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