Lit Review: America's History Through Young Voices

Despite the book's focus on the American curriculum (for which I have few primary sources), America's History Through Young Voices: Using Primary Sources in the K-12 Social Studies Classroom (2005) was extremely helpful to me. The book gives great explanations about primary, historical sources before discussing the five historical thinking concepts used in the United States. The following chapters each focus on one aspect of the K-12 curriculum, giving context about the content, reproducing parts of a young person's primary source, and providing questions or assignments modeled on the historical thinking concepts. Richard M. Wyman Jr. provides a resource that is practical and adaptable to any classroom.

Propaganda Posters get some mileage - and great attention

The Class

One of my favourite assignments was developed by an Education professor and me specifically for her class. The Archives has over 80 World War One recruitment, war bond, and Canada Food Board posters available both originally and digitally for our students. This assignment makes the most of the posters, relating them directly to the grade-school curriculum and using them as a teaching tool.

We bring the students to the Archives for a workshop with the posters. Using a few examples that I have pre-selected, the students work through the questions on their assignment as a practice run. The assignment is two-fold: one, the students answer questions from the perspective of students taking a secondary school history class; and, two, the students put together a lesson plan from the perspective of a teacher for that history class. Both the original and the digital posters are used in the assignment. (Here is the address for the posters: http://openarchive.acadiau.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/ww1posters)

The Conference

In October 2013, this assignment was the basis of a presentation made by the professor and me at the Nova Scotia Teachers Union conference for the Social Studies Teachers Association. Our presentation discussed the method for creating the assignment, the lesson plan, and the material needed. We also provided advice for practicing teachers who may want to adopt a similar assignment. Some attendees were former students who had done the assignment a few years ago and could speak from personal experience. I hope that more teachers will find these posters a helpful tool for instruction.

Note: An excellent secondary source to accompany the propaganda posters assignment is Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped a Nation by Francis Daniel (2011).

Lit Review: Doing History

I just spent a few weeks reading the 4^th edition of Doing History (2011) by Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Baton. It took a while to read because of my extensive note-taking and section re-reading. Even though the focus of the book is on elementary and middle school students, the techniques can easily be adapted to higher grades and undergraduates. For me, a person without any background in education, sections of the book helped explain educational theory as it assists in the development of practical applications in the classroom and assignments. (In this regard, Chapter Two was especially helpful.) The book emphasizes these goals to drive instruction, as specified on page 9: ‘to prepare students for reaching conclusions based on evidence; to engage students in deliberations over the common good; and, to understand perspectives different than their own’. To do this, Doing History provides many examples of critical thinking assignments as well as the required assessment tools. All of the assignments demonstrate why studying the past is relevant to understanding the present by making global/local connections, finding themes, creating new ways to represent the past, and/or creating questions and doing the research to find answers.

My favourite example from the book is a chapter about building a history museum because it relates directly to a class that I teach. Now, I have some new ideas to incorporate. I feel that Doing History has a number of techniques that I can use to pull together my archives sessions and make them more effective for students.

Note: Don't have enough to read???  Three books that were also recommended to me are: Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts ; Reading Like a Historian ; and, Why Don't You Just Tell Us the Answer