Workshop I: Reading Ole Rolvaag 100 Years On<\/span><\/h1>\nWorkshop II: Transnational Teaching and Research with Primary Sources<\/span><\/p>\nWorkshop III: Participatory Pedagogy in Language Classrooms: Engaging the Past through Role Play<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The CC2025 conference will feature three educational workshops. For more details on these, including descriptions and times, visit the program page. Workshop I: Reading Ole Rolvaag 100 Years On Workshop II: Transnational Teaching and Research with Primary Sources Workshop III: Participatory Pedagogy in Language Classrooms: Engaging the Past through Role Play <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"
The CC2025 conference will feature three educational workshops.<\/h3>\r\nWorkshop I: <\/b>Participatory Pedagogy in Language Classrooms: Engaging the Past through Role Play\r\n<\/span><\/i>Maren Johnson and Erik Mustad<\/b>\r\n\r\nThis proposal presents a simulation-based approach to exploring the complex experiences of Norwegian immigrants to the United States during the 19th century. The simulation, designed for use in middle school to college-level classrooms, is structured around two key historical scenes set in 1835 and 1862.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe first scene, set in 1835, captures the early wave of Norwegian immigration, a period marked by economic hardship and social upheaval in Norway, which pushed many to seek better opportunities in America. This scene introduces participants to the push-and-pull factors driving emigration, the decision-making process of potential immigrants, and the initial challenges they faced upon arrival in the United States. Through this, students gain insight into the broader European immigration trends of the early 19th century and how these trends shaped the demographic and cultural landscape of the United States.<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe second scene, set in 1862, focuses on a later wave of Norwegian immigrants during the American Civil War. This period highlights the intersection of immigration with broader national issues, such as the war, westward expansion, and the evolving notions of citizenship and belonging in the United States. Participants will explore the dilemmas faced by immigrants in this era, including the pressures of assimilation, participation in the war, and the quest for land and stability in the Midwest. By situating Norwegian immigration within the broader narrative of American history, this scene encourages students to critically engage with themes of identity, loyalty, and the immigrant experience.<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe simulation is designed as an interactive and engaging pedagogical tool, offering participants the opportunity to step into the shoes of historical figures and make decisions based on the scenarios presented. By test-playing the simulation, conference participants will experience firsthand the educational potential of this tool, exploring how it can be used to foster a deeper understanding of immigration history, critical thinking, and empathy in students.<\/span>\r\n\r\nOur goal is to demonstrate how this simulation can be integrated into existing curricula to enhance the teaching of immigration history. By bringing historical events to life, the simulation provides a dynamic alternative to traditional lecture-based instruction, making complex historical concepts more accessible and relatable to students. Additionally, the simulation encourages active learning, discussion, and reflection, helping students connect past events with contemporary issues of immigration and cultural integration.<\/span>\r\n\r\nBy test-playing the simulation at the conference, we seek feedback from participants to refine and improve the tool, ensuring its effectiveness and relevance in diverse classroom settings and provide the resource as a curricular tool for educators.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nWorkshop II: <\/b>Transnational Teaching and Research with Primary Sources\r\n<\/span><\/i>Tine Berg Floater and Lee Ann Porter<\/b>\r\n\r\nIn this 90-minute workshop, participants will be introduced to a wide variety of primary sources found in library collections and archival holdings that reveal the reasons for, suggest responses to, and illustrate the impact of transnational Norwegian migration.\u00a0 Select primary sources\u2014including manuscripts, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, emigration and immigration data, ship lists, and more\u2014from both the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Norwegian National Archives in Oslo, Norway, will be featured. Participants will engage in analysis activities, practice search strategies, and share approaches for teaching and research with primary sources across the curriculum and the grade spectrum.\r\n\r\nWorkshop III: <\/b>Reading Ole Rolvaag 100 Years On\r\n<\/span><\/i>Annette Atkins<\/b>\r\n\r\nIn this workshop participants will be invited into a conversation about the fiction of Ole Rolvaag.\u00a0 Best known, of course, for Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag told multiple versions of the Norwegian immigrant experience: Peder Victorious and Their Fathers\u2019 God (read mostly by serious students of Rolvaag) and (my favorite) The Boat of Longing that takes up the story of an young, male, single immigrant to Minneapolis.<\/span>\r\n\r\nReaders \u2013 teachers, students, scholars, descendants of Norwegian immigrants, regional historians \u2013 have conjured the immigrant experience through Rolvaag\u2019s language, images, characters, even his point of view.\u00a0 In his view the experience \u2013 and by extension, the book itself \u2013 are epic stories, about mythic-sized and defined characters.\u00a0 The traditional Norwegian sagas have nothing on this Norwegian-American saga.\u00a0 The experience as he described it was of monumental proportions, wrestling with giants.<\/span>\r\n\r\nRolvaag is also praised for his representation of the contributions of those Norwegian immigrants to American life and culture, his championing of ethnic pluralism, his treatment of the problem of hyphenated Americans.\u00a0 His books explore conflict among immigrant groups, about the preservation and deterioration and reconstruction of ethnic identity.<\/span>\r\n\r\nNot every reader has been enthusiastic.\u00a0 A recent anonymous reviewer for \u201cGood Reads,\u201d for example, wrote:\u00a0 \u201cI hated this book. It felt like counting sand. Or corn. Or whatever the hell they were growing. Oh and everyone is named Hansa. Seriously, this book moves so slow, you could literally skip entire chapters (maybe even 2 or three), and NOTHING WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.\u2019\u00a0 I certainly faced more than one student who had a similar response.\u00a0 Are they just wrong?<\/span>\r\n\r\nSome more recent historians of the American Midwest have simply ignored the book, uncomfortable with Rolvaag\u2019s accounts of the interactions between immigrants and native people.\u00a0 Some historians even identify immigrants as settler colonists who unjustly and carelessly displaced Native People and have profited for generations from that land grab (however mediated by federal government and railroad land grants).\u00a0 Many contemporary Midwestern organizations begin public gatherings with variously worded land acknowledgements.\u00a0 Should new editions of Rolvaag\u2019s books offer an even deeper and more powerful acknowledgment?<\/span>\r\n\r\nIn short, Rolvaag\u2019s books stand at the vortex of sets of issues and attitudes that deserve consideration, conversation, and airing of multiple approaches and reactions to this monumental man and his works on this 100th anniversary of the publication of Giants in the Earth.<\/span>\r\n\r\nAll comers to the workshop will be invited to participate.\u00a0 I would organize the attendees into groups representing each of the above points of view and orchestrate first small group discussions and then larger group conversation.\u00a0 In my experience, assigning a point of view to a person invites insights and understandings that go deeper and wider than straightforward and often combative expressions of our own views\/responses.\u00a0 In this experience I hope to help people of different points of view practice talking across and through those differences.\u00a0 That seems a worthy and Rolvaag-like aim.<\/span>","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-344","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1228,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/344\/revisions\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/cc2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}