provided oral explanations supporting their thought processes.
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Students read this book during the year. This is where they learned much of the information expressed in their timelines.
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| 400 years of New England history using both Cause and Effect and Contextualization. Historical connections across time and space; not random. |
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| 400 years of Virginia/Maryland history. Note the progression from top image to bottom image. Students used the metaphor of a growing tobacco plant to show the development of the cash crop economy, one leaf at a time. Root system is the pre-Revolutionary time period. |
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| Meme-inspired timeline. |
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| Graphic novels are great for showing the progression of time. Note the cultural and racial mixing in early New York. If I could link their oral presentation, it would be HERE. |
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| The Far West. Don’t remember why the hangers but there was a historical reason for using them. |
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| Index cards on a timeline. Note the groupings of historical events. This is Contextualization and it can be very sophisticated like this one. |
Very cool! What a creative way to expand students' ideas of how to present their thinking.
they are all really varied, that is cool…
Wow! This makes APUSH look like fun. It makes me want to get on board. Or try some of these things with my U.S. History classes. Keep the coffee bubbles perking.
After reading Maus in high school and college, I have always like the graphic novel idea to present a story/history. Very cool idea and I would have enjoyed that much more than an APUSH year of lecture, note taking, and SOAPS.
This is so interactive Phil – and you have included some essentials in your design – speaking skills, voice and choice, age-appropriate and realia (the hangers were probably meant to symbolize their need for minimal packing or something along those lines). Rich! They remember this stuff:)