ABSTRACT
I opened this book with the story of Ms. Cordova walking through the social studies department at McArthur Middle School observing a variety of teaching methods including lecture, textbook reading, recitation, and the showing of documentary videos. She saw something different, however, in Mr. Rich’s classroom, where students sifted through a variety of forms of evidence trying to determine whether child labor in factories was worse than child labor on family farms. A quick review of the vignettes across the chapters of this book shows other teachers, like Mr. Rich, helping students use evidence to answer interpretive historical questions. For instance, the 10th grade students in Mrs. Hansen’s class used primary and secondary source accounts of the Crusades to decide whether the crusaders were motivated primarily by religious factors. Miss Anderson’s 8th grade students used a historical novel and primary sources to gain a deeper appreciation for the historical context of the Civil Rights Movement – to understand how White people and Black people interacted as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Mr. Erikson’s 11th-grade students used census records to identify and explore patterns of immigration to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. And Mrs. Francis’ students used tree rings, ruins of dwellings, and other artifacts to consider the changing culture of the Ancestral Pueblo people. In this chapter I highlight a pattern followed by the innovative teachers described in the vignettes throughout this book in the planning and execution of lessons. The pattern involves four stages: a) the selection of objectives, b) the selection of texts, c) a determination of the support and instruction that students need to use the texts, and d) the execution of the lessons. I conclude the chapter with a few other practical suggestions for getting started in building students’ historical literacies.
