How Josh Perlman Teaches Immigration

I teach immigration with a sense of purpose. As a descendent of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe I owe a lot to this country's history of accepting immigrants. At the same time I'm aware that America has not always been, and may not always remain, a friendly place for strangers. While I have no specific political agenda in my teaching, I do return time and again to a central theme: that tolerance is the cornerstone of any successful society. When you teach world history to 10th graders, as I do, this message is hard to miss.

One way to elicit the theme of tolerance is ask your students to compare two or more "golden ages" - this year we compared the Gupta Empire in India to the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, for example. I led a general overview of both societies, highlighting amongst other elements the cultural fluorescence of minority Buddhist and Jewish cultures under the tolerant Hindu and Muslim policies of each empire. After reviewing these and other vibrant societies of the early Middle Ages, I asked students to come up with their own personal models for what makes for a successful society. This exercise sparked a lot of creativity. One student drew a model of an "ice-cream society," with the firm hand of good government holding the fragile ice-cream cone of "social unity;" another student drew a "pony-tail society" where the "hair-band" of government held together the various (and potentially frizzy) strands of diverse cultures. When I asked them to apply their own models to the various societies we had looked at, and to identify the particular strategies that had led to success, the students consistently spoke of tolerance and the need to find unity in diversity. I've found that teachers don't need to preach these values to high school students; the careful study of history will provoke students to discover these values for themselves.

A central goal of my class is that students should be able to contextualize current events. Towards that end I've established the daily routine of one student delivering a brief "world civilization update" at the beginning of each class. At the beginning of the year I assigned each student a particular "civilization", and charged each student with tracking events in this region. He or she must relate a current event to the history we've studied - either through direct causality or through comparison - and also to the central course question of what makes for a successful society.

Immigration is a very common theme in these reports, and one that I expressly encourage. It is eye-opening for students to realize that immigration is a pressing policy issue in societies world-wide, and not merely a question of the US-Mexico border. It is also a revelation for them to see that the movement of populations has been the rule, rather than the exception, throughout most of human history. My advice to high school teachers who share my enthusiasm for immigration is to retain a generally objective stance when heated classroom discussions on this topic emerge. An unresolved problem will excite students' interest and further investigation, whereas a pre-prepared verdict will provoke skepticism and boredom. Let immigration be a window into the most fascinating issues of your class, whether you teach social studies, biology, literature or music. Begin with a sense of purpose, but continue in a spirit of open investigation.

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