Reading this book was like striking g-o-l-d. The entire book was useful and interesting--full of good stuff. Much of the text has an immediate use for my own research. Even more of the text gave me ideas to incorporate into my online Archival Research Guide.
Laurel Schmidt's Social Studies That Sticks: How to Bring Content and Concepts to Life (2007) is aimed at American educators in the K-12 classroom. But, the "content and concepts" featured in this text can easily be adapted for undergraduates. In fact, a few sections in this book apply to sessions that I am constructing for History, Education, and Nutrition.
All of the chapters follow a similar pattern. Each has a section about assignment objectives, assessing prior knowledge on a topic, sources that can be used in an assignment, sample questions to ask of sources, methods of digging deeper into evidence, examples of applications of an assignment, and assessing the actual learning that took place. I was especially excited to go through the sections about biography, objects, and propaganda. The detection of bias in records and in the researcher is explored and provides links to online tests for bias detection. The book strongly supports incorporating textual records, visual records, and literary works not only to build context but to strengthen examples used in the classroom.
