Lesson 25: Seen and Unseen: Part 12

Have students take out Seen and Unseen, along with their annotations and Journal.

• Lesson 24 Homework: Students wrote brief descriptions of examples in Seen and Unseen where both survivor testimony and images appear on the page.

Display the Essential Question: How can readers evaluate words and images for accuracy, perspective, and ethical use?

Have students use the turn and talk routine to discuss their examples.

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: Look at the prompt on the board and take a moment to think about some ideas. Then, use the Turn and Talk routine to discuss your ideas and homework examples with a partner.

• Ask: What pages did you choose, and why?

  • I chose pp. 40–41 because both the photograph and the quotation are dramatic.

• Ask: How can seeing multiple kinds of evidence or media (words, photos, illustrations) help us understand a story more fully? What’s an example from this unit?

  • Different kinds of evidence show different aspects of a story. For example, someone who was there can say that there were dust storms, but if the reader hasn’t experienced a dust storm themselves, it could be hard to picture. A photograph or an illustration can show how the dust storms appeared in real life, helping readers visualize the sheer size and darkness of the clouds in a way that words alone cannot.

Remind students that responsibly evaluating words and images from history requires attention to what is included and what is missing.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: Today, we are going to continue our focus on survivor testimony, comparing the textual evidence with illustrations and photographs that address some of the same events. As you conduct your analysis in this lesson, think about how different kinds of evidence each contribute to our understanding.

Have students turn to page 44 in their copies of Seen and Unseen. Model reading using the Fluency Practice routine before reading together as a class. Then, have students reread in partnerships.

Fluency Practice

Reread it with your partner to practice your fluency and expression. Look at the excerpt on page 44 of Seen and Unseen. Follow along as we prepare to read and analyze it together.

Model Fluent Reading: Read the text aloud for students. Model how to navigate the differences in sentence length and language use between the third-person narration and the quote. Show students how to read the quote with emotion and emphasis but without undue theatricality or potentially insensitive character-acting. Then, as a class, briefly discuss the gist of what is happening in these paragraphs. Define unfamiliar words as needed and review their pronunciation.

Reread as a Class: Set an interpretive or knowledge-building purpose for rereading the text (in addition to developing fluency).

Say these Directions: Focus on the differences in style between the authors’ description and Archie Miyatake’s firsthand observation. Then, have the class echo-read one sentence at a time.

Reread in Partnerships: Finally, set a purpose for reading the text a third time.

Say these Directions: Reread it with your partner to practice your fluency and expression. Have students partner-read the text and offer feedback to one another with a focus on pacing and punctuation.

• Say: First, Partner A reads and Partner B provides feedback. Then, students switch roles. Partner B reads and Partner A provides feedback.

Once students have finished practicing, affirm the connection to today’s learning goals:

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: On this page, we can see and hear how Archie Miyatake’s firsthand recollections of life at Manzanar are expressed. We can compare and contrast them with the way that author Elizabeth Partridge describes the camp’s desert conditions. Reading these paragraphs aloud gives us an extra opportunity to appreciate the similarities and differences.

Part A: Model Image Analysis (RI.7.1, RI.7.6, RI.7.1) (10 minutes)

Present a relevant excerpt from Seen and Unseen, such as the spread of pp 96-97, where both survivor text and images appear on the pages. Read the survivor excerpt while displaying the corresponding illustration and/or photograph.

Model using a Craft Lens for students to analyze the page spread:

• Text: Highlight words or phrases that convey emotional tone or bias.

• Photography: Note framing, perspective, and subjects included or left out.

• Illustration: Observe style, emphasis, or exaggeration that affects perception.

In your Think-Aloud modeling, show how the elements combine to produce more than the sum of their parts and how different media can add new elements to understanding of a situation. Your analysis might sound like this:

• Say: The photographs show individual portraits of smiling children and adults. Their clothes look clean and in some cases even dressy. The quotation says, “Everything in a picture is not necessarily true.” It doesn’t say “Nothing in a picture is true,” but it suggests that we should ask questions. We can see a border with markings on it on some pictures, which reminds us that these are photographs, not reality, and that many were probably taken and only some selected. The pictures are clearly posed, and we can’t see anything in the background. The quotation is on black scribbles, and there are other images in shadows. The whole spread is dark, with other scribbles that could be desert wind or a dust storm.

Say these Directions: Examine the excerpt from Seen and Unseen and consider the following question:

• Ask: What do you think the authors’ purpose was in creating and choosing these illustrations for this page?

  • The illustrator may be trying to show what’s outside the photographs, like the desert and mountains, and to show that even though they’re bright and cheerful, these photographs were taken in a dark, lonely situation.

• Ask: Tamaki had to decide: Should this page be an illustration, a photograph, or both? For the page spread you're analyzing, what does Tamaki's choice of medium and her visual style on that spread accomplish that the other medium could not?

  • On pages 24–25, both a photograph and an illustration appear. The photograph shows the Mochida family with identification tags. But the illustration on the facing page zooms in on a child's worried face. The photograph proves what happened; the illustration shows how it felt. Including both means that we have the documentary proof and also another layer of emotion and empathy.

Part B: Analyze Text and Images (RI.7.1, RI.7.6, RI.7.7) (20 minutes)

Have students select a different page spread from Seen and Unseen, such as one they selected for homework. Students will use the Turn-and-Talk routine to share their selections and compare their work.

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: You have learned how different elements of a text, such as firsthand accounts and images, can provide new elements of understanding when analyzed together. Now, select a different set of text and images, such as an example you described in your homework, and analyze them with a partner using the Turn and Talk routine. Some examples of what you should discuss are:

• Ask: Text: What tone, perspective, or voice is conveyed?

• Ask: Photography: What is emphasized or omitted?

• Ask: Illustration: How does the visual style shape meaning?

• Ask: Omissions/Hidden Experiences: What is missing?

• Ask: Find a spread in Seen and Unseen where the text says one thing and the illustration or photograph seems to say something slightly different — or adds something the text doesn’t explicitly state. What is that gap between text and image? Is it a contradiction, a complication, or an extension? What would be lost if the image were removed and only the text remained?

  • On page 95, the text says the prisoners “smiled for his camera” because they were “under enormous pressure to prove they were good Americans.” If you didn’t read the text, you might think these people were happy. The gap between the text and the image is a complication: the smiles are real photographs, but the feelings behind them are not what they appear. If you removed the text, you’d see happy people in a camp and think everything was fine. The text makes the smiles heartbreaking instead of reassuring.

Collaborative Idea Board

Reconvene the class and record key ideas on a Collaborative Idea Board. Then, lead a whole-class discussion of the following points:

• Ask: What patterns do you notice in how the different media—text, illustration, and photography—relate on the page or page spread you chose?

  • In the photo on p. 24, the father of the family looks like he is smiling, perhaps because he wants to reassure his family they will be all right. However, the children look worried. The illustration on p. 25 emphasizes this by showing a close-up image of a child who looks sad and distrustful. The quote from the survivor on p. 25 explains how Japanese Americans were treated during “evacuation” and suggests how it must have felt. So the pattern is that the illustration emphasizes or adds to the details from the photo, and the text tells us what happened in a survivor’s own words.

• Ask: What do you think the authors’ purpose was in creating and choosing these illustrations for this page? How do these choices influence our understanding of the experience of incarceration?

  • The authors use illustrations to show emotions that photographs do not always capture. For example, the child in the illustration looks more upset than the children in the photograph. This helps readers understand the fear and uncertainty people felt during Japanese American incarceration. By combining illustrations, photographs, and testimony, the authors help us see both what happened and how it felt.

• Ask: How does this survivor story compare to government documents, press coverage, or other photographers’ work from Investigation 1?

  • This story shows the personal effects of the policies that were described in official language in the government documents. The official documents we read treat Japanese Americans as a group of people who are all the same. The survivor story here explains the emotional impact of being distrusted and treated as “only a number.”

• Ask: What else do we need to consider when reading or hearing from survivors of Japanese American incarceration?

  • We need to make sure that we remember the people who went through incarceration were individuals. That means that they did not all react in one way to being removed from their homes and sent off to the incarceration camps. People might have also felt different things during, immediately after, and long after incarceration.

Record key ideas from the discussion on a Collaborative Idea Board.

Have students write a short response to the prompt. Collect the response as formative data.

Quick Write

Say these Directions: Write two to three sentences in response to the following question:

• Which photograph, text, illustrations, or other object made the biggest impression on you today? What type of media was it, and what did you notice most about it?

  • A photograph where the children are wearing their tags added the most to my understanding today. It showed how the people who were moved to the incarceration camps weren’t treated as individuals but also made me think about how families tried to follow all the rules to keep their children safe.

• Ask: We've been analyzing how text, photographs, and illustrations work together. Now set the analysis aside. Which page spread from today stayed with you the most because of what it made you feel? Why?

  • Pages 40–41 stayed with me the most because the illustration of the dust storm made me feel how small and exposed people must have felt in the desert. I can analyze the color palette and the composition, but underneath that analysis, I just feel sad that families had to live like this. The illustration made the desert feel hostile in a way that facts alone didn't.

Explain that students will compare perspectives across three sources in the next lesson. Before the next class, have them identify three sources that they think work together to tell a coherent story:

1. A survivor story from Seen and Unseen (text, illustration, photo)

2. One photographer’s work from Investigation 1 (Lange, Miyatake, or Adams)

3. One informational source about WWII incarceration (e.g., government documents such as Executive Order 9066 (available online), press articles, or NPR “3 Views of Internment”).

Encourage them to note their ideas in their Journal.