What Does Culture Mean to You? Teaching the Harlem Renaissance

I’m Spencer Charrington, and this is my station-based lesson on the Harlem Renaissance. Students look at how Black writers, musicians and artists in the 1920s and 1930s used poetry, music, fiction and painting to talk about identity, history and resistance.

What students learn

• What the Harlem Renaissance was and how the Great Migration shaped it
• How to read a poem, a piece of fiction, a song and a painting as historical sources
• The themes of identity, pride, struggle and resistance in the work
• How the movement connects to art and music today

How the lesson runs

1. Opening question. Music is playing as students come in. I ask “What does culture mean to you?” and they talk it over with the person next to them.
2. Five stations. Each group studies one figure or form: Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too”, an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois on the “sorrow songs” in The Souls of Black Folk, Aaron Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, and the spirituals “Go Down Moses”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Wade in the Water” and “Steal Away”.
3. Everyone gets a question. Each person in the group takes one question and thinks it through, then the group builds a shared answer.
4. Five guiding questions. Who was this person? What did they make? What themes run through the work? How did the 1920s, Harlem and the Great Migration shape it? How did it change American culture or push back against racism?
5. Make and share. Groups turn what they found into a poster, a canvas or a few slides and share one idea with the class.