CREATE DIARY ENTRIES FOR A PERSON FROM HISTORY OR A FICTIONAL
CHARACTER WHO HAS EXPERIENCED AN HISTORIC EVENT.
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Answer:
Kathryn Ciancia and Edith Sheffer | Oct 1, 2013
Studying history is a creative and imaginative process; as we pour over our sources, we strive to enter the minds of the people we study and understand why the world looked so radically different through their eyes. As teachers, standing at the front of the classroom or sitting around the seminar table, we also encourage our students to take imaginative leaps. But what kinds of assignments best foster skills of historical empathy and understanding? We've found that one way to start exciting yet challenging conversations about our relationships with the past and the present is through student-created fictional historical characters.
A Pedagogical Experiment
In the spring of 2012, the 123 Stanford University freshmen enrolled in a class on 20th-century Europe participated in the Creating Lives project.1 Our objectives were to help students develop the cognitive flexibility to shift perspectives and understand how individuals shape and are shaped by their environments. To this end, we asked students to create two fictional characters: one had to be 18 years old in 1900 and would live until at least 1940; the second had to turn 18 in 1940 and survive until the present day. While students were free to choose their character's gender, birthplace, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and personality traits, there were two stipulations: the characters could not die prematurely and they could not fundamentally alter the past.2
Students responded by creating a diverse set of characters that included a French soldier who fought in the trenches of World War I, an aristocratic British woman who questioned the gender norms of her time, a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, and West Berliners who contemplated life beyond the wall.