Movement Maps

Sacred Heart Schools, Atherton (SHS) seventh graders traced their families’ heritage and migration to California as part of their study of maps and migration in history class. In the process, students learned details about family and world history previously unknown to them.

 

“Many realized these are stories that are in danger of being lost over the generations,” said Jen Vaida, SHS seventh grade history teacher. “The students had a chance to see their families in a larger context than ‘just parents,’ and they took pride in what they learned of their heritage.”

 

Sophie Xie (SHS ’28) traced her mother’s journey from China to the Bay Area of California for her “movement map” project. Speaking about her experience researching her mother’s journey, Xie said, “I never realized the hardships she faced growing up in a poor village under Mao Zedong, who didn’t allow all people to go to school… She really wanted to work hard—she would read Reader’s Digest for inspiring stories about people getting out of unfortunate situations.”

 

Classmate Emiliano Tostado Franco (SHS ’28) traced his family’s journey from Michoacán, Mexico, to the Bay Area. When he interviewed his mother about her family’s migration story, he learned new details about the history of his family and their hometown in Michoacán; this led him to research more about the 8.0 magnitude earthquake that struck his family’s hometown in 1985 and how that affected migration statistics from that region.

 

The idea for the movement map project was generated through a history educators’ study group Vaida is involved with as part of her role as teaching consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP), a division of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, in which she was named a teaching fellow after completing the group’s Immersive Summer Institute program last summer.

 

Group members were asked to create a lesson that could be used in professional development training for history teachers; BAWP leaders asked Vaida to tap into her interest in maps.

 

“They were particularly interested in having students work with maps, because many kids know maps only in terms of something static, like Google Earth, or as a means of getting from point A to point B,” said Vaida. “I wanted them to see maps as more, as a way through which history—and people’s stories—are captured.”

 

Vaida designed a lesson that helped students articulate that while maps are documents, they’re “not necessarily static, or always objective—they might be created with bias, for a particular audience, and for a specific reason.”

 

The class used this lens when examining a variety of maps. “Many times in history, maps have been created for a political reason or from a particular geo-political perspective. Some maps created in, say, wartime might be designed to deceive an enemy. We considered treasure maps and posed the question, ‘would you put all the information on a treasure map, or would you not?’ And we explored the concept of borders and how they’re created,” said Vaida.

 

The project overlapped with the students’ English class curriculum, where they recently read Alan Gratz’s novel, “Refugee,” which traces journeys of three characters fleeing their homelands at different touchpoints in recent world history—1940s Nazi Germany, 1990s Cuba, and 2015s Syria.

 

In debriefing the history project, students identified some common “push and pull” factors for their families’ journeys to California, including economic or career opportunity and fleeing from a dangerous or untenable situation. The students then considered the parallels between migrants and refugees around the world today and their own families’ migration experiences.

 

“So often, family history is perceived as somehow ‘less important’ than the textbook history. I wanted our students to understand that history is not something esoteric and removed from real life—it’s a reflection of people, of individuals, and their individual experiences,” said Vaida.

 

To add another layer of historical thinking skills, students extended their research beyond family stories, examining the larger historical context of what was happening in the world during key points in family history.

 

“For some of our students, this project had a lot of ‘firsts’—the first time they saw old family photos, or the first time they learned that their parents or grandparents withstood some serious hardships, or the first time they dug into events like 9/11, the Loma Prieta earthquake, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, or the advent of the Euro,” said Vaida.

 

A final step involved students’ developing a claim or topic of research that a historian might pursue, based on what they unearthed in their projects. Responses ranged from topics generated by family history—“how many people left Hong Kong when it was returned to China in 1997?” wondered Anna Fong, (SHS ’28), after learning her family’s story—to topics generated from learning about the larger cultural historical context. Charlotte Kirincich (SHS ’28) remarked, “I learned that there was a World Trade Center attack in 1993. A historian could study how the attack in 1993 was related to the attack in 2001 and how the United States could have been more prepared for 9/11.”

 

“In reading their reflections I realized a lot of the students—for the first time—were starting to see their family as part of a larger history and recognizing that those are researchable areas,” said Vaida. “I hope some of them turn them into research projects, books, or even screenplays one day.”