“I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.”
— Attributed to John Jacob Astor IV after the Titanic hit an iceberg.
Everything about the Titanic was enormous. The contents of the kitchen alone illustrates the scale: its pantries contained 40 tons of potatoes, 40,000 fresh eggs, and 36,000 apples, enough food to feed the approximately 2,220 people on board. When disaster struck, it was also on an epic scale. Of those 2,220 people, only 712 survived. Digging into the survivors’ statistics is revealing. You discover that 62% were First Class passengers while 25% were in Third Class, and 75% of the survivors were female. Two dogs, both in First Class, also survived. The complex and nuanced story of the Titanic provides a compelling subject for students as they examine primary source documents and conduct independent research to uncover what really happened on that night in 1912.
In the lessons on information literacy that begin the unit, students learn how to tell the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, determine if a source is reliable, and understand the ethical uses of information. Having practiced these skills, students are ready to develop and sharpen their sourcing abilities in the next lessons, where they construct their own research questions and explore the Internet for answers.
In subsequent lessons, each student is assigned a passenger from the Titanic’s manifest. They consider gender and class issues as they research and write narrative accounts from the point of view of their passengers. This lesson informs the next sub-unit, a Socratic Seminar in which students rely on their research to examine the complicated issues inherent in the Titanic story.
As students reach the end of the unit, they synthesize all of the skills they’ve developed to tackle a culminating research assignment: a part essay, part multimedia project.
The Titanic Collection
EXTRA: “The Harvest Of The Sea (On the sinking of the Titanic)” by Charles Hanson Towne
EXTRA: Excerpt from the British Government report submitted to US Senate on April 15, 1912: “The Third-Class Passengers”
Topic & Theme: The lives and experiences of the Titanic passengers
Reading: Compare and contrast perspectives on a single event
Writing: Develop a question, conduct research, and create a multimedia project
Activity Highlights: Research and role-play a Titanic passenger and write from their point of view
Text Features: Compelling artifacts from voyage (menus, journals), letters, photographs
Some of the subject matter in the texts in this unit discusses classism and discrimination regarding how third-class passengers were treated before and during the Titanic disaster.