WebQuest Historical Background & Student Investigation Introduction:
The year is 1933 and you are a teenager in a family of Mexican immigrants in the Southwest of the United States. You were born in Mexico into a wealthy family of farmers, but the revolution in Mexico has taken your fathers life and your home. After your father died, the government seized your home and farmland. They demanded that you work the land for them as slaves or else they would forcibly drive you from your home. Instead of giving in to their demands, your mother decided that your family should flee to the United States in hopes of finding work and freedom from the oppression. Greed has greatly changed the international economy
and your family now findsitself in a country that both wants and fears immigration.
It is 1930. You and your family have immigrated to the United States and have managed to find work as part time laborers picking carrots for farmers in the Southern Plains. Even though the United States has been in the grip of the Great Depression, Americans still need food. Because of this, your family has managed to find a new home. For two years, your family has embraced this new life, believing that they have found the freedom and escaped the Mexican government's grasp in Mexico. In 1932 however, greed and oppression will again change your life for the worst. The Dust Bowl ravages the Southern Plains in 1932 and the once fertile land becomes a barren desert. Your family along with other Mexican immigrants and Americans from this region are forced to move further west out of fear of starvation and in hope of some work. Hundreds of thousands of workers move west, but resources are scarce and various groups of people begin to turn on each other. American workers need someone to blame for their hardships, and the easiest people to accuse and punish are your family and the other Mexican immigrants. People claim that you have taken their jobs and eaten their food, so public sentiment grows that you have no right to be in the United States of America.
The year is 1933 and you are a teenager in a family of Mexican immigrants in the Southwest of the United States. You were born in Mexico into a wealthy family of farmers, but the revolution in Mexico has taken your fathers life and your home. After your father died, the government seized your home and farmland. They demanded that you work the land for them as slaves or else they would forcibly drive you from your home. Instead of giving in to their demands, your mother decided that your family should flee to the United States in hopes of finding work and freedom from the oppression. Greed has greatly changed the international economy
and your family now findsitself in a country that both wants and fears immigration.
It is 1930. You and your family have immigrated to the United States and have managed to find work as part time laborers picking carrots for farmers in the Southern Plains. Even though the United States has been in the grip of the Great Depression, Americans still need food. Because of this, your family has managed to find a new home. For two years, your family has embraced this new life, believing that they have found the freedom and escaped the Mexican government's grasp in Mexico. In 1932 however, greed and oppression will again change your life for the worst. The Dust Bowl ravages the Southern Plains in 1932 and the once fertile land becomes a barren desert. Your family along with other Mexican immigrants and Americans from this region are forced to move further west out of fear of starvation and in hope of some work. Hundreds of thousands of workers move west, but resources are scarce and various groups of people begin to turn on each other. American workers need someone to blame for their hardships, and the easiest people to accuse and punish are your family and the other Mexican immigrants. People claim that you have taken their jobs and eaten their food, so public sentiment grows that you have no right to be in the United States of America.
What are Pathfinders and what do they do?
A Pathfinder is a strategy for managing online information. It is an ironic product of the digital age. Prior to computers and the internet, the availability of information presented scholars, teachers, and students with major problems of access. Today, the conditions are reversed. A click of the computer overwhelms us with access to massive amounts of information. Navigating through massive digital archives to find the needed document is a great challenge.
As the name implies, pathfinders create routes through the massive collections direct to pertinent resources. Various pathfinder strategies exist. The option here focuses on topics and themes. Thematic paths blaze the way through sub-topics to selected resources to organize online resources of a integral curriculum topic.
The goal is to manage the millions of digitized documents in the numerous collections of the Library of Congress web site.
What is the Pathfinder strategy?
The strategy is to move from the general to the specific. Familiar classroom topics comprise an individual Pathfinder home page while a general theme related to that topic provides context and structure. A sub-topic connected to the theme serves as the organizational construct, linked pages from the home page, More detailed sub-themes from the sub-theme pages serve as the paths to the final destinations, namely a series of selected documents.
The guideline of one document for one day’s instruction serves as the criteria for selection of resources. As a result, the stress is on visuals and brief print resources.
A Pathfinder is a strategy for managing online information. It is an ironic product of the digital age. Prior to computers and the internet, the availability of information presented scholars, teachers, and students with major problems of access. Today, the conditions are reversed. A click of the computer overwhelms us with access to massive amounts of information. Navigating through massive digital archives to find the needed document is a great challenge.
As the name implies, pathfinders create routes through the massive collections direct to pertinent resources. Various pathfinder strategies exist. The option here focuses on topics and themes. Thematic paths blaze the way through sub-topics to selected resources to organize online resources of a integral curriculum topic.
The goal is to manage the millions of digitized documents in the numerous collections of the Library of Congress web site.
What is the Pathfinder strategy?
The strategy is to move from the general to the specific. Familiar classroom topics comprise an individual Pathfinder home page while a general theme related to that topic provides context and structure. A sub-topic connected to the theme serves as the organizational construct, linked pages from the home page, More detailed sub-themes from the sub-theme pages serve as the paths to the final destinations, namely a series of selected documents.
The guideline of one document for one day’s instruction serves as the criteria for selection of resources. As a result, the stress is on visuals and brief print resources.