MLK, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Information Literacy

What do Martin Luther King, Jr., Old Crow Medicine Show, and information literacy have in common?  A lot, if you use a multidisciplinary approach to teach fact verification and information seeking skills through music and technology.

I have always been a huge music fan and I've always loved all kinds of music.  Most often I'm drawn to a song because of the lyrics.  The first time I heard Old Crow Medicine Show's song "Motel in Memphis" - a song about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - I knew that I wanted to use it in a lesson someday, somehow. The song lyrics touched me in a way that made me see the assassination of this man in a way I had not before.  The mere words to the song brought a piece of history to life. I hoped it would do the same for my students - make them view the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a way that would provoke a new appreciation for his legacy and for the many reasons he is celebrated and recognized with a national holiday.

But I don't teach music and I don't teach history.  I am a media specialist.  I teach information literacy skills - how to locate information, how to evaluate information and authenticate sources, how to be responsible users of information, and how to learn from the information we find.  What could that possibly have in common with this song, the man, and the fact that we celebrate his life with a national holiday?  

Everything...if you go about it the right way.

I started with the song lyrics that had so moved me and thought about how, like myself, my students were not present when Martin Luther King was alive nor when he was so brutally murdered.  Like myself, those lyrics could bring new meaning to a part of history they had often heard about, but never experienced.  And so I did what I love to do and found a way to incorporate technology and music to teach a lesson about a great man using a thoughtful song with historically specific lyrics to engage my students in a information seeking/fact authentication and verification mission. 

I started by using "Motel in Memphis" as the background music for an Animoto photo montage video depicting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, assassination, and funeral. The lyrics to the song were printed on a worksheet for students.  Third and fourth grade students were asked five questions specific to facts in the lyrics and instructed to use research and fact verification skills to answer and/or verify the answer to those questions.  

I allowed a little more autonomy with my fifth-graders, asking them to use information from the lyrics to learn more about specific details illustrated by the song.  For example, one line from the song reads, "Were you there with Mahalia wailing at the funeral?"  Students were to use the information in that lyric to learn by using their research skills that the "Mahalia" referred to was Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer and friend of Dr. King, who sang at his funeral service.

Through both of these activities, students learned multiple cross-disciplinary lessons.

• They learned that music and music lyrics tell a story and that sometimes that story is a historically factual one.  
• They learned about a great man by starting from the day he was assassinated and working back through his life to discover detailed information about the equality and civil rights he fought for.

I used technology and music as tools to paint the picture for them and they used technology through online research to locate, verify, evaluate, and develop what I know was a greater understanding of the history and the man.

But most importantly, they used their own natural curiosity and inquisitive behavior as a catalyst for responsible information seeking and fact verification. 

What I learned was that I wasn't alone in being touched by the song, I wasn't the only one to see history from a different perspective because of it's lyrics, and that given the opportunity to interpret factual and artistic expression through music lyrics, students were led to not only find and verify the factual information, but also to dig even deeper to satisfy their personal curiosity about the facets of this particular history that most fascinated them.