Constitution Role Play: Whose “More Perfect Union”? and The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won?
Teaching Activity PDF. By Bill Bigelow. 23 pages.
A role play on the issues involved with the framing of the Constitution.
Download PDF.
Most U.S. history and government textbooks present the Constitution as a kind of secular Ten Commandments: James Madison brought the document from the mountain and it was Good. The books may point out that not everyone agreed on the best plan for government, but through debate and compromise “Right” triumphed.
What makes this treatment of the Constitution so pernicious is its effect on students. Removed from a social context, cast as an inevitability, the document is elevated to an almost holy status, above analysis and critique. This Constitution-as-religious-icon scenario doesn’t allow much wiggle room for student reflection. Instead, the teacher’s task is to enlist students in memorizing Constitutional wisdom: What’s meant by “checks and balances”? What’s a writ of habeus corpus? I’m sure I wasn’t the only student forced to learn by heart and repeat on command: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union …” This is indoctrination not education.
The Constitution Role Play asks students to think critically about a number of issues that confronted the original framers of the Constitution. But the role play adds a twist: instead of including only the bankers, lawyers, merchants, and plantation owners who attended the actual Constitutional Convention, the activity also invites poor farmers, workers, and enslaved African Americans. This more representative assembly gives students a chance to see the partisan nature of the actual document produced in 1787.
In the second lesson (The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won?), with the Constitution Role Play as background, students are primed to wade into the actual document and analyze parts of it in a social context.
Published by Rethinking Schools.
Key words: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Constitution, Constitutional Convention, founding fathers, Federalist Paper #10, farmer, planter, slavery, Declaration of Independence
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Zinn Education Project
Thursday, February 9th at 13:07 The National Museum of the American Indian is in the early planning stages for an exhibit on the Native people of New York State and the surrounding regions. They seek insights into how teachers are covering historic and contemporary issues around Native Americans in their classrooms so that they can best integrate the needs of students and teachers into the exhibition. If you are currently teaching, or have recently taught content related to Native Americans from the Northeast, they would appreciate hearing your input on the survey at the link below. As a thank you, you will automatically be entered in a raffle to win one of three books.
Zinn Education Project
Thursday, February 9th at 7:31 On this day in 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech during which he claimed to hold a list of known communists in the U.S. State Dep't. The speech grabbed national headlines and launched the paranoia and persecution now known as “McCarthyism.”
Here are classroom resources, including a young adult novel, on McCarthyism:http://zinnedproject.org/posts/tag/mccarthyism
Are there other books, films, lessons you recommend to teach about McCarthyism?
History in Pictures - February
On Feb 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech at the McLure Hotel during which he claimed to hold a list of known communists in the U.S. State Department. The speech grabbed national headlines and launched the paranoia and persecution now known as “McCarthyism.”
Here are classroom resources, including a young adult novel, on McCarthyism: http://zinnedproject.org/posts/tag/mccarthyism
History in Pictures features just a few of the many stories that are often left out of the textbooks. The sources for these stories include: This Week in History from Peace Buttons (http://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/thisweek.htm), Planning to Change the World: A Social Justice Plan Book for Teachers (http://www.justiceplanbook.com/), This Day in Civil Rights History (http://zinnedproject.org/posts/13684), History.com (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history), 50 American Revolutions You Are Not Supposed to Know (http://zinnedproject.org/posts/11632), A People's History of the United States (http://zinnedproject.org/posts/67), Black Facts Online (http://www.blackfacts.com), Today in Labor History (http://www.unionist.com/big-labor/today-in-labor-history), and many more.
Zinn Education Project
Thursday, February 9th at 7:04 Happy birthday Alice Walker. A good day to listen to one of Walker's interviews on Democracy Now!.
Please share your favorite book, essay, or quote by Alice Walker.
Alice Walker on "Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo an
www.democracynow.org
As the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners are announced, we speak with the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist Alice Walker. She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was written many books since then. Her latest, ju...
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