Teaching The Jungle and Food Today

As I said in an earlier post, I do not like to teach a topic that I cannot connect to events today for my students.  One of the important units I like to do, because it is very relevant, is a look at Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.  You can find an online version of the text, but you can go to my resources section and find a copy of the chapters I use with my class.

The novel is quite long, and I do not use the entire text.  I select chapters from the novel (special thanks to Meg Guanci and Brian Deveney for helping me select) and use it to teach students about:

• the time period--1900s
• the disadvantages the working class had
• the way immigrants were treated
• the "American Dream" and what really happened
• food at the time
• industrialization and the ideas of scientific management

We get through the early chapters and I ask students to create their own discussion questions.  You can see example student generated discussion questions on my resource page and then I like to show them the film from California KPBS called Food: A Project Envision Documentary.  I know that there are other films, like Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation but this documentary covers a great deal of material in 27 minutes and it connects to my students in the San Diego area.  

You can spend anywhere from three class periods on this topic to a project that could take four weeks.  Notice this-- no textbook readings! 

~John