 The Q-Focus is a political cartoon by Louis Dali Rimpel. I thought it would be a great one because when I looked at it, I was shocked. It is a caricature of Uncle Sam in a classroom. It's from 1899, so it's a year after the Spanish-American War and you've got Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, sitting in the front row of this classroom and then sitting in the back, you've got California and Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska. So immediately, there's sort of frightening ideas about assimilation and these racist assumptions that justified US Empire building. I zoomed in on the political cartoon to use as my Q-Focus instead of giving them the entire cartoon. So it was a focus on the children or the nations sitting in the front of the classroom. That's what I wanted them to be asking questions about. When I'm picking a Q-Focus, I really wanna pick something that at the end of a unit or a lesson, I want my students to look at and appreciate and appreciate the complexity of it. And this one was a complex depiction of different forms of racism. How are you doing? Good morning. All right, okay, great. We'll get started. The main objective, analyze cultural beliefs and attitudes that justified US imperialism. And we're gonna use the question formulation technique to generate, categorize and prioritize questions about a primary source. And then throughout, we'll be researching and then writing a response to our question that we generate. And it'll have claim evidence reasoning and then reasoning with complexity. Okay, so if you guys can click on that link, that should take you to a Google doc and we'll be working from this Google doc. This image is going to be the Q-Focus, okay? I'm gonna be the scribe. I'm gonna write down every question as you state it. And let's go for it. Is that Uncle Sam? There's a caricature face of the black characters on purpose. What is written on the light blue book on the left side? I'm the indigenous man in the back. Was that the door? Why are they sitting on what looks to be like a park bench? What is written on the blackboard? Is the man at the door Chinese? My initial thoughts were, oh, we're gonna talk about American imperialism and white man's burden and all these other aspects of imperialism. But the QFT process really enlightened me because we usually look at one scope of it and it's from the American perspective, but we don't look at the perspective of those who are being subjugated, which I found very interesting because we're looking at the opposite perspective instead of the American one. What are they reading? Why do they have satchels, I think that's what they're called, on different countries? When was this made? Why are these specific countries listed? When I saw the picture, I didn't really understand what was going on. I was more so confused because the first thing that came to mind to me was racism and I didn't understand how that was connected to imperialism. I was squinting, trying to see what things were in the background while other people were bringing up questions about things I wasn't really paying attention to such as what some of the people in the image were wearing. And I thought it was kind of cool to put into perspective what other people were looking at while I was kind of like looking somewhere else but all under the same image. Is this supposed to be satire? Why are the lighter characters sitting in the back? Why is there a character reading a book upside down that also appears to be simpler than the other books? At first glance, I was kind of disgusted because I see the different races, I could see how I'd represented and I really didn't like the depiction of these people that were put. But it really highlights the era of the time, it highlights the ideology that was going around the belief system that they had. And so doing the questions let us look deeper into this deeper than our feelings and have an actual sort of like scientific and audible gaze upon it. What is the gold ring on the second character's leg on the bench? One thing I really love about this part of the process is that there's no judgment. I'm writing down everything word for word. Felt like it was a safe and open environment. He mentions don't criticize questions, just keep asking questions. And I think that really helped me be comfortable. Even when there may be a misconception or a mistake that is within a question, I think for example, a student asked, why are they wearing satchels instead of the word sashes? You know, that's not a problem either. As a teacher, sometimes you find yourself correcting students all the time, like, oh, it's spelled this way or this is the correct thing. It is so nice to be able to just sit back and give them the steering wheel. And so that's a really wonderful part about it. Why are the kids in the front shown as terrified or afraid? What does the writing say on the books, the children in the back reading? All right, excellent everybody. Now we're gonna go through and categorize, right? Closed ended or open ended questions? Closed ended questions? Yes or no answers or a one word answer? Open ended questions? Are required an explanation? So number one, is that open or closed? Is that Uncle Sam? It's closed, yeah. Is the character face of the black? Characters on purpose? Closed. What is written on the book on the left side? Closed. Okay, why is there an indigenous man sitting in the back? Open. Open. Yeah, so we categorize the questions into open and closed questions. Now we're going to improve questions. We're going to be able to change them from close to open and open to closed. So pick anyone that you're curious, what's a number of a closed ended question and we can turn into an open ended question. What number that has a C next to it? What about one? Sure. We could say, I is Uncle Sam there. Okay, so from, is that Uncle Sam to, why is Uncle Sam there? Now number five, who's at the door? You could ask them why they are like excluded. Why excluded? And now let's do one open to closed. Or four instead of why we could put is there? Okay. As a historian who comes across this document, what would you prioritize in terms of the questions? Number 13. 21. Okay. I think 14, I think it's 20. Sorry, 20? Number 10. All right. Oh, 11. What are you noticing about where we chose to prioritize questions? We have more closed questions. Why do you think that is? I feel like some of the close ended questions that we chose provides us with like background. I could assume that the closed ended questions could have solid answers towards what they are and what the meaning of them are. It also helps with finding the historical context to know what's going on at that time. All right. Great. So Javier, what's your question? Why did you choose it? I chose number 21, doing part to the fact that it's asking what the topic has to do with imperialism and it's going to be the basis for what we will be looking into. Thank you. And Leslie, talk about why you chose this priority open ended question. I chose the why do they have sad shows of different countries because if we're trying to look up, trying to search our answer imperialism and what everyone had to do, I would like to know why there's different countries and how they affected American imperialism as a whole. Thank you. Great. I'm going to direct you to a few different sources. And the first thing we're going to do, there's a link to the original source with information about it. I'd like you to see if you can find information there that can answer some of our questions. And as you find those answers, if you could put them into our Google doc. I showed them the Library of Congress. They looked at the full cartoon along with information about it, like artists and date and publication and could see the text written out of what was in the cartoon. And I just said, go for it. And they started answering the questions sort of in real time on the same document. And that was fun to watch them just sort of work and go for it. And I like that they're able to see each other's work at the same time too, because it inspires them to keep working and also to read what each other is writing. And there you can also have discussions or as they're writing, I can question them and they can defend what they're writing or explain to others what it is. And we can think about the different questions. I have another source I'd like you to look at. It seems like you guys have done a great job looking at just this one primary source from a little wider perspective, right? And been able to answer a bunch of these. And I'm starting to hear the analysis happen. If you scroll down and just sort of look around and you'll find that this primary source is embedded in the secondary source. So it's like you're reading a textbook and this would come up. So there's gonna be a little more context about it. I had them read a secondary source about imperialism, but of course they're reading with a purpose because they generated these questions, which is one thing I really like about QFT. They have a question that they've created that they've thought about that they're, so whenever they read, they're going to be doing it with a very specific purpose in mind. It also states on secondary source, the blackboard says the consent of the government is a good thing in theory, but very rare in fact the US must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves. So in theory it's basically saying that these people are uncivilized, that they don't have a basic form of governance. So the United States has to go in and govern for them, which is basically justifying why they have a presence on those islands. It's like this white savior complex that they have extending to the idea of white mans bird and that these countries are unable to govern themselves. It's the US's duty to do so as if they are obligated. So using those two secondary sources, they ended up writing their claim evidence reasoning paragraph. I'd like to finish up with a quick discussion about the idea of continuity and change in American society. How is the American classroom that's been depicted here the same? What are continuities and then what are changes? First changes is that people are able to go to school and get that education with some continuities that there are still people out in the world who don't even have like the necessary means to get in an education. And it's not even like technically within their control. Like it's just not in their resources. Classrooms are more diverse than no one is treated better than others based on race or creed. What has continued is stereotypes in some forms racism still persists. It isn't as common as it is today compared to how it was a hundred years ago, but it still occurs. I kind of wanna disagree with what you said. Racism is still very prevalent. A lot of things are now illegal, but it's still very normal. And that's the reason why it doesn't seem as if it's uncommon because it's been normalized within our history now. The questioning process is totally enhances our learning just because the source of our curiosity of making these questions is entirely our own. We're not worried about if this is the question our teacher is trying to get us to ask or if this is the question like that they're kind of like looking forward that's gonna help move forth the lesson. It's more like these are the questions that I'm seeing that I'm thinking of. It helps me drive my learning by pushing more towards that curiosity and seeing like what's behind that. So like it's like a little like curtain and it's like, okay, my question is right there. Let me like go in and see what's more behind it and more like background information and then just our own information that we have ourselves put it in and just collide it to one big one. It definitely feels a lot more engaging with it because I'm actually speaking out rather than just hearing the teacher talk about it. And the teacher is still facilitating the discussion but it's mainly the students doing it compared to a normal lesson since we are talking it's a lot more easier to be engaged. It's kind of refreshing because it reverses that process that you typically see in the classroom where it's like students are typically given all this information and like they're supposed to digest that right away and then after the teacher asks like so does anybody have any questions after like you're still digesting all this information while this process kind of reverses that and you think for yourself first and get quality work at the end with a better result.