Exploring Historical Texts in a Discussion-Based Class

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Learning from Others: Learning in a Social Context from Annenberg Media is a video made up of two sections, the second half of which documents the practice of Avram Barlowe, a high school history teacher at the Urban Academy in New York City. (Go to Session 7 and view video from 13:58–25:55.) This video provides examples of two promising practices:

  • Helping students use textual evidence to support their claims
  • Leading a productive discussion in the history classroom by asking open-ended questions and restating student answers
Black Codes

The subject for the class discussion is a set of discriminatory Southern laws known as Black Codes. The laws were passed by Southern state legislatures in the wake of the Civil War and reflected the efforts of former Confederates to reassert control over the recently emancipated black population.

Returning Students to the Text

The classroom discussion is grounded in primary sources. Students are asked to look at examples of Black Codes and answer the following questions:

  • What were the laws designed to do?
  • How might such laws be defended by the people who wrote them?

Having asked students to form interpretations based on these texts, the instructor is diligent about reminding students to return to the texts during their discussion. "Let's look at what the law says," he instructs at one point, reinforcing his desire that they work with the evidence to develop their ideas.

Leading Discussion

A major part of managing a successful class discussion, this video makes clear, is asking open-ended questions that students can answer in a variety of ways. This approach makes the class discussion more accessible for all students and can engage them in using evidence to support their claims. The instructor in this classroom also works to put students in conversation with each other. He does this by restating and clarifying the claims made by students, as well as by pointing out areas of agreement and disagreement in their comments.

What's Notable?

Discussions are a common feature in many history classrooms. What makes this class unique, though, is the approach taken by the instructor. First, the video documents the practice of consistently returning students to the text in discussions, asking them to use evidence to support their claims. Second, it reveals a successful approach to promoting deeper historical understanding by asking open-ended questions and restating student answers.

Opening Up the Textbook: Rosa Parks

Teaser

The textbook is examined as one source among many, rather than a final authority.

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Description

Using a textbook passage and two primary sources, this lesson engages students in using historical evidence in order to critique a textbook passage. In this way, it also allows teachers to introduce the textbook as one source among many, rather than the final word on historical events.

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This easy-to-follow lesson cuts to the heart of historical thinking. Its strength is that it requires students to go to the sources in order to develop historical knowledge. Not only does it show students how public memory and history textbooks can oversimplify complex events, it gives students the means to craft their own textbook passage by drawing on specific textual evidence, including sources that contradict one another.

The simplicity and clarity of the lesson make it ideal for introducing both historical thinking in general and the Civil Rights Movement specifically. More experienced teachers may chafe at the lesson's tight structure—so, they can create their own lesson by using the website's multiple resources regarding the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Of the two suggested writing assignments, Prompt One, which asks students to rewrite a standard textbook account, is particularly good. Prompt Two asks students to take a position for or against using a standard textbook. While this may prompt students to consider the implications of the traditional Rosa Parks story, it is also problematic. Would it be possible for a student to argue for and still receive a good grade?

Topic
Montgomery Bus Boycott and Civil Rights
Time Estimate
One hour
flexibility_scale
5
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes Current historians highlight both Parks's training as an activist and the fact that she was part of a broad, well-organized movement in Montgomery.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

No The point of the lesson is to look at students' and textbooks' assumptions about Rosa Parks, and so the lesson purposefully does not offer extra background. However, resources are available at the website.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes The lesson includes reading one secondary and two primary sources. Teachers can choose from two suggested writing assignments.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes Students create their own interpretation, and they question a textbook interpretation.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes Through looking closely at sources, students arrive at a complex understanding of events.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes The lesson is appropriate for high school students and with modifications could be used with younger students.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes If analysis stalls, teachers could prod students to look at the documents' dates and to identify the contradictions among the documents.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No Assessment strategies are included, but not assessment criteria.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes The lesson states its goals, and it progresses in a logical, linear fashion.

National Register of Historic Places Travel Itineraries

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San Francisco during World War II, Mississippi's Indian Mounds, and Cumberland, Maryland, are just three of the more than 50 cities, towns, and rivers across the U.S. to which this website provides virtual access. In Baltimore, Maryland, a clickable map allows users to wander from the USCGC Taney (the last surviving warship present at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941) docked at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, to the house where Edgar Allen Poe lived in the mid-1830s, to the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District to learn about Baltimore's oldest public market still in operation, and on to 40 more sites around the city. Each landmark is introduced with photographs, brief essays providing historical context, and tourist information.

Some travel itineraries are grouped by theme. For example, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement presents information on Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School, Virginia's Robert Moton High School, and the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Many of these sites includes links to lesson plans in NPS's Teaching With Historic Places. Updated regularly, this website is useful for teachers, students, and tourists alike.

Race and Place

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This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

Picturing America

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Twenty-seven iconic images in American history are presented here, designed specifically to encourage educators to use images as primary source documents in the classroom. The images range in time from 17th-century depictions of the Catholic mission in San Antonio to the contemporary art of Washington, DC native Martin Puryear.

Also included are the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, "Washington Crossing the Delaware," and Hiram Powers's statue of Benjamin Franklin, as well as works by artists such as Grant Wood, George Catlin, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Edward Hopper, and by photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. All images are accompanied by a brief annotation providing historical context, a biography of the artist, and a list of online resources offering further contextual information, lesson plans, and classroom activities. Images enlarge to fullscreen and are searchable by artist and by theme: Leadership, Freedom & Equality, Democracy, Courage, Landscapes, and Creativity & Ingenuity.

Using Maps as Primary Sources

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This website shows a 4th-grade teacher in northern Virginia teaching a lesson focused on a map drawn by John Smith that was published in 1612. Source Analysis, a feature created for the Loudoun County (Virginia) (TAH) website, has three sections focused on this primary source: scholar analysis, teacher analysis, and classroom practice. The latter two sections show a standards-based lesson that asks students to answer the question: What is important to John Smith? The teacher carefully plans activities so students look closely at the map and consider how this primary source helps them answer the central question. The site provides examples of two promising practices:

  • Engaging young students in close, careful observation and reading of a primary source document (using student pairs and a comparative document); and
  • Using students' observations to inform and guide analysis and connect the source to larger questions and topics in the curriculum.
The Lesson in Action

In the Classroom Practice section, we see the lesson in action. The teacher introduces the lesson question and then takes time to ensure that students understand the question by introducing synonyms for "important" and reviewing word meanings. She passes out the maps to assigned student pairs and asks them, "What do you see?" Students have time to look carefully at the map and notice words (e.g., "Jamestown" and "Powhatan"), the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, living structures, trees, how particular words vary in size and spacing, and so on. The teacher further facilitates the students' observation by juxtaposing the 1612 map with a contemporary textbook map of the same region. This juxtaposition helps students see the choices John Smith made in drawing this map that they might have missed without the comparative source. The teacher then uses what students notice about these maps to help them think about what the details and differences mean. Students start to identify what was important to John Smith and subsequently to the Virginia Company, given the evidence in front of them. Throughout this instruction, the teacher uses feedback, a logical sequencing of activities, and clear and accessible questions to ensure access to the learning activities for all of her students.

Thinking Like Historians

This teacher shows how carefully structured lessons that use primary sources can engage students in the process of thinking like historians. Students slow down and carefully read and look at the map, noticing things that they might otherwise have missed. They then consider what the contents of the map mean and what the map tells us about John Smith and the Virginia Company's worldview. The 1612 map becomes a window into the past that only reveals its slice of the landscape with close reading. Also on this site is a Teacher Analysis section in which the teacher explains some of what preceded this lesson and her instructional choices—a useful complement to the classroom videos. Each of these sections presents information in a set of videos that are clearly titled and visually interesting.

The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

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In 1939, John Lomax, Curator of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, and his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax, embarked on a 6,500-mile journey through the South. During their travels, they recorded more than 700 folk tunes that now are available as audio files on this website. Genres include ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, spirituals, and work songs.

The site also presents field notes containing personal information on some of the more than 300 performers the Lomaxes recorded, notes on geography and culture, and excerpts from correspondence. More than 50 letters to and from the Lomaxes, 380 photographs, a bibliography of 22 works, and a map are also offered. The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject as well as title, song text, and performer.

Virtual Jamestown

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This is a good place to begin exploring the history of Jamestown. The site includes over 60 letters and firsthand accounts from 1570 to 1720 on voyages, settlements, Bacon's Rebellion, and early history. More than 100 public records, such as census data and laws; 55 maps and images; and a registry of servants sent to plantations from 1654 to 1686 complete the site.

Virtual Jamestown also includes records from 1607 to 1815 of Christ's Hospital in England, where orphans were trained to apprentice in the colonies. There are four interactive virtual recreations. The reference section includes a timeline from 1502 to the present, narratives by prominent historians, links to 20 related sites, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The Complete Works of John Smith and John Smith's Map of Virginia have recently been added to the site, while 3D recreations of Jamestown's Statehouse and Meetinghouse as well as an archive of Virginia's first Africans are being added.

Reclaiming the Everglades: South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934

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This archive contains primary and secondary sources relating to reclamation efforts of the Everglades and the history of south Florida from 1884 to 1934. Comprising nearly 10,000 pages and images, the compilation includes personal correspondence; government publications, reports, and memos; and images, such as photographs, maps, and postcards. Materials document issues relating to the creation of national parks, including conflicting interests—public, private individual, and corporate—and government accountability.

The website also presents a photo exhibit, "The Everglades: Exploitation and Conservation," accompanied by a 1,000-word essay. Two additional features, an interactive timeline and 31 biographies of South Florida's most notable personalities, complete this project. This site will be of interest for those exploring the establishment of the Everglades National Park, the conservation movement, and the treatment of Native Americans, particularly the Seminoles.

Selected Civil War Photographs

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More than 1,000 photographs depict Civil War military personnel, preparations for battle, and the aftermath of battles in the main eastern theater and in the west in this collection. Photographs also include Federal Navy and Atlantic seaborne expeditions against the Confederacy, Confederate and Union officers and enlisted soldiers, and Washington, DC during the war. Most images were created under the supervision of photographer Mathew B. Brady. Additional photographs were taken by Alexander Gardner after leaving Brady's employment to start his own business.

The presentation "Timeline of the Civil War" places images in historical context. "Does the Camera Ever Lie" demonstrates the constructed nature of images, showing that photographers sometimes rearranged elements of their images to achieve a particular effect. This website is useful for studying 19th-century American photography and Civil War history.