Inspired history teaching and learning happened in the fourth-grade classroom of an independent school in New York City. The teacher had grown tired of doing American history in the same way. She did not want to cover more material; rather, she wanted to slow down and capture the students' interest and reinvigorate her own passion. The opportunity to try another way came with a unit on the Pilgrims. A theme in her social studies class for the year was immigration. She used that theme to frame a case study. This meant using primary and secondary sources, visiting Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, and using the Web to enhance student learning.
She needed time to make these changes in her teaching. She also needed scaffolding techniques to get her students to begin thinking about history in unaccustomed ways. First, she had them talking and writing about themselves as travelers between different places in their daily lives. They moved on to do oral histories of older relatives and family friends. Eventually, she had them think about a more remote past, a past where they were not able to interview eyewitnesses.
Enter the Pilgrims. The students discussed their own conceptions of who they thought the Pilgrims were. They came up with many of the usual images that have become standard fare in popular culture. The real historical investigation began with students working in study groups, examining actual people from the past. With help from the Plimoth Plantation Museum and by accessing relevant websites, the teacher was able to provide her students with letters, diaries, wills, and ships' inventories. The students researched individual people and created composite characters out of the source material.
The students came alive with the assignment. They felt a human connection to the people they were investigating. The lives of the Pilgrims of the 17th century were very different from their own lives, yet these were still people who had hopes and fears. This recognition fed the students' appetite to know more

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a seventh-grade public school teacher did her own unit on immigration. Her students came from a mix of class, ethnic, and achievement backgrounds. In this unit, the class focused on Irish immigration to Boston in the mid-19th century. As in the Pilgrim unit, the students "got to know" the lives of the people they were studying.
They did this by using the passenger lists of four ships that left Dublin in 1850. This information was recorded in a database created by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.6 The students examined the lists to find out who actually came over on the ships. Based on what they found, they formed historical hypotheses about who was leaving Ireland. They then compared their initial hypotheses with other accounts of the demographics of Irish immigration.
The students developed a strong personal interest in the subject matter when they got to "adopt a family." They chose one of the members of the family on the passenger list and "retold" the immigrants' stories. The students explained the reasons why their characters left Ireland, what their journeys to America were like, and what they experienced when they got to Boston. The narratives were presented in the form of diaries. The students needed to use their imagination to create the stories, but they also had to be conscious of historical accuracy. They read primary and secondary accounts of the potato famine, learned about the "coffin ships" that transported Irish immigrants across the Atlantic, and read records of housing and employment in Boston.
The students were asked to make decisions about how their families could realistically survive in the new land. Their choices of ways to earn a livelihood had to be drawn from the actual accounts they were reading. In the database, they could examine such information as average wage levels for different jobs, the types and cost of food sold in local markets, and the housing available to immigrants. Sometimes, the students would have to read information four or five times to understand it. The teacher was there to help, but the students were motivated to learn more throughout the project. They were doing hard work, but it was interesting work.
The students' journals revealed how much they understood. These diaries became powerful assessment tools for the students and teachers. The teacher explained:
We conduct review panels at the end of the eighth grade in our school. Students present their work to a panel of adults. They invariably bring their diaries with them and talk about how they came to understand this period of history in a different way.
They also learned how to write historical fiction. They had to create something that they knew was going to be read by other people. The standard was high. You did not want to have sloppy writing and spelling mistakes. You also knew you were being judged on being historically accurate and yet also being creative, which I think is key for middle school kids.7
It took a while before the students had polished diaries. Along the way, they had to change things (eliminating references to using light bulbs in 1850) and respond to the teacher's questions (How could an immigrant get a job as a teacher if he or she could not write?). They also developed good study habits (learning to seek out supporting evidence for their characters' actions).
No, the students did not become historians after this eight-week unit. But they did develop self-confidence in their ability to stay with something that did not come to them automatically. They learned "facts" about history, but they did not rush through the curriculum simply to cover more and more. They learned how to think in a different and deeper way, and they were better able to remember the details of the period because the information was embedded in a meaningful context.
One teacher in a Los Angeles high school commented that, for her working-class and limited-English-speaking students to get motivated to learn history well, they needed to feel that something in the past spoke to them.17 She talked about how her unit on the Great Depression had that very effect. The students could relate to the struggles for survival of ordinary people. The stories from the past resonated with episodes in the lives of students' family members, especially students whose parents had worked in sweatshops. Many of these students did not see themselves as success stories in American schools, but the teacher piqued their interest because they were reading about others who had struggled against hardships.
The efforts of this teacher cannot be dismissed as simply doing "identity politics" in history. She used real stories from the American past to interest students who had felt left out of American history and American education. Her ability to use history to connect to students' personal identities equipped them to take the next steps toward deeper investigation. The students looked at artifacts, read diaries, and examined old newspaper clippings. They wrestled with the material at times, but they also were intrigued.
In addition, the teacher attended training in the latest literacy techniques at local universities. She creatively combined language decoding skills with historical thinking skills, enabling her students to examine sources critically. If she had stuck to a single textbook and moved through the standard chapters, the students would surely have turned off their minds and fallen into the "history is boring" refrain