Transcript for Youth Movements (1903-2020)

Sometimes it's hard for the youngest learners to see themselves as change makers. I'm Angela Bianco, and I’m a 3/4 teacher out in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. And I'm here to share some resources that I found on the Library of Congress website and put together as a source set that you can find on the Minnesota Historical Society website.

So here I've got really three different sets of the sources. One set is focused on child labor and the newsie movement during the Industrial Revolution. These two images are about helping out during war and how young people could help their country and help the soldiers. And then this last set of photographs here is about youth being involved in the civil rights movement.

The last two sources are about art and how that connects to youth as changemakers. So with these photographs, one thing I like to do is make sure that whenever we're tackling or talking about maybe a harder topic or something that maybe hard history, we talk about, one, creating a brave space. And the way that we do that is making sure that students have great ways to process those big emotions that they might be feeling.

So one thing that we use is the courageous conversations compass, and that helps us think about what we're believing. Are we feeling like doing action? Do we have questioning? We have more research that we want to do. So in that way, it helps students kind of put words to how they're feeling. I also give students multiple opportunities to draw or write what they're feeling just so that they have a way to process those feelings.

With these three sets, I think one great way to bring them together is when you're talking about citizenship and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. We also talk about action and action that citizens can take. The cool piece about that is we are thinking about citizens as youth and seeing that youth have been active citizens and participants in history for a long time.

With the Industrial Revolution, we'll talk about what are they doing? Are they marching? Are they protesting? Are they speaking up in this way? They're donating. And one type of action is to fundraise. Are they going to school in some of these photographs? Are they kneeling? Are they just being present in their action? The last set of action that we talk about is the idea of art as action and knowing that students are, many are budding artists.

This is a great way to connect that the art that they're doing has meaning and has real purpose. And so to look at one, the people that are in the art, but also how art can be a form of action, how it encourages people to take action and speak up. There are many, so many different ways to use this.

I'm excited to see how people do that. Thank you.