Blog Post #3

This week’s readings and class had a strong emphasis on the use of historical sources in the classroom to promote historical, analytical, and multi-dimensional thinking. When I think about my own experience with primary sources, I do not look on the memories fondly. I think about droning on about documents that I did not understand and frankly, did not care to. They seemed antiquated and I had a hard time deriving meaning from the somewhat foreign and decodable language in front of me. Most of my teachers did not offer much assistance in truly grasping the meaning of these sources. We merely scanned them and they told us what they were used for or we filled out monotonous and meaningless worksheets. In all honesty, Tuesday’s class period brought me back to this. As much as I understood the occasional need to go slowly through Social Studies material, I found myself staring at the clock just waiting for the lesson to end. I was not engaged enough and the worksheet and readings were far too repetitive.

The one positive experience I recall from my own years as a middle and high school Social Studies student relating to the use of primary sources takes me back to the seventh grade in Mrs. Cromley’s classroom. I believed that she used primary and secondary sources in a way that truly made me think critically and analytically about what was in front of me. Every day, each pair of students in the class of twelve was given newspaper articles from that day in history. We then had to present on articles we found interesting and compare and contrast with things we see in the news today. While studying the Industrial Revolution, we would look at photographs of the factories and the conditions and did an online simulation that put us in the role of a child in the pictures. We then wrote a reflective essay about our experience.

The articles we read and videos we watched also presented a lot of helpful and important points regarding history, historical thinking, and the use of primary and secondary sources. Something that was mentioned multiple times was the need for varying points of view when analyzing primary sources. I think this is key because it shows that there is no “one, true history” and that each document or painting that we look at has an audience in mind and a message they are trying to portray. I want to make sure that my students think critically about biases in the sources presented to them so that they can make their minds up for themselves. I want to facilitate individual and independent thinking processes. I also found it interesting in the “Think Historically” article that kids as young as 7 can begin to engage in source work. The final thing that really stood out to me was the point made that we should present our students with accounts from young people and children of that time period not only to create points of comparison with their own lives but also to give a perspective that is more easily accessible for them than that of a 45 year old working man.