Drop Me Off in Harlem: Exploring the Intersections
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/interactives/harlem/
Drop Me Off in Harlem: Exploring the Intersections explores the Harlem Renaissance from the ground up, allowing site visitors to take a virtual tour of the community and to become familiar with the people and artistic works that were central to the cultural explosion of that age.
Beginning with the question “Who would you meet if you were actually dropped off in Harlem between 1917 and 1935?” the creators of the site have identified people who were not only critical to the Harlem Renaissance as an artistic movement, but also intimately tied to the Harlem community itself and connected to one another. As a result, the site manages to introduce students to a wide range of artists, writers, actors, dancers, and benefactors while maintaining a tight focus on Harlem and a coherence that is often absent from other web-based projects about this topic.
Drop Me Off in Harlem was developed by ARTSEDGE under a cooperative agreement between the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. and the National Endowment for the Arts with support from the U.S. Department of Education. The site is also affiliated with the Thinkfinity Partnership, a resource for K-12 education. It is organized around three central sections: Faces of the Renaissance, A Place Called Harlem, and Themes and Variations. A fourth section, Classroom Connections, helps teachers make use of the resources provided.
Faces of Harlem
The Faces of the Renaissance section uses DHTML “cards” to introduce visitors to the actors, musicians, artists, dancers, writers, and supporters of the Harlem Renaissance. Special care has been taken to select individuals whose work was not only developed in Harlem, but also inspired by or focused on the community. Featured historical actors include actors Charles Gilpen, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Evelyn Preer, and Adelaide Hall; musicians Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, and William Grant Still; artists Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, James VanDerZee, Selma Burke, Augusta Savage, and Oscar Micheaux; dancers Bill Robinson, Herbert White, Earl Tucker, Florence Mills, and George Snowden; writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James W. Johnson, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman; and supporters/activists Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, A’Lelia Walker, Charlotte Mason, Cal Van Vechten, and the Harmon Foundation.
Visitors can explore the Faces of the Renaissance section by looking at the cards for one particular kind of artist — dancers for example — or by viewing all of the cards at once. Clicking on an individual’s name brings up a photo, a short and well-written biographical sketch, links to multimedia presentations of their work, and a series of “Intersections” showing the connections between this individual and other people, places, and artistic works that are featured on the site. For example, in the section on musician Cab Calloway, students can see a photo of Calloway, learn about his career, watch video of Calloway performing “Dawn Time,” listen to a clip of his famous song “Minnie the Moocher,” and connect to information elsewhere on the site about the clubs where he played and other musicians with whom he performed.
A Place Called Harlem
In the A Place Called Harlem section, visitors can explore an interactive map of Harlem in the 1917-1935 period. By mousing over a building or a block, viewers can see the name of the specific building or area and can click to bring up detailed historical information about the location, often including period photographs to bring the map to life. The interactive map features prominent social, cultural, and political landmarks like the Cotton Club, Pace Phonograph Company, and Mother Zion AME Church. For students who have never visited New York or lived in a large city, this interactive map may provide the strong sense of place that will help them visualize this community more clearly and get a feel for what it would have been like to live and work in Harlem during this period.
Themes and Variations
The Themes and Variations part of the site provides a more detailed look at specific artistic works and themes from the Harlem Renaissance. It features concise illustrated essays on Harlem’s literary publications, the musical Shuffle Along, social dance, the Lafayette Players, and Harlem writers. These more in-depth articles are all linked back to Faces of Harlem profiles and the A Place Called Harlem interactive map so that interested visitors can explore the historical figures and places that pique their interest. Themes and Variations also links to excellent outside resources such as Jacob Lawrence: Over the Line from the Phillips Collection, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and A Great Day in Harlem, which explores jazz history through the photos of Art Kane.
Classroom Connections
Drop Me Off in Harlem’s Classroom Connections area features two classroom activities. The first, “Why Harlem?” uses poetry and the interactive map to help sixth through eighth graders understand why Harlem was particularly well-suited to a cultural explosion like what happened during the Harlem Renaissance. The other, “Collaboration, Influence and Support” challenges high school students to see connections between artists and those with whom they interacted. Students develop their own interpretations of the roles of collaboration, support, and influence in the Harlem Renaissance and have the creative opportunity to imagine a fictional collaboration between two Harlem Renaissance figures and develop their own ideas about what such a collaboration might have yielded.
Classroom Connections also provides links to other lesson plans about the Harlem Renaissance from ARTSEDGE (the Drop Me Off in Harlem creator) and elsewhere. Reaching these links requires the viewer to depart from the main site, and it is unclear why the site developers chose to link to these resources in this way instead of incorporating them into Drop Me Off in Harlem in a more seamless way, but the links are worth visiting as they include several useful curriculum ideas for K-6 teachers and teachers in the upper grades, and many of the linked lesson plans include links to exceptional additional resources.
Using the site with students
Technically, the site is well-designed and easy to navigate. The site does require a few technical specifications, however. Viewers should be using Internet Explorer 5.0 or better and should have installed a recent version of Real Player (8.5 or greater). The site’s multimedia features will not work with AOL’s media players, so AOL users should be aware of that incompatibility and make sure that RealPlayer is installed. One particularly nice design feature is that the color palette for the site was inspired by the works of Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas, who is featured in the Faces of the Renaissance section.
As with any rich resource for teaching, one can come away from this site wanting even more than it offers. Additional photos in the interactive map, perhaps even photos that show the difference between the featured streets then and now, might have painted the visual picture of Harlem even more vividly. Adding “non-essential” buildings to the interactive map, perhaps in another color, might have shown what else was going on in Harlem’s day-to-day life aside from the cultural renaissance and provided more context for the Harlem Renaissance itself. Longer audio and video clips might allow students to get a better feel for the music, dance, and drama of the period, but copyright concerns may have limited the availability of these resources. At the least, a completed bibliography would allow teachers who would like to play more complete recordings of specific songs or video clips to obtain copies of the original albums or films for classroom use. But this minor “wish list” of additional resources in no way detracts from what is an exceptionally useful and well-designed site on the Harlem Renaissance.
Drop Me Off in Harlem includes a number of unique features that will make it a tremendously valuable resource for social studies teachers. Unlike many websites about the Harlem Renaissance and its artists and benefactors, the site focuses on a variety of artistic forms from literature to visual arts to dance and drama. The multimedia features of the site will bring those artistic contributions to life for students who might remain uninterested if they simply read about Harlem in a textbook. Moreover, the interactive map provides students with a sense of the landscape of Harlem that will help them feel what it would have been like to have been there at the time.
This kind of experiential learning, deeply rooted in time and place, can get students excited about history in ways that more abstract discussions of events simply cannot. Most importantly, the numerous opportunities for students to explore the intersections between people, places, and artistic works featured on the site facilitate not only independent exploration of historical interests as students follow links from one figure to another, but also allow for the development of a complex view of the past in which historical information is not simply a collection of isolated, memorized facts but, rather, is a web of intimately interrelated concepts.
Students should be able to use these intersections as jumping off points for their own analysis of the connections between artists, themes, and ideas by developing learning webs, concept maps, or other interpretive projects. With the wealth of resources available on Drop Me Off in Harlem, students will benefit tremendously from this opportunity to develop their own analysis of the past and explore the material in a seamless and interactive way.
