This trimester, students studied the history of labor movements in the United States since the Industrial Revolution, and they also examined how social class affects our lives.
The term began by discussing the historical novel Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, which imagines the life of a girl who moves from her family farm in Vermont to work in the Lowell mills. Following this, students learned about how millworkers used different forms of media to organize for better working conditions by reading aloud excerpts from the new play “The Lowell Offering” by Andy Bayiates and Genevra Gallo-Bayiates. Finally, students used primary sources to simulate an 1845 hearing at the Massachusetts Legislature, in which mill workers, overseers, lawmakers, and businessmen testified for and against a 10-hour working day at the mills.
Following this exploration of Lowell, students examined several other labor movements, including the Atlanta washerwomen strike of 1881, the newsies strike of 1899, the Triangle Shirtwaist strike and fire of 1911, the West Virginia coal miners strike of 1912-1913, the California farm workers’ strikes of the 1930s – for which they read the historical novel Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan – and many others. After this exploration, students chose a labor movement that they wanted to represent artistically, and they designed and painted individual panels for a collective class mural.
To understand how not only labor but class affects our lives, students read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and they wrote original thesis essays arguing for different ways that social class influences the lives of the characters.