ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how students learn about and develop perspectives when working with multiple sources in disciplinary classrooms. This chapter begins with a proposal for considering multiple facets of perspective learning, involving acknowledging, comparing, and co-constructing perspectives. It situates these perspective-learning processes in a historical literacy task environment that engages students in an examination of multiple historical sources. The chapter explores the nature of students’ perspective learning within a series of classroom vignettes in which students used competing perspectives and consulted multiple sources in an investigation into their local area and its history. It draws on specific moments of classroom discourse from a research project conducted with 8th graders in an urban school, which examined student learning within a multisource task environment designed to promote disciplinary practices of historical reading, writing, and thinking. The chapter concludes with a discussion of observations of student engagement in this literacy task and suggestions about possible considerations for designing classroom environments that support perspective learning.
