History Through Music

Hello and thank you for viewing my WebQuest.  On this page I invite students to explore history through the lens of a specific song or two.  This lesson is meant to use music and song lyrics to get students to critically think, interpret, draw conclusions, and make deep connections between raw materials and the social elements during that time period.  In all, I am asking students to begin to understand context and how meaning can change when you assign context to it.  

The project is meant to peak students' interest by allowing them to choose music first.  They can explore different decades of music they may or may not be familiar with or they can jump right to their favorite songs.  It allows them to jump head first into the assignment by starting with examining the songs.  Students should start to grow a curiosity about what the song is trying to address before they are even looking at the historical events of the time.  They may even jump to some conclusions about the meaning of the songs prior and then find themselves surprised.  I encourage this because it can reinforce the lesson of context and meaning.

In this project I ask the students to do three things.  The first is write a 3-5 page paper explaining three aspects of the time period the song was released they believe the lyrics address and support it with history.  The paper is meant to address writing skills and the students ability to make connections, draw conclusions, and support them with evidence.  I specifically have the students find three aspects to encourage deeper thought in their research.  The second portion of the project is a verbal presentation.  Here the students can verbal represent their arguments made in the paper.  This portion of the project is meant to build on verbal skills as well as practical presentation skills.  The final portion of the project is the presentation board.  Here I weighted this portion a little less than the other two to address the concern of access to materials.  In a sense we should simply be assessing for effort and following directions in this portion.  If the students have presented everything required on the board and have attempted to make it visually stimulating in any way they should receive at minimum an assessment of "GOOD" per the rubric.

Standards

Common Core Reading Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies #3 for grades 11-12 Key Ideas and Details

Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.

Common Core Reading Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies #4 for grades 11-12 Craft and Structure

Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).

Common Core Reading Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies #6 for grades 11-12 Craft and Structure

Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness, or beauty of the text.

Credits

Below are a list of the links used in this WebQuest:

https://genius.com/

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/1960s

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/1970s

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/1980s

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/1990s

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/2000s

https://www.thoughtco.com/20th-century-timelines-1779957

https://www.infoplease.com/yearbyyear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_decades