Course: HIS 3208 – History of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Nativism
Course Link: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/catapanohis3208/
Assignment: Hester Street
In this assignment, students watched the 1975 film Hester Street, in which a Russian Jewish immigrant in NYC’s Lower East Side shakes his ethnic roots for a more Americanized version of himself, leading to family turmoil and strife. Students were given a set of questions to answer as they watched the film. They were also required to post a paragraph-long response on the course blog in the OpenLab which had more questions such as whether or not the film could be considered a feminist film due to its strong female leads..
Assignment Link: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/catapanohis3208/2013/03/06/hester-street/#comments
What WAC principle(s) does this assignment exemplify?
By asking students to respond to directed questions where they had to analyze the underlying themes of the film, this assignment lays the groundwork for later assignments that may require a thesis statement in a larger research paper. For example, the role of Hester Street as a feminist film could be used as a jumping point for a larger research project in which other contemporaneous (or not) films are analyzed in that light as well. Secondly, these short assignments allow students to write less formally while simultaneously thinking critically about the film they watched. These kind of assignments lend themselves to strong discussions in class and on the course blog.
How might this type of assignment be used in other courses across the curriculum?
By structuring assignments that ask students to critically think about its theoretical/conceptual significance in an informal setting allows for fruitful discussion where students explain (and sometimes defend) their interpretations. This makes the process of writing a formal, thesis-driven assignment more accessible to the student while at the same time giving them ownership of their ideas throughout the writing process.
