and then the Archivist came to class...
"What's going on over there? Everyone is talking about the archives!" Helping students understand the potential of primary documents to enhance their research skills and their findings--that's what I do. This blog will document my journey of discovery as I develop and deliver archival information literacy sessions.
WARNING: The use of archives can improve your health.
Extend the boundaries. Explore original documents. Experience the past. Excite your inner-archivist.
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014
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.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Propaganda Posters get some mileage - and great attention
The Class
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).
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).
Friday, January 24, 2014
Lit Review: Doing History
I just spent a
few weeks reading the 4th 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
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
Thursday, December 19, 2013
An unexpected visit
My final class of the
year was with a small group of high school students. Their teacher had been in
one of my sessions when she was a student and wanted to bring some of her
students to the Archives. Yeah! This is one of my goals for doing sessions with
B.Ed. students.
I divided the allotted
time into a combination of looking at records related to their curriculum, interesting
books from Special Collections, and a tour of Archives and Special Collections.
The exercises with archival documents were very short, asking only two questions
about the content and allowing for some discussion time. I also gave them some information
about the process of research. During the tour, I had laid out a few documents
that I thought would catch their interest.
It all went very well.
The documents and books that I selected did make an impact on them. They took pictures of the material they used. The group
stayed longer than expected and had lots of questions during the tour. Indeed,
we all learned a lot.Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Where Did You Say You Came From?
During the summer, the
prof of Canadian Immigration History and I discussed a number of ideas for the
class session in September. We agreed on using the Archives to help the
students practice for an oral history assignment. Who better to practice
interview skills, I thought, than with dead people? There are both similarities
and (significant) differences.
The session was
divided into three parts: interviewing dead people, blind dating, and moving
beyond the records. I brought in a few secondary sources about oral history to
wave around during the session so that students knew they could get lots of
help in the Library.
First up—an interview
with a dead person, J.F. Herbin to be exact. You can find a similar lesson plan
here (http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2012/07/counting-canadians.html
; for this class I did a modified version). We spent close to 30 minutes going
through this guided example. I tell the students a few details about the
individual and then quiz them about other sources of information. As students
brainstorm a source, like a newspaper, I encourage them by giving out a copy of
the newspaper and asking for details from that source. Every student gets a
source to explore. In the end, we all have a piece of the puzzle and as a group
put together the person’s life. This first part of the class demonstrated to
the students what they needed to do during the following two parts.
Next was blind dating
to give the students an opportunity to practice doing background research with
archival records. Four groups of records had been pre-selected for this class,
all related to immigration. Normally, I set out records and the students sit
randomly at tables without knowing what records are there. But, I did something
unusual this time; I told the students about the records that were on each
table so they could choose to work with ones of interest to them and they chose
where to sit. We spent 30 minutes looking at the records, doing critical
analysis of them. The groups were given a sheet of critical analysis questions
that I developed from Social Studies that Sticks by Laurel Schmidt
(2007). They were asked to select one set of the questions and use them as a
jumping-point to find major themes within the records, build categories of key
concepts found in the records, and look for what is missing from the records. Each
student in the group worked independently to prepare for the next part of the
session.
Part three, moving
beyond the records, was to prepare the students for an actual interview. You
can find the basic lesson plan here (http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/thinking-outside-box.html).
The groups at each table worked together to discuss a number of questions about
the records. These questions were meant to provoke further discussion about
forming interview questions for the assignment.
You may wonder about
music for this class. I played Sting’s “Englishman in New York”, although I
could have used “Illegal Alien” by Genesis.
This class was almost
90 minutes long, so I was able to do three, separate lessons, relate them, and
offer them as one class. I think it worked well, giving the students lots of
time to experience and guidance with the records. Many of the students returned
to work on the research necessary for their assignment.Monday, December 16, 2013
Lit Review: Broadening Student Understanding…
A good friend of mine
recently brought my attention to an article in Social Education 77 (5), pp. 228-231, by Lee Ann Potter entitled
“Broadening Student Understanding of Wartime Experience through Original Works
of Art and Personal Accounts”. It is a most interesting article that discusses
the incorporation of various sources (i.e., oral history, photos,
correspondence, videos, etc.) to encourage critical thinking. The author
outlines how this is done. Here's my take on what she said.
The students are
provided with some sources and challenged to identify if they think any sources
are missing. If so, what types of sources? Then challenged again to identify
what the missing sources might add to their understanding of the event. As the
new sources are provided, the students are asked to speculate on the creator,
title, and date of the new item(s) and then create a list of questions based on
these sources. After that list is built, the students are given the metadata
about these items. As a group, the students discuss how this changes their view
of the event. Then, the students are shown a video (or videos) that are
directly related to the event, adding another dimension [I would love to do
this with my classes]. The group discussion that follows incorporates the
newest information from the video. How are the students’ views changed about the
event or the items that reflect the event? Finally, the students are asked to
read the relevant section in their textbook to build and understanding of the
event. [Now comes the best part.] The students were asked to produce their own
interpretation of the event based on the more-rounded information, using the
various sources. [Are you wondering what my sessions might be doing next term?
If I can find a class with which this will work, I will let you
know!]
Thursday, December 5, 2013
One From the Song Book
Some time in August,
the planning began for a course for which I had done a session before, but not
using my new methods. Of course, I had to completely change the session to
incorporate speed dating, discovery, interrogation, and – yes – music. The
prof, who is open to new things, was in total agreement. We decided to offer
the session twice so that the class of 40 students could be divided into two
sessions of 20, each lasting 1.5 hours in length. The class assignment was a choice of one with historic textbooks, an
archival collection, a historiographic essay, or an oral history.
To get those creative
juices flowing, part one was a speed dating exercise with the historic textbook
collection – I called it Timeless Texting. I have used this method many times
for various classes. The challenge is to select only 20 or 25 books out of the
2200 titles we have in this special collection, ranging in dates between 1800
and 1983 on all topics. Normally, the class has a subject area to which I can
limit my search, but Educating Canadians covers the entire scope of this
collection. I limited myself to two titles for each decade, spreading out the
subjects as evenly as possible to provide comparisons. During the 30-minute activity, we discussed biases
when approaching a book, making fun of old textbooks, and expectations on
content. This was also an opportunity for me to explain the purpose of speed
dating, which is not apparent to everyone. I explained that the students need to
learn and practice skills for assessing a source and collecting bibliographic
data – speed dating.
Between this exercise
and the next one, I played some music for the students. Years ago, the Archives
recorded the campus Choir singing and chanting Acadia-related songs and cheers. Many
of the students had not heard these before. The music
interlude was directly relevant to the class and the students enjoyed them. Very effective.
The next part was
discovery with archival collections. As I have in other sessions, students were given
five collections related to the topic with the correlating finding
aid. They looked through the boxes for one item of interest, completed an information
sheet, and we openly discussed the records and items at each table (lesson plan
here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/hunting-and-gathering.html).
The purpose was to practice gathering historical details and information. This part
took about 30-minutes. Then, I had more Acadia-related music and song books to
share with the students before we began the next exercise.
Part three was the
interrogation section and would help with the oral history assignment. The purpose
was for students to practice interrogating sources and to brainstorm new ideas.
First, I instructed the students to switch tables. You see, in part two they
had heard about the records at the other tables and I suspected that something may
have caught their interest. Now was their chance to check out another group of
records. After the switch, everyone selected one item, completed a sheet of
questions, and then brainstormed about other sources of information that could
be helpful. (lesson plan here: http://archivallessons.blogspot.ca/2013/12/thinking-outside-box.html).
As the students packed up to leave, I played the song that is part of the
Acadia convocation ceremony. Many had not heard it before, but everyone
understood the significance of playing it at the end of this class.
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