Often, when we use biographies in the elementary classroom, we use them to teach about the lives of important people and what qualities or characteristics they had that influenced their lives.  In her books History Makers and Making Sense of History, Myra Zarnowski challenges us to use biographies as tools in teaching critical reading.  By reading across biographies, as we have written about in the section on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and by identifying the different perspectives of people who interacted with the main person whose life we are reading about, we can consider how different authors give us different insights into a person's life and how different people in history might have viewed that person. 

Another advantage of teaching biography in this way is that we can focus on a key force in history, in this case the abolition movement, in a way that provides access for the diverse learners in our classrooms.  We chose Douglass and Truth to study because there are books about them that are written at various readability levels -- from lower level texts at an L or M level up to the narratives they wrote about their own lives. 

 As groups of learners engaged in the sets of biographies, they were asked to first identify the different voices in the narrative and to see if they could determine, together, what this person's role was in society.  For example, in reading about Sojourner Truth, we met Master Hardenbergh who was a rich New Yorker who owned slaves.  We then wondered what thier thoughts and opinions on abolition might have been and identified evidence in the texts that supported our initial ideas.  Since Master Hardenbergh as a slave owner, we thought that he was pro-slavery since he made money from selling enslaved people.  Finally, we thought about what he might have said about young Isabelle.  Readers spent some time reading the various texts together and completing the attached graphic organizer on voices in history. 

Groups then wrote books on the person they studied. Using Nikki Grimes' book Talkin' About Bessie  as a model, we wrote introductory pages that established the person and the context, and then wrote pages on what different individuals in this person's life might have said about the person we were studying.  Greater description of this activity is in chapter 5 of Making Sense of History. 

An interesting twist that arose during tihs process happened in one group that was studying about Frederick Douglass. This group became quite fascinated by the story of Sophia, the woman who taught Douglass to read. Over the course of her life, she changed from questioning slavery to becoming adamantly pro-slavery.  Instead of writing a book about the different perspectives on Douglass, this group decided to write about Sophia instead.  Sharing the outcomes of these discoveries added to the group's overall understanding of the complexity of US societal views on slavery and abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.