Here's the evidence. What do you see?

Understanding history through the lens of many perspectives is our chief aim in middle school social studies. Our state standards require that students learn to understand how perspectives differ and why. 
These images from our Chopped: 1850 presentations makes one reason why perspectives and experiences differed very clear. It's structural. This week students researched 8 different real people from the antebellum era. They used primary and secondary sources to identify what obstacles and opportunities each person faced. Together we defined the ten elements in the Pantry of Democracy. The pantry on the Food Network show Chopped is filled with foods and tools anyone can access equally. Today students evaluated whether their person from history had full access to the pantry, as we imagine all Americans do.
Few eighth graders will realize this on first glance, but they've proven the importance of not white-washing history through the work they've done. The pantry on the bottom left belongs to Nathan Appleton, a wealthy industrialist from Boston. Top left is Angelina Grimke, an abolitionist who came from a wealthy white family. Top right is Caroline Quarrls an enslaved woman who liberated herself using the Underground Railroad and the bottom right is  Lucy Larcom, a white woman who worked in the Lowell cotton mills starting at age 11.
The other four people from history include Solomon Northup from 12 years a slave fame, a slaveowner from Louisiana, an Irish immigrant and a Cherokee woman. To model our work this week, I shared the profile of Juana Briones.

I can't wait to see what conclusions they draw when they compare next week.

We could read from the textbook and take a test on the differences between North and South but that leaves out the richness and complexity of America's reality.