Three Generation Immigration Project

Created Feb. 7, 2024 by Kathryn Shaughnessy

NHPRC QIH Assignment Title:

Three Generation Immigration Project

NOTE: This assignment was created by the participant educator, Korell Pierson, as part of the Queens Immigration History curriculum development project funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission division of the National Archives (grant #DH-50022-16).  For more information on this grant project, please visit the Queens Immigration History website  at https://queensimmigrationhistory.wordpress.com     

NHPRC QIH Assignment Creator

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Korell Pierson.  Mr. Pierson (C1, July 2017 – June 2018) is the Chair/Lead Teacher of the Social Studies department at Brooklyn Lab School, in Brooklyn New York. He received his BA in History from Morgan State University, his MA in Early Modern History from the University of Manchester, and his Advanced Certificate in Secondary Education from Queens College, CUNY. In his spare time, he enjoys studying cultural, economic, and military history, along with foreign and public policy. He frequently attends and participates in educational workshops and events throughout New York City with the goal of utilizing the information and resources from the events to help enrich his curriculum and teacher practices.\

Purpose/Learning Goal

In studying Industrialization and Progressivism, you have been introduced to the Immigration experience of many ethnic Americans. You’ve learned the many of the factors that drove these people to leave their native lands to seek life in the United States, and what life was like for them once they settled here. 

The goal of this project is for you to research three generations of the immigration experience (or migration) within their family, or members of your community and to gain a better understanding of the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience and whether or not their experiences mirrored those you learned about in the unit or if they differed. 


Task/Assignment/Activity

Task 1:

You will be looking to find the following questions.  These will help you with your reflection paper that you will write for this project.  Use the spaces below to record information to help you with the paper. 

Questions:

  • Why did your family or people within the community immigrated,(or migrated)?

  • Were the reasons, political, economic, religious, or all of the above?          

  • How has the experience of assimilating into American culture been for them? Have they tried to assimilate?

  • Have things gotten better for you and your families?   How?

  • Have your family or members of the community achieved their goals since immigrating to the US?

  • Do they feel like you are Americans, or still as strangers in a foreign land?

  • Do you find that your family or members of the community are still facing many of the same problems that immigrant families experienced during the era of Industrialization and Progressivism?

Task 2

Project Research: You will be given time in class to collaborate with classmates on how you will go about this project, as well as, research online databases on immigration from the NHPRC-QIH Guide, if you are not sure where to begin. This process could be information you could use for your rough draft of the reflection paper.

Task 3:

Create the storyboard.  Though because the project will be due the day we come back from break, you will be tasked to do your storyboard on poster paper that you will have to obtain yourself, and the bulk of the work on your own.

Task 4:

Gallery presentation of your storyboard

 

Outcome

You will use the information that you’ve gathered from interviews with family, members of the community, and your own memories of your immigration experience (if it applies), to put together a storyboard to display for the class

  • The storyboard should be broken into three sections for each generation documented.

  • Each section should contain an illustration of the person who was interviewed or something that describes an event that you uncovered about the person during the interview process (you could also use images such as pictures for this part).

  • There should be a summary that details the illustration (or image) and its relation to the person’s immigration story.

  • The third part should contain a question that you were left with after learning about the person’s experience.

  • When we come back from break, we will have a gallery walk that will put on display your storyboards to the class. You will be tasked with writing a reflection paper on their experience during the project.

 

Required Resources

Interview Questions:  Provided

More Resources from the NHPRCQIH LibGuide:

Genealogy Tab –   assistance with family tree and Genealogy resources

Oral History Tab –  links to local NYC Oral History Projects for contributing.

National and Global Resources Tab -- to assist you in looking at historical push-pull factors, newspapers and primary resources from country of origin

NYC Resources Tab – for NYC historical newspapers in the time of Industrialism and Progressive era

Assessment/Rubric

·         NCTE/IRA Reflective Writing Rubric

·         NCTE/IRA Poster Presentation Rubric

Attribution

This NHPRC Teacher Participant assignment was created by   Korell Pierson

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States



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