This Social Studies lesson took my class of 35 sixth-graders two 55-minute class periods to complete. I also used slides and materials from the DIA to prepare for our field trip, which took place after the classroom project.

The lesson on Diego Rivera was presented to middle school students near the end of the school year. Introducing students to Rivera after a year of basic social studies was in some respects an advantage for them. They were better equipped to make sense of who Rivera was, the significance of his painting, and where he traveled during his life by drawing on information they had been taught in the subject areas of government, history, economics, and geography.

For example, as students were introduced to Rivera, they learned that he was born in a small town in Mexico in 1886 and left Mexico when he was 22 years old to study art in Europe for several years. He visited Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. He worked on mural projects in San Francisco and New York City as well as Detroit. He returned to Mexico and painted many murals. They also learned that Rivera made several trips to what was then communist Russia. Their previous studies of government systems in the world - such as democracy, socialism, communism, totalitarianism, monarchies - helped familiarize them with the kinds of government systems that existed in Rivera's native Mexico and the countries in which he lived, worked, and visited: Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. What most came to understand was that there are government systems that operate in ways very different from the one we have in the United States.

Students also learned that there are different economic systems (ways of doing business) throughout the world. Through their ten-week study of economics, students learned that the United States and much of western Europe has a democratic form of government and a "free market" economy often referred to as capitalism; that the old Soviet Union operated under an economic system known as "socialism"; and that since 1949, China has embraced a government and economic system known as "communism".

Finally, ten weeks of work in the area of geography (which included the study of longitude, latitude, map legends, and locating and labeling continents and countries) made students more familiar with the locations, climates, and natural resources of the countries where Rivera lived, worked, and traveled.

In addition to information about Diego Rivera students used the following resources:

Art Explorations: Mexican Folk Art. MacMillan McGraw-Hill School Publishing Company, 1992.

Emerging Mexico. National Geographic Special Issue, Volume 190, Number 2, August 1996.
This 22-minute video focused on the culture of the Mexican people as expressed through art, religions practices, traditions, foods, etc.

Geography: The World and Its People. Glenco McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Our social studies text book. Information about the geography of Mexico and the other American nations was helpful in preparing class lectures.