Using Primary Sources in the Social Studies Classroom

By Alissa Schwermin

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide practical classroom instruction to help students connect to history and deepen their knowledge of history through the use of primary sources and thinking like a historian. Utilizing questioning as a way to introduce new topics in social studies classes allows for a wide variety of ways to go about answering those questions. Gone are the days of textbook driven lessons. Today’s learners expect multimedia, multiliteracy, and multifaceted lessons that open their eyes to new and exciting things. Getting students to connect to a past that is so different from their present day can be very challenging. By using primary sources and developing questioning skills, students are able to develop empathy about days past and deepen their understanding of the history that led them to where they are today.

Pause and Ponder

What happens to a student’s academic confidence when they find the answers to their own questions?

Do learners of the 21st century need to practice finding reliable resources?

How can creating empathy in students about our past make a better future for them?

How does writing about a topic help deepen our understanding of the topic?

The text teaser

Primary sources have great importance in a social studies classroom because they allow the students to see the thoughts and actions of people they are writing about and put themselves in the shoes of people from the past.

Primary Source background and relevance

The word ‘textbooks’ has become a bad word in our district and many other districts. History education has been flipped upside down and inside out the past decade. There is not one source to teach from anymore, but instead, a history teacher is expected to pull in multiple sources in multiple texts, and in multiple media on one topic. In fact, we are not even called history teachers anymore because our standards have proven that the title is not enough. We are social studies teachers and we must include primary and secondary sources in all lessons and incorporate geography, history, economy, and civics in one fell swoop.

This is no easy task but it is a better and more holistic way of teaching about our past. A major change that hit the social studies world the past decade is the use of primary sources. Instead of the one linear textbook, now we are encouraged to use primary sources to really set the tone for that time in history.

A primary source could be a speech given by a president (text or audio or video), a diary entry from a Jew in hiding, a newspaper ad for women during WWII to step up and help their country, an autobiography, a song written during an influential time, a uniform worn by a Confederate soldier, a political cartoon during election season, a historical map of the United States in 1865, or any other item that was written, sang, played, or worn with first hand experience.

These sources are not always easy to find, yet can add a real depth to a lesson. These sources can transform your classroom into a traveling time capsule as you roll through days gone by. They also give students the opportunity to use higher level thinking as they analyze the sources.

By adding primary sources to your lesson, you are allowing students to see a true glimpse into the past. Unfiltered, yet sometimes biased.

What skills do students need to learn as they analyze primary sources?

Before a teacher hands out primary sources to analyze, they must spend some time teaching the skills that are required to properly analyze them. “Stanford History Education Group”, n.d.) has some great resources to get started in your classroom complete with lessons on how to wear a historical thinking hat.

A student must first learn how to source a document or artifact. Asking questions like who wrote this? What is the author’s perspective? When was it written? Why was it written? Is it reliable? These questions will help them shape where the document falls on a scale of reliability and bias.

Next, a student must contextualize the document. Asking things like when and where was it created? What was different during that time period? What is the same? How might the circumstances in which the document was created affect its content?

Once they have sourced and contextualized it is time to corroborate documents. What do other documents say about this experience? Do the documents agree? What documents are most reliable?

The last step is to close read (or view or listen). What claims does the author make? What evidence does the author use? How does the document’s language indicate the author’s perspective?

By using these skills students can analyze primary sources and then use that analysis to synthesize their own thinking about an event in history.

How might this be implemented in a classroom?

What is worth fighting for? Was Nat Turner ‘noble’ or a ‘madman’? This might be an essential question posed to students as they enter the classroom. An assumption should be made here that the students are in the middle of a unit on slavery and there has been background information provided about this time in history. In keeping with the cognitive literacy theory, students must have a working memory of a topic to be able to write about it. “Students need to have a clear understanding of a social studies topic before they are expected to write or report on it” (Clark, 2014). Now that background has been given, it is time for the students to put on their historical thinking hats and analyze some primary and secondary sources and then answer this essential question in writing.

Class may start with listening to the lyrics of “Roll Jordan Roll,” from the movie 12 Years a Slave. The teacher may then facilitate a class discussion about the lyrics after listening to the song. Asking guided questions like, “why do you think Christian hymns were popular in the 1800s?” “How did slaves communicate with each other?”

Next, in pairs students will review the timeline that begins in the early 1600s establishing the first African slaves brought to the British colony of Virginia and ending after Nat’s rebellion and the new laws that were passed to restrict the rights of free black citizens and slaves. Then students could analyze a set of historical maps of the United States that starts in the late 1770s and goes through how the U.S. looked at the time of Nat Turner’s rebellion. Noting slave and non-slave states and possibly showing an underground railroad map.

Students can then turn their attention to a short video clip from the History channel that reenacts Nat’s rebellion. This will provide multiliteracy connection for them as they then follow that up with a primary source reading of an excerpt from notes taken of a meeting between Nat and his lawyer while he is being held in jail. Nat lays out his case of being divinely called to lead the rebellion and his lawyer clearly thinks that Nat is crazy.

They will compare that to an anonymous letter written to a local news editor. The author of the letter believes that Nat had this plan of rebellion for years and is pretending to use God as a cover-up do his deceitfulness. Students would already have a background on the plantation style farming and the economy of the South, but this would be an opportunity to review that information and why slaves were so important to the farmers in the South.

The last document that the students will examine is a speech that was given by an abolitionist at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York in 1843. In this speech, Nat Turner is referred to as a patriot.

All of these sources provide a differing perspective of the same incident in history. Now the students must use their own background knowledge and their newly acquired knowledge to begin constructing an answer to the question: “Was Nat Turner noble or a madman?”

Along with each primary source, there would be a whole class, small group, or individual questions to consider. None of these would be easy ‘yes or no’ questions. Instead, they would be questions that would really illicit discussion and debate. The question, ‘how would you characterize Nat Turner’ could get 25 different responses in a class of 25 students. In turn, students would need to go back and find evidence to support their thinking. The beauty here is that all 25 can be right, as long as they can defend their answer with evidence. This allows all students to feel success and build confidence in their thinking as they prepare to write.

Tying literacy into content areas

“Content literacy supports the view that students construct knowledge through activities such as reading, discussion, and writing. Students must begin to personally connect with the content information they are learning and gathering as they study social studies(Clark, 2014). Primary sources are often times personal, meaningful, and allow a perspective to the students that take them to the place and time they are studying. By using that historical thinking hat, students can connect to the time period easier and help construct knowledge in a meaningful way.

By using different types of media as primary sources are introduced, a teacher has more success reaching students. The student who loves to read history may really be engaged by the diary entry provided. The artist may really study the painting or photograph of the time period. The musician or writer might be inspired by lyrics or scripts from that time period. The student who loves to analyze numbers would enjoy looking at crop outputs in the south over a duration of time and see the numbers behind the rationale southern farmers had in using slaves. Using primary sources offers students a variety of ways to connect to the past.

Creating empathetic students can be an uphill battle in this modern era. They truly have no concept of life before a small, personal device with all the answers they could ever want in their hands. Teachers must capitalize on that device. Teach students where to find these primary sources. How to source a document for reliability. How to use background information to construct what was going on in history during that time.

Once students have the basic skill of finding their own primary sources they can move to a deeper skill of corroborating sources. This skill takes practice but is invaluable in today’s world of instant media. It teaches students how to assess validity in what they read, watch, or hear. “As critical thinkers, they must learn that it may be problematic to rely on a single source for information” (Morgan, 2012). Students will learn the skill of taking two or more sources and finding the truth in both of them before they decide if either of them is a source that is trustworthy.

Teaching this skill by using primary sources is brilliant! It allows for students to take a step back in time and feel what the people of that time period felt, yet it also develops the skill set for current and future analysis that they will need as they sift through the massive amounts of information that they are bombarded with every day.

Now comes an opportunity for writing. There are endless ways a teacher can go about this task. What is important to remember is that writing is a tool that allows students to make sense of complex ideas and turn them into words and language that they understand (Clark, 2014). A teacher may decide to use this as an opportunity to learn by developing vocabulary, previewing or reviewing information, using diagrams, or maybe use it as an opportunity to apply knowledge and ask for students to summarize an event or author a historical biography. Using writing as an assessment is another option. Guidelines can be given according to what standard the teacher is focusing on for that particular unit. Incorporating writing could be as simple as journal response, exit ticket response, or as big as an essay or a multimodal assignment that might include a podcast about the historical event. The opportunities are endless. Using the primary sources as the building blocks for piecing together background information and developing their working memory will allow them to pull from meaningful work to write

Why should writing and primary source analyzation work together?

When introducing The Boston Massacre to my students we started by analyzing the engraving. We looked for details from the artwork that could give us some insight into how this group of people ended up in a battle against each other. Then we read a secondary piece of work that gave a biased background to what happened. The students again made note of what they thought led to the massacre and who was at fault. Then I introduced letters from Captain Preston, who was in charge of the British soldiers, and we examined his diary entries and letters to the British government about the incident. We followed that by reading several testimonies from the citizens that were there when the massacre took place. Of course, the stories read quite differently and give the students a lot to consider. Then I posed an essential question for them to develop a writing response to make a claim as to who was at fault for The Boston Massacre. The students were split on who they thought was really at fault and provided good reasoning to their thinking.

According to Fisher, by providing writing opportunities in content areas, teachers are able to strengthen cognitive writing processes to enhance reading comprehension(2015). Students will work on skills that will overlap in all other content areas and ensure that ELA is not the only class where writing is happening. As they develop those prewriting skills and become more comfortable it will be time to apply learning to writing. This will encourage students to use their working memory to draft coherent ideas and defend their thinking based on the information they have learned.

Using text features and learning to read the whole text when sourcing and corroborating will make students develop those analytical skills they will need when sifting through data that is given to them in multiple ways in our ever-changing literate world. Being able to verify that a document or article or video is reliable is becoming an invaluable tool in our society.

Students can demonstrate true knowledge gained in their writing. It forces them to not only read about something but to unpack what they have learned, analyze it, and write about it in an intelligent way. These skills are what we need all students to have as they move up to higher education or the workforce.

If we don’t learn our history, we are destined to repeat it. How many times have we heard that phrase? If students can connect to history in a real way by wearing that historical thinking hat and analyzing primary data from all perspectives, we are teaching the next generation the mistakes of our past and empowering them not to repeat them.

Active, Engaged, Enlightened

Lively conversations and debates happening around the classroom is one thing that makes me smile each day. Students wrestling with difficult issues and sometimes coming to the place that there is no ‘right’ answer let me see a glimpse into their future when black and white becomes more gray as they get older and wiser.

Students put themselves in the shoes of a child during the Holocaust as they read diary entries from Anne Frank, or watch a documentary of the Indian Code Talkers from WWI, or the retrace an off duty fireman's footsteps on 9/11 ties them to their past in a way that just reading about it can not do. Hearing the phone calls from the passengers from flight 93 to their loved ones is something they will remember. Bringing primary sources into the classroom is a gift to learners. It gives them the first-hand experience that makes that moment in history truly come alive.

Once they have a clearer understanding of an event, they are ensured to be able to write about it more clearly. The more clearly they are able to walk through the writing process the more evidence of learning teachers will see on a summative and formative basis.

Bringing primary sources into the classroom will take more work on the teacher’s part, but the rewards will be worth it.

Take Action!

Choose an upcoming topic of interest to you.

Know your enthusiasm is contagious

Compile a list of primary sources to support any secondary sources you already have on the topic

Pose a question that will lead to more questions about your topic

Teach your students how to think like a historian

Plan several days to go through the sources in whole group, small group, and individual tasks.

Ask students to write about what they have learned and respond to the original question (prewriting stage, application stage, or assessment stage depending on what standard you are meeting)

Allow the response to be multimodal, graphics, or written for more engagement.

More to explore!

Where to find primary sources

https://www.archives.gov/

https://www.loc.gov/

https://www.history.com/speeches

https://www.911memorial.org/museum (topic-based online museums)

https://library.harvard.edu/explore-collections

https://sheg.stanford.edu/ (thinking like a historian tool)

https://dppl.org/blog/post/kid-friendly-primary-sources (libraries)

References

Clark-Kartchner, Sarah. (2014). Writing Strategies for Social Studies Second Edition. Huntington Beach, California: Shell Education Publishing.

Fisher, Douglas & Frey, Nancy. ( 2015). Teacher Modeling Using Complex Informational Texts. The Reading Teacher, 69( 1), 63– 69. doi: 10.1002/trtr.1372.

Morgan, D. N. and Rasinski, T. V. (2012), The Power and Potential of Primary Sources. Read Teach, 65: 584-594. doi:10.1002/TRTR.01086

SHEG. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sheg.stanford.edu/