The Underground Railrod

The Underground Abductor is a book about Harriet Tubman. This famous woman from American history is most famous for her work as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, a network of houses and people that helped slaves escape enslavement in the South to free states in the North or Canada. While to us today, this work doesn't seem too risky or groundbreaking, it was in fact an incredibly dangerous and very illegal job. Harriet was an escaped slave herself, so if she had been caught during one of her many trips South to help runaways, she would have been put back into bondage or even worse, killed.

This week in class, we discussed the idea of freedom. this word is thrown around a lot throughout history, but we rarely stop to think how different its meaning is across time and places. One task we did this week was explore our expectations of freedom in Taiwan and contrast those with the expectations of slaves escaping to the North. Our discussion was rich and enlightening, and I was happy to see the kids understand the difference between our expectations today and those of escaped slaves. Feel free to view their comments in the slideshow here.

Finally, I tasked the kids with learning more about the Underground Railroad using Scholastic's excellent online resource here. Students were tasked with reading through this resource and completing a handout to learn more about the Underground Railroad. These can be seen below. I have also included a very helpful video about the Underground Railroad to the right.