Happy holidays to all who celebrate — and happy holiday break to all the teachers in our network! We hope you can all take the break you deserve and spend some downtime relaxing or enjoying the company of family and friends. 

In the spirit of spending time with loved ones, we’ve chosen to focus this month’s newsletter on community history. Listed below are some teaching resources and reading recommendations that center family and community stories. Click on any of the links to learn more!

Resources for Educators

• Sharing Family Stories: This Resource Spotlight from 2023 features a list of educator resources, academic book recommendations, and picture books that focus on kinship, heritage, and family stories. One second-grade primary source set, How Do Families Remember Their Past?, introduces the concept of primary sources through the stories of a diverse group of families. Another inquiry set designed for eighth-grade students examines the experiences of immigrants at Angel Island and Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century. Students learn how new immigrants to the United States maintained familial bonds abroad while starting new lives in America. 

• Vietnamese American Culture and Identity: This inquiry set for tenth and eleventh-grade students was designed by 2023 CA-R & CHSSP Educator Fellow Virginia Nguyen. The primary and secondary sources featured in this lesson provide a more comprehensive understanding of Vietnamese American identity and experience. Students learn about the power of tradition, language, and food in immigrant communities, and are encouraged to reflect upon their own identity and sense of belonging in a diverse society.

• Pláticas con Family Photographs: Pláticas is a project from the UCLA History-Geography Project that encourages students to engage in pláticas (a Spanish word meaning conversations or chats) with parents/guardians through the lens of family photographs. Although originally designed for remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, it could also serve as a great take-home assignment over winter break. For more information on the project, check out this 2020 blog by CHSSP’s Shelley Brooks. 

• NCPH History@Work: The National Council on Public History has some great blog posts on family and community history for its History@Work blog. Although a few years old, this 2018 blog on several key themes of family history might serve as a good starting point for bringing discussions of family history into your classroom.

• Library of Congress: The LOC has a free lesson plan on Family Customs Past and Present, in which students explore different cultural rituals and celebrations. They also have a particularly fun holiday card-making activity, based on archival sources in their collection. I highly recommend checking it out — and don’t forget to look through their additional resources listed below the activity, which feature blogs on the first Christmas card and Hanukkah in the archives!

Kate’s Book Club: December Reads

My Daddy is a Cowboy by Stephanie Seales, illustrated by C.G. Esperanza. A young girl and her father share an early morning horseback ride around their city giving them much-needed time together. As they trot along, Daddy tells cowboy stories filled with fun and community, friendship, discovery, and pride.  Seeing her city from a new vantage point and feeling seen in a new way, the child discovers that she too is a cowboy—strong and confident in who she is. My Daddy is a Cowboy would make an excellent mentor text for narrative writing in the upper grades. A lovely depiction of a parent sharing their culture with their child in a refreshingly new way. 

The Last Stand by Antwan Eady, illustrated by Jarrett Pumphrey and Jerome Pumphrey.  In this book, a boy and his grandfather take their produce to a farmers’ market every Saturday. Papa’s stall is the only one occupied, but “it wasn’t always this way.” Just two years ago, there were five farmers at the market. Papa knows his customers well and stops at Mrs. Brown’s to deliver plums after the stand closes each week. When Papa is too tired to carry on his work at the market, his customers come to him to share a meal consisting of the bounty from his land. The final spread reveals that even though Papa’s days of harvesting are over, the family’s connection to farming won’t end. A bumper sticker on his pickup truck along with signs in his barn and stand promote the cause of Black farmers. The illustrations highlight the richness of the harvest, the deep purple plums, large orange pumpkins, and vibrant green bell peppers. Lovely story about the bond between a grandparent and grandson.  The author’s note provides information about the dwindling number of Black farmers in our country.

The Table by Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illustrated by Jason Griffin.  Two families—both filled with love, both encountering hardship and joy, both living in the same place—and the simple table that connects them all.  For years, a mining family’s life has revolved around their table. It’s where they eat, read, sew, laugh, and pay the bills; it’s stained with easter egg paint, warmed by fresh biscuits and the soft morning sun. Outside the house, Appalachia changes. The coal mine closes, but the bills keep coming. Eventually, there’s no choice but to move on— and to say goodbye to the table.  Later, when a young girl’s father sees the table by the road, he slams on the brakes. A lifelong carpenter, he can see it’s something special. They bring it home and clean it up; sitting around it, they eat and work and laugh. The Table is a lovely example for students to see the similarities between people whose lives are entirely different.  The underlying message of the book is family love, and the many important connections we share with the family we have. 

The Yellow Bus, written and illustrated by Loren Long. Quite possibly my favorite book of the year!  The Yellow Bus invites readers to visit a small town and the yellow bus that serves it. The author/artist portrays a mostly black-and-white world; but also relies on colorful acrylics to show those who enter the bus, including children going to school. Time goes on, and the bus is repurposed to take the elderly around town. Later, she’s abandoned near an overpass but finds a new role sheltering unhoused people. Finally, she’s taken to a farm, where she becomes a playground for goats. With each iteration, we hear the sounds of her passengers, human and otherwise, and the repeated phrase “And they filled her with joy.” At long last a damming project leaves her underwater, but fish find a home in the bus and make her happy. Don’t miss the backmatter that explains the author’s inspiration and the model town he made as a visual aid. 

Recent Scholarship on Family & Community History

The Color of Family: History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry by Michael O’Malley (2024) 

From the University of Chicago Press:

“A zealous eugenicist ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race… This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.”

 Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest by Edward E. Curtis IV (2022)

From NYU Press:

“The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them. Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City. Its story-driven approach places Syrian Americans at the center of key American institutions like the assembly line, the family farm, the dance hall, and the public school, showing how the first two generations of Midwestern Syrians created a life that was Arab, Muslim, and American, all at the same time.”

 Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (2021)

From Penguin Random House:

“Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.”

Upcoming Events

The Instructional Leadership Institute -- February 6 and March 6, 2024

District administrators, site administrators, and instructional coaches are invited to join this spring workshop series with leaders from the CSMP, the Yolo County Office of Education, SCOE, and 21CSLA. Even as schools expand community partnerships, interventions, and services to students and families, school leaders recognize that excellent classroom instruction remains the cornerstone of high-quality education.  This institute will center school leaders' role as instructional leaders, addressing recent policy changes and allowing for collaboration among attendees.

Thanks for being part of our 2024! Here’s to doing great work together in 2025.