Classroom Series: History of the DSNY
May 6, 2020 | Garima Sharma
Objectives: Students will be able to utilize historical thinking skills to form connections between the past and the present by investigating primary sources such as photographs and videos. Students will be able to understand the role of sanitation workers in the community Students will be able to practice their listening and speaking skills.
Lesson plan: Explain to the students that NYC’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) plays a crucial role in the city’s everyday life. The department was established many years ago in 1881 and looked quite different then. Inform them that they will be watching a short video discussing DSNY's history and looking at multiple historical photographs and video as primary sources.
Before watching the video, share the following Mind Map skills sheet with your students. (If you’re conducting this lesson online, you can copy the Mind Map skills sheet below to a Google doc and share with your students, or ask them to make a mind map on their own, making sure they place ‘Trash’ in the middle.)
Ask students to write down all words/phrases they can associate with Trash. When they’ve finished, ask students to volunteer and share the connections they have made with Trash. The aim of this activity is to help prime the students’ prior knowledge around concepts relating to waste management and communities, and how they see their relationship with trash. (10 mins.)
Next, play the video, students watch video, DSNY History. (6 mins)
After the video, ask students to share three to four facts they discovered about the DSNY from the video. (5 mins)
Next, lead students through the See-Think-Wonder exercise, using the images shared below. Ask students to note what details they see in the images, what do they think based on what they see, and what do these details make them wonder. You can structure this discussion to focus on the /me periods shown, the work that sanitation workers do, their role in our community, and development of New York City as a city. To carry out this exercise online, you can copy-paste the following table into Google Docs and share with your students. The images can viewed online here. (10 mins.) (See below for skills sheets)