Takai Chapter 6

Takaki Chapter 6 and Wineburg Chapter 3

I found Takaki’s chapter on the emigration of the Irish particularly interesting because I was not familiar with the entire story of the emigration of the Irish and their incredible struggle for political, economic, and social equality. It’s quite moving, inspiring, and dispelled some of the myths or stereotypes that often plague the Irish.

While reading Takaki, I conceptualized the story of the Irish by recalling scenes from Martin Scorcese’s movie “Gangs of New York.” The movie outlines some the struggles Irish immigrants faced while trying to make a new life in New York City, particularly racism, discrimination, poverty, and the riot caused by discriminatory draft policies. As I was reading, I was filtering through the images and story lines of the movie and trying to make connections between the movie and Takaki’s investigation. Not only did using the movie as a reference enhance my conceptualization of Takaki, but it also increased my critical analysis of the book as I constantly questioned where Takaki obtained his research and how the viewpoint of an academic might differ from the viewpoint of a film maker. While conducting this process of referring back to the movie to help me conceptualize, I considered how beneficial this would be for my students and how to better incorporate film in my class.

For my lesson plan, I would divide my class into three groups and assign each group a section of Takaki. Takaki has divided chapter 6 into three sections and I would assign each group a section. Each group will read the section, select roles (i.e. Irish immigrants, landlords, politicians, businessmen) and do any additional research to prepare them for the lesson. To add a kinesthetic component to the lesson, I will require each group to perform a 10 minute skit on their assigned section. The purpose of the skit is to have the students role play the people, struggles, policies, agendas, actions, ideas, etc., that affected Irish immigrants. By performing the skit, the instruction is differentiated and I will be able to assess what the students have learned by gauging what they mentioned/performed in their skit.