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History's Push and Pull
Karen March has her eighth-graders explore the “push and pull” factors of emigration and immigration as they study cultural geography in her U.S. History class. “We start by reading the quote on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and discuss its meaning,” she says. “Then we look at Ellis Island and the waves of immigrants who were processed there as they entered the United States.” She doesn’t stop there, but sends kids to study the Asian immigrant experience at California’s Angel Island, too. “There’s incredible poetry inscribed in the walls at Angel Island,” she says, “and kids get an East and West Coast perspective on immigration.”
Human migration isn’t just a relic of history, and people don’t just move east and west. These two facts are abundantly clear to Karen’s students at Yolo Junior High School in Newman, California. Many students travel with their families from California's Central Valley to Mexico and back within a school year. These students—most from Hispanic families--can relate to the factors that drive human migration across time and place. Karen explains: “We have a strong agricultural base, and build our school year around the movement of kids, with an earlier start in the summer and a longer winter break to accommodate our itinerant families.”
When asked what prompted her to develop her geography and history plan during the Intel® Teach Program training, Karen says that it was an important and relevant topic she’d been developing for some time. “I had worked on the idea previously, but never fully expanded it into a teaching plan. When the Intel course came along, it seemed like a natural opportunity to develop it further.”
American Dreamers
The course of study, of which the unit plan presented on this site is only a part, causes students to consider the lofty idea of the American Dream, and what it means to different immigrant groups right up to this day. Karen asks her students to decide: Is the American Dream a one-size-fits-all promise of prosperity?
As they formulate their answers, students study primary source material (such as the diaries and poetry at the Angel Island Web site, http://www.angelisland.org/immigr02.html*), and find that the history of immigration to the United States is complex. Not all immigrant groups have been welcomed with open arms. The “give me your tired and poor” salutation inscribed on the Statue of Liberty wasn’t always all-inclusive (generally, only immigrants of European descent were welcomed), and to the west, the Angel Island immigration station served to restrict the flow of Asian immigrants into the U.S.
How human migration in the past relates to practices in modern America is an important topic of study for all learners, and is especially apt for Karen’s students.
Karen has always enriched her lessons with hands-on, minds-on activities for kids, and the Intel course allowed her to develop more of the same for this teaching unit. She looks forward to the day when resources at her school will allow her to try out her teaching plan with her students.
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