Teacher’s Page
Overview
Headlining the Sports Page has been designed as a student website. The target audience is high school students enrolled in the advanced placement (AP) section of the United States history survey course, as well as college undergraduates. There are no teacher lesson plans included because the site is designed as a lesson in and of itself. The plan would be to direct students to visit the first three links, “The Athletes/Their Sports,” “Alice Coachman’s Story,” and “Althea Gibson’s Story,” and then to reinforce their learning through the “Exercises and DBQs.” The two practice DBQs (document-based questions) use the newspaper sources that inform the research for the web site and are structured in accordance with the requirements of the AP history exam.
Student-Learning Objectives
Following is a list of the knowledge and skills that Headlining the Sports Page is intended to develop in students. These objectives were the outgrowth of discussions with teachers and professors of United States history survey courses of AP high school and college undergraduate students. By following the site narrative, doing the interactive exercises, and completing at least one of the practice DBQs, the site will help students:
1) Identify social constructions of race and
gender of 1940s and 1950s America by: evaluating press accounts of athletes
from the black and white press;
contrasting the degree of societal acceptance regarding women’s participation
in track and field and tennis;
and observing changes that occurred in social attitudes regarding race
as a result of World War II and the cold war.
2) Understand how attitudes of race and gender depicted through the sporting
world fit into the larger narrative of twentieth-century United States History,
particularly key events in the 1940s and 1950s civil rights narrative.
3) Identify and evaluate bias in primary sources.
4) Develop critical thinking skills.