U1--OER Draw Your History

OER Draw Your History

An introduction to thinking about history

Purpose of Draw Your History

In this activity, you’ll draw a history of yourself, and then you’ll reflect upon the scale at which you examined your own history. This will help show you how your own personal narrative has a lot in common with much larger history narratives. This activity also introduces the concept of both temporal (time) and spatial (geographical) scale. This will help you understand why historians will occasionally zoom out (in terms of both time and geography) to create a larger context for understanding a single history. (Source: OER Project)

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Directions

Take 5 minutes to draw a “history of you”—your own personal history. This won’t be graded, and you shouldn’t get stressed out about whether you’re a good artist. You can use text to label your pictures, stick figures for people, however you want to do it is fine. You can do this in the Quizizz slide OR on a piece of paper--which ever seems easier to you.

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Draw

Draw a "History of You" (or draw it on paper)

Share your history with your table partner

Take turns sharing your history story.

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Poll

Which of these did you include? (Check all that apply--these are about TEMPORAL, or time, scale)

• Your time in high school or earlier school

• Your childhood

• Your parents

• Your parents' childhoods

Poll

Which of these did you include? (Check all that apply--these are also about TEMPORAL, or time, scale.)

• Your grandparents

• Anything that happened over 100 years ago

• Anything that happened over 1000 years ago

Poll

Spatial means "geographical distance." How many of you talked about anything that's

• Farther away than American Canyon?

• Farther away than the Bay Area?

• farther away than California?

• farther away than the US?

• Farther away than North America?

Open Ended

What is the farthest place you mentioned/drew in your history?

Open Ended

You only had a few minutes to draw your entire history—how did you decide what was important enough to include?

Open Ended

Is it ever possible for a “history of you” to be complete? What would it mean for the history to be complete? How could you tell? How long do you think it would take you to write it?

​Debrief

There’s a natural scale in time and space that people in our society think of when writing a biography or autobiography. For example, in telling their own story, you probably thought that your parents were worth mentioning, and possibly your grandparents, but probably not more distant ancestors. (Many other cultures think differently about this!) Your might have included events before your birth, but probably not more than 100 years before, and almost certainly (unless you're already thinking very, very big!) not more than 1,000 or 10,000 years before. Why not? (Source: OER)

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Open Ended

Do you think events that happened hundreds of years ago affected your history? What about thousands of years ago? Millions? Billions? Explain.

​The Big Picture

This discussion can bring up things like the fact that the Universe, Earth, and life exist; the geography of the Earth; the form and composition of our bodies and our genetic makeup; the migration of people from one place to another; the fact that everyone currently alive shares the exact same set of ancestors if you go back far enough—probably just a few thousand years, according to recent research—and if any two of that set of ancestors had not had children, there would be a completely different set of people alive today. (Source: OER Project)

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​In Conclusion

Wrap up by discussing why scale matters. Let students know that they will think about scale—both the time scale and spatial scale—throughout the course. They should use timelines to help them with scale, and they should also use the language of spatial scale when talking about where things happen in history. We will use the terms personal, local, regional, national, and global to help us think and talk about scales of space. Let them know that there are many other terms, but those are the ones we’ll use in this course. (Source: OER Project)

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