Welcome to the portion of Americans who Tell the Truth where educators explore the use of Robert Shetterly’s portraits and vision to help students come to understand their heritage and ultimately, inspire their futures.
When I wrote to Rob about my work with his portraits in our study of US History, we began a dialogue that continues today and hopefully, will not ever end.
It is the dialogue of hope and its meaning; the voices of the courageous, hardworking human beings that grace his paintings and one last piece that I hadn’t counted on: the personal growth of my students. You see, it was my intention that each student hear of the actions and events surrounding the lives of all the citizens in the portraits Rob had painted. What I hadn’t realized, was that each student would fall in a kind of love with one of the individuals. In one girl’s case, the voice from the past would inspire inner change in her troubled life. To hear her speak Chief Joseph’s words calling for an end to fighting, knowing of the violence in her own family, I could not help but feel that much more than her understanding of relations with Native Americans had been altered. Indeed, like the rest of us, she would never be the same.
And so, here we are, presenting you with curriculum, using the term only to identify that these are ways I have used this work with children of many ages and to encourage you to do the same. To take these ideas and grow them; to take these strategies and design them to work for your students and then write to us here and share all that unfolds.
Share questions, concerns, objections and your own experiences in contemplating these “truths.” In presenting my classroom work on this website, I am attempting to begin an ongoing forum for all of us who are on the quest toward honest and compelling work for students in their studies of citizenship and its meaning for our times.
