Background
In the United States, the famed highway Route 66 that runs from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California, is celebrating its Centennial. Official highway routes were adopted by the United States Systems of Highways on November 11, 1926. You’ll find some history from the official Route 66 site (The Route 66 Centennial) and a fun blog from the Library of Congress (The Mother Road Trip- Route 66 History and Activities).
Challenge Based Learning
Even with unique topics such as a centennial, the Challenge Based Learning framework provides an engaging student-driven approach that helps learners creatively dig deeper into important history content. I've suggested a Challenge Based Learning outline below but have your students brainstorm their own. Route 66 is famous for many things (including neon signs)!
🟢 Engage
Big Idea: Travel Routes
Essential question: As we recognize the Route 66 Centennial, how do we tell its diverse and complex stories?
The Challenge: Create a public-facing digital artifact, exhibition proposal, or community resource that captures the "hidden histories" or contrasting realities of Route 66 over the last century.
🟡 Investigate
In the Investigate phase of CBL, students might form groups, each group tackling a specific angle of the challenge. Students guide their investigation by generating guiding questions, activities, and formulating analysis. Investigative topics might include:
Geographic Identity and Roadside Culture - Use Numbers with AI to chart by state all the towns along the Route. Verify by using Apple Maps and see what artifacts, signs or buildings remain. Create travel posters in Pages to highlight locations or insert primary sources to Keynote to recreate, via animation, the flashing neon that pointed to lodges, restaurants and tourist highlights. To find photos to posterize or animate, a listing of photographer Carol M. Highsmith public domain photos can be found in the Library of Congress.
Civil Rights Along the Highway - Investigate the recommendations of The Green Book, a historic guidebook for African-American travelers published from 1936 to 1967 during the Jim Crow era. The Green Book outlined safe lodging, businesses, gas stations that would cater equally to all travelers. Use Apple Maps to outline which stretches of Route 66 were welcome to all.
Migrants of the Dust Bowl - Follow the footsteps John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath describes during hard times along the route (lesson idea from the Library of Congress). “The Mother Road”, so named in the novel, captured the stories of the Dust Bowl Migration. Use Notes to download images, organize research and collect the historic field stories told by migrant workers. Research and analyze primary source images of travel along the route during the Dust Bowl.
🔵 Act
Students create solutions that answer their challenge. They might include:
Podcasts or written travel logs using GarageBand or Pages creating a historically accurate story of travel on Route 66 during a selected period of time.
Centennial dual-sided postcards created in Keynote. The front mimics vintage travel posters and the back features primary source quotes or data reflecting the reality of a specific town’s history along the road.
Centennial museum exhibit with a curated collection featuring primary source images. Exhibit includes student-written curator notes explaining the deeper historical context of the selected items. A traveling virtual museum can be output in Keynote or iMovie for a community presentation on the history of Route 66.
⚫️ Reflect
Wrap up the CBL experience by having students write or record via Voice Memos, a reflection on the learning process and the lessons learned. They document their process as they digitally travel, explore and share their experiences on Route 66.
A couple of tips…
If your town or city is along “The Mother Road”, contact city councils and local historical societies for information and stories - and include your CBL in the local centennial celebration of the Route.
You might want to spark your lesson by playing this YouTube 🎶 (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 - Nat King Cole.
#Route66 #CBL
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