Cultural Quilt

After reading Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," a timeless story about family dynamics, southern African American tradition, and cultural exploration, students are able to research the historical signficance of quilting and create their own quilt, highlighting their own culture and lived experiences. Some students will have a real-life quilt they can share about, but most will be somewhat detached from the historical tradition and meaning of quilting. Bringing in their home traditions, cultural backgrounds, and understanding of themselves, students can engage in a creative act as they put together a digital quilt. Any mobile device and countless apps can be used to create a digital quilt. And if all else fails, offer your students a blank sheet of paper and some crayons! The description below asks students to follow a specific iOS workflow, making use of Keynote, Clips, and Pages, to end up with a digital book that showcases the quilt and tells the story of the pieces of the quilt. You'll see most of the examples below are just the quilts themselves.

The Activity

Quilting has a long history of family celebration, preservation of history, and the telling of family story and history. A family quilt can be a metaphor for culture and family history. It is time to create your own quilt. Think about your own family cultural history and create a digital quilt. Start in Keynote and add picture and drawings. Export the slides as a movie and import to Clips. Add music and effects. Export the Clips video into Pages. Add text describing your quilt and the significance of each piece and export as a digital book (ePub).