Thursday, January 22, 2015
(Blog Post 2) History Texts: What are they? How do we understand them?
A multitude of texts can be used in the study of history. Most of them are broke down into the following two categories: Primary and secondary sources. Primary sources can include anything from diaries, letters, and speeches to novels, photos and videos, as long as they come from the time under study. Secondary sources are also valuable texts in the history classroom and include resources that analyze or interprets a historical event.
In order to properly understand some history texts, students need to have some previous knowledge of ideas and terms. Before diving into historical texts, a teacher should make sure that students understand concepts like bias, purpose, and audience. Teachers also need to address any unfamiliar vocabulary that my be present in the reading.
Unfortunately, I do not have many memories of my pre-college educational classrooms, so I will discuss some techniques use by one of my favorite history professors.
In one of my history classrooms, we were learning about the industrial revolution, laissez-faire policies, and immigrant workers. For one of our sources on the time period, we were assigned to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The professor did an excellent job of pairing this text with other activities. He front loaded the unit with lectures/discussions, vocab, KWL, and note outlines. In our discussions, we talked about current politics and the role of government in business.
These discussions triggered some of our previous knowledge and gave us a starting point for our lectures. I was impressed with how the teacher was able to quickly discuss some important vocab terms. It is important to not only understand the terms, but also how they are used in the media you are studying.
The professor also paired our main reading with other texts including videos of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, documents of labor complaints, and lectures.
By engaging in proper scaffolding activities, I was able to develop a deep understanding of the text, and I was able to analyze the time period and take away enduring understandings.
I will use some of these strategies along with others from the Buehl text, in order to make sure that my students are learning how to read through a history lens.
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Hi, James! Nice blog post. I especially like the way that you shared all of the preparatory activities that your professor executed prior to sharing the Upton Sinclair novel. I think that successful teaching is a lot like successful painting...it's all in the preparation. If you rush into teaching a concept without properly preparing students with they tools they will need to succeed, you will get a crappy result. I know that you will do a great job of providing support to your students along their education adventure. They are lucky to have a teacher who cares so much about their achievement!
ReplyDeleteJames,
ReplyDeleteI really like what you had to say about primary ad secondary documents. I agree that it is an important concept for students to be able to differentiate between the two. I also really like what you said about students understanding bias, purpose, and audience when reading history texts. Although I will be teaching theatre, we use historical texts a lot to do research about the plays we read/produce. It will also be important for my students to understand these same concepts about history texts so that their research can be effective. I hope that in the school I teach in, the students will have learned this from someone like their history teacher, but it is necessary that I know how to teach them that too, since many of our subjects overlap. Thanks for your insight!
Hi James,
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you had that professor! I think your posting highlights one weakness of the Buehl text. He focuses more on how to help students understand an individual text, but I like your point that sometimes you can help students understand ONE text (e.g., the Jungle) through asking them to read other texts related to the time period. I like how your professor provided an example of frontloading. To me, the "Guided Imagery" activity in the Buehl book would be perfect to introduce "The Jungle." You could show a picture of a food processing plant interior, then ask students to close their eyes and lead them through a guided scene as though they were workers in that processing plant. If I were a teenager, I would be eager to read excerpts from the book after imagining for myself what conditions were like.
Thanks for your posting!
I really enjoyed how you said that it was through the classroom discussion that you were able to remember your previous knowledge on the subject. I think that is an amazing thing to be able to do as a teacher is to help your students to remember past knowledge and be able to put it to use in your classroom. I also think it is amazing that your teacher was able to pair the text with activities. That is the way that I learn so I think it is amazing.
ReplyDeleteI love that you mention how teachers need to address unfamiliar vocabulary in the reading. In math if a student doesn't understand the wording, they will get completly lost. It's so important that we help our students understand the text before we teach it so that they can understand the content.
ReplyDeleteI think activities are a great idea, especially in history because it is sometimes hard to hold students' attention. One thing that worked really well for me in History classes was historical novels or things written by the person. It was much easier for me to learn from first hand sources. I am in a class right now that is studying the lives of famous scientists and I love it because we read first hand accounts to major scientific events and we read books written by the scientists. It is much more interesting to me that way.
ReplyDeleteI like how you mentioned that sometimes it can be difficult for students to learn when they don't understand some of the terms and words in the text. I think it is important that the teacher points these out amid helps the student to focus more on the reading instead of words they don't understand. I also like how your professor pairs the texts with the activities. It really helps the students gain a better understanding of the texts.
ReplyDelete