Lesson 24: Seen and Unseen: Part 11

Have students take out Seen and Unseen with their annotations.

• Display or project the Essential Question for this investigation: How can readers evaluate words and images for accuracy, perspective, and ethical use?

• Have students use the Turn and Talk routine to answer the essential question and to share a real-life example of how a firsthand narrative can make past events come to life. Reconvene the class and have volunteers share with the whole group.

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 with a partner before sharing with the class.

• Ask: What makes a story feel authentic or believable? Provide an example to support your response.

  • Vivid and specific details can make a story feel believable. For example, a story about a road trip seems more authentic if you hear details about the weather, the kind of car, the condition of the roads, and so forth. Details like that make you feel that the person telling the story was really there.

• Ask: How is reading one individual’s firsthand testimony of the camps different from learning that 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved to camps?

  • Listening to someone’s experience reminds you that what we call “history” represents the experiences of real people. When you read that 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved to camps, for example, it is easy to forget that those were 120,000 adults and children with their own unique lives and feelings.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: Today, we are focusing on the individual testimony from Seen and Unseen. By thinking about the experience of incarceration from an individual’s perspective, we can better understand the events of Japanese American incarceration and the purposes of Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki in crafting this book.

Introduce vocabulary using examples and non-examples to support understanding of word meaning and comprehension.

Example/Non-Example

Say these Directions: Work with a partner to determine whether the following scenarios are examples or non-examples of the target word.

Target word: miserable

• Introduce the Activity: Present each scenario orally and/or project on a board. 

• Ask: What does the word miserable mean?

• Discuss Scenarios: Ask students to discuss with a partner to explain why each scenario is an example or a non-example of discrimination. 

• Ask: Is this an example or non-example of miserable? Why?

Share Student Thinking: Invite partnerships to share their examples and non-examples. Prompt students to share their rationale and explain their connections. For example:

• Ask: Why is this first scenario, “A family is forced from their home…” an example of a miserable situation, but the second, “a couple sells their condo…” is not?

  • The conditions in the first example are miserable because the building is clearly inadequate for the people to live in, and they had no choice about going there. The second is not miserable because the people selling the house are giving up something they did not need.

• Ask: What factors can make a situation miserable rather than just inconvenient, boring, or frustrating?

  • A miserable situation is bad in an extreme way. One thing that can make a situation miserable is when there is no freedom to change it and no sense of when it will end. This is why it would not be fair to call the summer camp miserable because of its boring menu, but it would be fair to call the prison rations miserable.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: Those imprisoned under Executive Order 9066 often described their circumstances using extreme language—understandably so, because they were living through extreme situations. Recognizing the shades of meaning in the survivors’ word choices can help us to appreciate how they felt about their experiences and why they felt that way.

Introduce the excerpt from Seen and Unseen that presents the firsthand testimony of camp survivor Amy Iwasaki (page 29). Then model how to annotate, before students annotate on their own.

Part A: Model Annotation (RI.7.3, RI.7.6) (10 minutes)

Annotations are notes that you write while reading a text, which help you to stay engaged, understand the text, and remember what you read.

Think-Aloud Modeling

Model the process of annotating the excerpt using a Think-Aloud. Provide sticky notes and/or highlighters. Read the excerpt aloud and note specific words and details that connect to the survivor’s point of view and tone. Pause to annotate and talk through your annotations.

• Point of View/Voice: The survivor was a child, which we see in the third-person text that introduces the excerpt. The language (“had done something so bad”) reflects this.

• Emotional Tone: The words convey sadness, confusion, and shame. She felt judged and blamed herself, although she was so young, saying they must have “done something so bad that the people didn’t even want to look at us.” She uses the extreme language “all the Japanese Americans,” “so bad,” and “didn’t even want to look at us” that show how intensely she felt this and that she drew broad conclusions.

• Omissions/Hidden Details: We don’t know from this quotation whether the speaker was moved by bus or train. We don’t know whether the covered windows were really to keep others from seeing the Japanese Americans being transported or were to keep the passengers from seeing out, or both. We also don’t know how much later she talked about her experience, but I bet we could find out by looking at the Notes in the back of the book.

• Ask: What do you think the authors’ purpose might have been in including this quotation?

  • They may have wanted to show how the experience affected children even years later and made them feel confused and ashamed.

Highlight connections between your annotations and the goal of being responsible witnesses to history.

• Say: As readers, we need to consider what the survivor reveals, what is missing, and how we can honor their perspective without making assumptions.

Part B: Annotate for Voice and Tone (RI.7.6, SL.7.1) (20 minutes)

Have students read the selected survivor excerpt in pairs (the sample responses below reflect on the survivor account on p. 33). Provide them with sticky notes or annotation handouts to record observations. Have students turn and talk with a partner to share examples from each category of their annotations (perspective, tone, omissions).

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: You have learned to annotate key details about point of view. Now, investigate and annotate details with a partner.

Reread the passage, using sticky notes to annotate details that reveal more about the point of view, such as:

• Moments that reveal voice, emotional tone, and omissions or hidden experiences

• Details that show the author’s purpose

Then, use your annotations to discuss some or all of these questions with your partner:

• Ask: Who is telling the story? What do they emphasize?

  • An unnamed Japanese American man is telling the story and emphasizes the poor, improvised state of the housing at Tanforan. He discusses how the housing still bore obvious traces of being used to shelter horses.

• Ask: What feelings are conveyed? What details does “the man” use to show their feelings?

  • The man sounds sad and perhaps resentful as he recalls his experiences. He describes living circumstances at Tanforan as “terrible” and says that he felt “miserable” and powerless while confined there (page 33)..

• Ask: What is left out or unclear?

  • He does not talk about how prisoners tried to adapt to their confinement at Tanforan or the measures they took to “keep their spirits up.” That information is provided later in a third-person narrative with reported examples.

• Ask: Why might Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki have included this excerpt?

  • To show that what we can see with our eyes doesn’t tell the whole story, and even if the housing looked clean it may have still been disgusting; to show how Japanese Americans were treated as less than people.

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: How does the survivor’s perspective shape our understanding of individuals’ lives in the camps?

  • This survivor’s perspective reminds us that while people did their best to adapt to life in the camps, they were not happy about it. This is important because while we can admire the prisoners’ efforts to “keep their spirits up” and understand why Adams took so many cheerful-looking photographs, we should not confuse appearances of cheerfulness with real happiness and contentment. We should not assume that the prisoners were smiling all the time.

• Ask: What details make the experience feel real, and what is left unseen?

  • The mention of the stable’s horrible smell makes the experience feel real and reminds us that photographs only show what we can see. It helps us understand how “the government moved the horses out and put us in,” as if the people were treated as animals. What is left unseen in this excerpt is how climate and environment also affected living conditions at the camp and anything about whether this man was there on his own or with his family.

• Ask: How do these firsthand accounts differ from the government or press perspectives we studied in Investigation 1?

  • The government and press perspectives we studied in Investigation 1 did not talk about the prisoners’ suffering or how uncomfortable and disgusting the housing was. In fact, they often didn’t say where the people would live at all.

• Ask: What do you think the authors’ purpose might have been in including this quotation?

  • They may have wanted the reader to appreciate parts of the experience, like the smell, that they could not see in photographs or illustrations. They may have also wanted to include details that show the camps were like prisons; they may have felt the emotional language was powerful.

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

Quick Write

Say these Directions: Write two to three questions that you might ask a survivor if you could, based on what was said and not said in excerpts from Seen and Unseen.

• SAMPLE RESPONSE [reflecting on the survivor account on p. 33]: If I could interview this man, I would ask how long he had to live in the horse stables, how long he was in the camp, and what he did afterward.

Share that in the next lesson, students will be reading survivor story excerpts and comparing them to photos and illustrations. Instruct students to take notes in their Journal on the following prompt:

• Find examples in Seen and Unseen where both survivor testimony and images appear on the page. Write a brief description and the page numbers of your examples in your Journal.