Storytelling Styles That Show What History Books Don't
In this unit students will critically contemplate the art of basketry through the shared insights of Onondaga basket weaver Ronni- Leigh Goeman. This unit’s curricular context originates from the NYS K-8 Social Studies Framework. These goals include Comprehension and Collaboration: Students integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally; Chronological Reasoning: Students distinguish between long-term and immediate causes and effects of an event from current events or history; Geographic Reasoning: Students identify and describe how environments affect human activities and how human activities affect physical environments through the study of cases in the Western Hemisphere; and Economics and Economic Systems: Students explain how scarcity necessitates decision making; employ examples from the Western Hemisphere to illustrate the role of scarcity historically and in current events.
Basket Weavers, Storytelling, Onondaga, Oñgwehoñwe', Haudenosaunee, scarcity
- Students will know that parents model for their children how to parent and that trauma in onegeneration reverberates throughout later generations.
- Students will know that the way that goods are priced is rarely fair and that the price of a good always reflects a deeper meaning.
- Students will be able identify and discuss how Ronni Leigh uses basketmaking to remember and share history that textbooks erase.
- Students will be able to track the causes and effects of colonization and climate change on the supplies that basketmakers like Ronni Leigh need to create their art.
- Students will write “what I want to be when I grow up” stories that consider how their mentors’,parents’, or guardians’ role in their lives have impacted their dreams.
- Students will calculate the cost of living and the cost of baskets for different time periods and reflect on their findings with a short answer response.
- Students will play a game comparing and contrasting one of the stories Ronni Leigh shares with one of her baskets to how that part of history is recorded in writing (in textbooks or other non-fiction resources).
- Students will create a commic strip using storyboardthat.com depicting how colonization and climate change have impacted black ash borer trees, sweet grass, and the basketmakers who use those resources.
