Illinois Democracy Schools are a key element of the state’s comprehensive approach.

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Increasingly, students learn about the past and present from social media. This assessment asks students to evaluate the trustworthiness of a video on TikTok depicting an American city in the 1940s. Use this task as an exit ticket or \do now\ to start the class in order to quickly gauge student thinking about videos on social media. Using the accompanying rubric as a guide, review responses to get a sense of how students evaluate videos on TikTok.

All historical events have multiple causes. Part of the work of historians is to identify both immediate and systemic causes of events and to analyze the relationships between causes. In this lesson, students analyze historical documents to investigate the question: What caused the 1974 Puerto Rican Riots?

This assessment gauges students’ ability to evaluate the credibility of a social media video for providing information about a Supreme Court decision. To answer the question successfully, students must read laterally about the organization that posted the video and evaluate whether it’s a trustworthy source of information. 

At the height of the Second Red Scare, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Communist Party USA leader under the Smith Act, deciding that membership in the party amounted to advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Just six years later, the Supreme Court reversed course. In this lesson, students contextualize two Supreme Court decisions and reason about why the Supreme Court changed its mind.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to generate realistic images of the past. Without careful consideration of where an image comes from, it could be easy to be fooled by a bad actor misrepresenting the past with an AI image. This assessment gauges students’ abilities to reason critically about a social media post that uses an AI-generated image to support a dubious claim about the past.

Arnold Genthe took hundreds of photographs in San Francisco’s Chinatown from 1896 to 1906. Genthe’s extensive portfolio provides historians with a trove of evidence of what life was like in Chinatown in the decade leading up to the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. This lesson asks students to think critically about Genthe’s photographs and evaluate their strengths and limitations as evidence of the past.

Use this assessment to gauge students’ skills at verifying claims on social media. This task asks students whether a claim made on TikTok is accurate. The video claims that the term “grandfather clause” comes from a disenfranchisement scheme common in Southern states in the Jim Crow era. By consulting credible sources, students should determine that the claim is true. 

It can be tempting to think that textbooks present impartial accounts of the past. However, textbook writers and publishers have a variety of motivations in choosing what to include in textbooks, including creating products that the companies believe are likely to be purchased. In this lesson, students analyze two history textbook passages about the Jim Crow era, one published in 1942 and the other in 1974.

Crucial lessons around digital literacy and digital safety can be framed around these two questions.

This assessment gauges students’ ability to source a historical document. To answer this question correctly, students must identify a valid reason for questioning the usefulness of a radical labor leader’s autobiography as evidence of who was responsible for the Haymarket bombing. 

YouTube video by Stanford Graduate School of Education