Colonial America: Diverse?—

Understanding Our Immigrant Nation

By Larissa Lytwyn

Alive with an enthusiasm that is downright contagious, Oona Mulligan, a seventh grade social studies teacher at Newtown Middle School, discusses the ethnic and economic diversity of Colonial America with firsthand knowledge.

Maybe its because she grew up in an environment rich in resources for a budding historian: many of the gardening tools and cooking devices she has brought in to show her class came from her parents’ collection.

“Now the students are analyzing them to try to find out what they were used for,” Ms Mulligan explained.

Her classes are close to finishing their unit on Colonial America, taught this year with the twist of approaching the oft-visited subject from the perspective of immigrants.

“We’ve divided the classes into sections,” Ms Mulligan explained. “Each group explores a different aspect of colonial life, whether it be the arts, the geography, or natural resources.”

The curriculum is attuned with other classes’ exploration of the historical period; in English, for example, one student mentioned reading Elizabeth George Speer’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The story discusses one woman’s life amidst an increasingly oppressive Puritanical community in Colonial America.

Part of the unit included a field trip to Ellis Island in New York City as well as the opportunity for students to trace their own family heritage.

“Although she could trace her history back to Africa, one girl couldn’t go into a lot of detail because many of her ancestors were slaves — and there were no records kept,” Ms Mulligan said. Sharing her story with the class, she continued, “You could have heard a pin drop!”

The experience, Ms Mulligan believes, makes a potentially distant subject seem sharply relevant.

“We also marked the places we were able to trace our families on a map using pushpins,” Ms Mulligan said.

Many of the students were from the British Isles and Western Europe, including Germany, France, and Sweden.

“We’ve also had some students from Puerto Rico and Brazil,” Ms Mulligan noted. “It’s important, I think, to understand our heritage — and get more in touch with each others’.”