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Lesson 4

How did photography come to define the Great Depression? We will learn more about the Great Depression, Lange’s impetus to create a series of photographs that became known as Migrant Mother, the importance of her composition of the photographs, and how her work connects in a larger sense to the plight of people during the era.

Lesson Goals

  • Can I gather and organize relevant and sufficient evidence to demonstrate an understanding of the historical context of the Great Depression? Of Lange’s photography?

  • Can I recognize and interpret important relationships among key details and ideas within multiple texts about the Great Depression and Lange’s photography?

  • Can I use connections among details, elements, and effects to make logical deductions about Lange’s perspective in her photographs?

  • Can I analyze how Lange’s perspective influences the purpose and ideas represented by her photography?

Texts

Core

  • Unit Reader
    • “How Photography Defined the Great Depression,” Annette McDermott, A&E Television Networks, LLC., 2018
  • Digital Access
    • Photographers of the Dust Bowl, Ken Burns, PBS, 2012

Materials

Tools

Reference Guides

Question Sets

Editable Google Docs

Activity 1: Read – Discuss

After conducting a first read of “How Photography Defined The Great Depression,” we will discuss a text-specific question in small groups and then share with the class.

Access the text "How Photography Defined the Great Depression" by Annette McDermott. Review the annotations and details you have noted about the role of the Farm Security Administration and its photographers.

With a partner, compare your annotations and your responses to the text-specific question you considered during your homework reading:

  1. How do details from the text relate to or expand what you already have learned about the FSA and its photographers?

Activity 2: Read – Write – Discuss

We will identify words that are not familiar and work collaboratively to determine the meaning of vocabulary in context. We will interact with the words we defined to cement our understanding of their meaning.

Step 1

With a partner, examine the following words from "How Photography Defined the Great Depression."

  • dire

  • document

  • rural

  • propaganda

Some of these vocabulary words might have enough context to determine their meaning; some of them might not have enough context. How will you know when to use context clues and when to try another strategy? Refer to the questions in the Vocabulary in Context Tool to assist you with determining each word’s meaning.

Some of these vocabulary words might be multi-meaning words. As you determine the meaning of the words, be sure to pay attention to the way the word is being used in this context.

Write down the words and your final definitions in your Vocabulary Journal.

Step 2

Work with your partner to respond to the vocabulary exercises, as directed by your teacher.

Activity 3: Write – Discuss

We will form evidence-based claims with partners and then share our claims with the class.

Step 1

With your partner, use a Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool to form a claim in response to the following text-specific question:

  1. In what ways did the Farm Security Administration and photographs such as Migrant Mother influence American society, public opinion, and politics?

Step 2

Share and compare your claim with those of other students in the class.

Once you have generated an evidence-based claim, you can use the tool to explain its derivation and support to others. To do this, begin at the bottom of the tool and work upward: present the claim, explain the analysis and evidence that led to it, and cite the key details that support it.

Activity 4: Discuss

We will preview an opportunity to further research depression-era photojournalism by rewatching and discussing the short Ken Burns video we initially viewed in Lesson 2.

Step 1

Follow along as your teacher previews and discusses an extended research task you will do in the next lesson: to select an additional Depression-era photographer to learn more about, do some primary and secondary source research on the photographer and their photos, and then revise and further focus the evidence-based claim you developed with a partner in the previous activity. You will be selecting another photojournalist of interest to you from the ones profiled by Ken Burns in his short documentary:

  • Walker Evans

  • Russell Lee

  • John Vachon

  • Marion Post Wolcott

  • Arthur Rothstein

  • Gordon Parks

Alternately, you might do further research on Dorothea Lange.

Step 2

Rewatch the Ken Burns documentary Photographers of the Dust Bowl, focusing again on the names of the Dust Bowl photjournalists he profiles and identifying photographs you find to be compelling or interesting.

Identify one or more of the photojournalists that you are interested in studying further.

Step 3

As a class, discuss the options you have for learning more about one of the photojournalists and preview the resources you will use to do so.

For homework, if you have access to a computer and the Internet, do a preliminary review of these sources and see what you can initially learn about your photojournalist.