Communicating Like Revolutionary Spies

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the STEMSS Team for their support and knowledge while creating this lesson. I have immense respect for the cartographer on staff who was able to create a map plotting George Washington’s correspondence. I would also like to thank all of the fabulous students at Ypsilanti High School for inspiring me to create a messy geography lesson!

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Notes on contributors

Katherine Shafer

I currently teach in Michigan. I teach geography in all my classes because I also have a large English learner population. I love discussing cultures with my students and hearing the vivid descriptions they have from their home countries. We work to incorporate these discussions while reading our stories in class and looking at maps and pictures of the areas discussed.

I have always loved the sense of place that students discover as their world expands. From small community beginnings, to travel and new lands that often come when families move or children grow up, my students are forever reaching out, discov­ering new connections to other cultures and communities they did not know before. That sense of a broadening worldview is an opportunity to build bridges between education and budding minds. It is this connection that I seek to develop with my students.

We had a portrait of President Washington hanging in my classroom of Arabic students. Some of them knew who he was, but most did not. Knowing that many of my students were into playing games of intrigue, I decided to develop a lesson sur­rounding George Washington’s spy network. I had joined the STEMSS program the prior year. My relationship with geography deepened while connecting with my peers as I discussed how teachers and students were learning. I saw a bond forming between how we travel and migrate and who we become as a population because of it. Before STEMSS, I thought of geography in terms of places and locations. After participating in STEMSS, the lines of connection branched out from me to my students, to their families and beyond, like so many bright stars across the globe. When I imagined George Washington and his spies trav­eling across dark landscapes, desperately carrying their messages for freedom, and my students engaged in trying to decipher just what that message was, those stars of connection traveled through time to land on the edge of the bank where one young spy had gently pinned a red shirt on the clothesline to communicate her desperate message. My students were there to see it.