Childhood Education Instructor Brings Spark to Social Studies by Diving Into Genealogy
Casey Patterson, who graduated from the University of Arkansas in May with a bachelor's degree in childhood education, displays the documents her grandparents shared with her for a genealogy project required in Susan Riggs' social studies methods class. On the left is a bill of sale for corn purchased by the Union Army during the Civil War, and on the right is an Arkansas war bond from the same era.
Casey Patterson has caught her college instructor's passion – that is, the passion Susan Riggs has both for teaching and for genealogy.
Riggs has taught literacy and methods courses at the University of Arkansas since 1987. Before that, she taught English and language arts in Texas public schools.
This past spring semester, Riggs took what she called a huge leap and changed the curriculum in her social studies methods class for seniors majoring in childhood education.
"I've found that most of my students in the past aren't very excited about social studies, especially history," she recalled. "The history they had all the way through school was mainly memorizing a lot of facts, names and dates."
Riggs herself was taught history the same way and was not enthusiastic about the subject. That changed about a dozen years ago when she became interested in genealogy.
"I have become very involved in tracing my family and my husband's family," she said. Her husband, Charles Riggs, a professor of kinesiology, also teaches in the university's College of Education and Health Professions. "I figured that the way to get my students interested in history and everything that accompanies it was to make it personal to them. So, I now talk about how history really is 'his story and her story.' It's the way real people lived that's interesting."
Before the spring class began, Riggs e-mailed her students and asked them to get started by talking to their parents and grandparents over the winter break. The result of the semester-long project was that some students traced family lines back as far as six generations. Through their research, some discovered why their families moved to Arkansas. Usually it was for work such as growing cotton or raising chickens.
They found grandparents whose names had been Anglicized when they arrived in America, and others located photos of local communities from the early 1900s.
Civil War Memorabilia
Patterson, who grew up in Bentonville, started her search by e-mailing an aunt who had already done some genealogical research. Several of her grandparents live nearby so she was able to have conversations with them to flesh out the information she collected.
"Before this, I didn't have much interest in where my family came from," Patterson said.
She found out her maternal grandmother was Irish and Scottish and her maternal grandfather's heritage was Italian, German and Scotch-Irish. On her father's side, her grandfather was also Irish and her great-grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma.
"Some of the family went first to mountainous regions of Tennessee and Kentucky, then to the Ozarks," Patterson reported. "A lot of Ireland looks like the Ozarks.
"This project made history more relevant to me. I enjoyed learning about the people and the time period and their lifestyles. If I was learning about people not related to me, I think I would have been less interested. Mrs. Riggs also gave us a lesson we could use for third- and fourth-graders, and I think they will feel the same way that I did."
Patterson's grandparents showed her a bill of sale from 1863 when her great-grandfather, H.H. Patterson, sold corn to the Union Army at Elkhorn Tavern in Pea Ridge, now the site of Pea Ridge National Military Park in Benton County. Another frame held a yellowed copy of a Civil War-era Arkansas war bond.
"It was great to talk with them," she said. "I have a sister who's 17 and a brother who's 12, and they were there when we were talking, too. I think it made my grandparents feel special that we asked them about our history."
Bolivian Twins
Debbie and Orit Farkas came to the United States from Bolivia to attend the University of Arkansas. Their mother is from Guatemala and their father was from the former Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. The fraternal twins illustrate the family heritage in a striking way – Debbie has dark hair and olive skin while Orit's hair is red and she has a fair complexion.
"Their family tree is a virtual United Nations," Riggs said.
The Farkases did a similar project when they were in grade school and again in high school so they had a jump-start. They have ancestors from Mexico and Turkey. Their paternal grandfather was in a concentration camp during World War II, and after the war the family immigrated to Bolivia. Their Jewish parents met in Israel, where their mother, a biochemist and teacher, was studying, and their late father, a physician, was visiting.
"Children are more interested in a subject when it relates to them," Orit said. "They can study an era in history and see how it affected their family."
"It helps them realize how much they have in common," Debbie said. "They may think they don't care about European history, but if you bring family ties in, they want to ask questions and do research on their own."
Engaging Subjects
"What do you remember from geography class in elementary school?" Riggs asked her students during one class.
The nearly unanimous answer – maps. The students described labeling regions, states, countries and other features, memorizing state capitals and writing reports about states. Some attended schools with huge maps drawn on the playground and their teachers led them in games to help learn them geography.
"If you look at the state frameworks – the standards that say what children need to learn – they are all themes that can be related to people," Riggs said, explaining how to spark pupils' interests through genealogy. "Immigrants chose locations in the United States that reminded them of their home countries. In addition to the region looking like what they were familiar with, the regions offered the same sort of work they were used to – agriculture, industry, fishing, and so on. That leads to a discussion of climate, natural resources, dress and family life."
Riggs also guided the students to numerous Web sites that provided activities and information for geography lessons, and she showed them many popular children's books that could be used to introduce a lesson.
"You have to find a way to make the subject real to them," she said. "Draw the Appalachian Trail on pavement and have them walk it. On genealogy sites and with census information, you can find materials such as a passport application. It will have much more than the person's name. It will have information about where people came from and when they arrived in America, other places they lived, even a physical description. Don't discount sources until you investigate them."
It's important for children to learn how to read maps, Riggs said.
"Give them a scenario to investigate," she continued. "It could be from their own family history. They could trace the journey from Germany to Galveston, Texas."
That was the path her father's family took to the United States. Her grandfather was a small boy when the family emigrated from Germany.
Riggs talked to the class about the group of Italian immigrants who settled Tontitown, west of Springdale, to raise grapes as they had in the old country.
"Use information that is local and meaningful to get students interested," she said.
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Contact:
Heidi Stambuck, director of communications
College of Education and Health Professions
479-575-3138, stambuck@uark.edu