Inquiry Question: "What happens to students' concepts of "perspective" in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis?"
Part II: "Doing History" with critical literacy toolsMy goal is for students to conceive of the study of history as a wieldable tool—useful in their own lives—rather than a static set of knowledge that either does or doesn’t interest them. Various critiques of the contemporary social studies curriculum, in general, take issue with the absence of the “tools of the profession” (Weinberg 2001) in the secondary classroom. Weinberg et al (2011) describe historians’ skillsets to include “ways of reading that allow them to see patterns, make sense of contradictions, and formulate reasoned interpretations” (v), whereas non-historians might “get lost in the forest of detail and throw up their hands in frustration” (v). When imagining the “tools of the profession” at work in secondary classrooms, Weinberg proposes that “the practices historians have developed can be used to make sense of the conflicting voices that confront us every time we turn on Fox News or MSNBC.” Thus, doing history becomes a matter of critical literacy of both past and present. Lintvedt (2005) affirms the need:
“Most students read a document as if they were reading a paragraph in a narrative text. Students have to be shown that historians often read documents “backwards,” so to speak. … This is a sophisticated, multilayered set of skills, and we have to teach students how to do this explicitly” (1). I have looked elsewhere to find pedagogical support for what Lintvedt describes as reading documents “backwards.” Attending to the task of incorporating “historical thinking” into secondary classrooms, Weinberg et al (2011) offer the methodological model, “Reading Like an Historian,” to help students read documents using the tenets of “sourcing” and “contextualizing” (vi). Hicks et al’s (2004) “The SCIM-C Strategy: Expert Historians, Historical Inquiry, and Multimedia” offers a five-part critical reading strategy that guides students’ analysis of an individual document, but also asks students to “corroborate” viewpoints across documents. The comparative aspects of Weinberg’s and Hicks’s models set them apart. Other curricula, such as Facing History and Ourselves, does a fantastic job at contrasting viewpoints across documents, but attends less to analytic skills used to examine individual documents in-depth.
Studying existing curricular materials and reading these critiques was revelatory for me: I love history because of my college courses in historiography and my career as a journalist, wherein the real questions are about the making of history, and the constant negotiation of perspectives, not about the Who, What, Where, and Whens. Those details are fascinating to me, but only in the context of Why: the complex mechanisms of social institutions, power, and national and individual subjectivity (Ferro 1981). To me, studying history means asking questions about the past: What do the documents say? Who wrote those documents? Are the authors of the documents the same people as the stakeholders in the situation? Where was the money? What art did people make in response to a situation? Were the people involved self-aware? What is the popular version of the story? What is the unpopular version of the story? How does that situation resemble situations in play today? My conception of my own task as a teacher of history is to disambiguate the monolithic narrative in capital “H” History, and to make the study of history relevant to my students’ lives. Because I am not the teacher who will woo and awe my classes with fantastical renderings of the stories of battles and triumphs, I look to teaching methods that rely on students’ individual creativity, interest, and subjectivity, and to teaching materials that don’t necessarily lend a clean and simple answer. I need to help my students use the “tools of the profession”—including comparison, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis of multiple sources and perspectives—to deal with the messiness of history. Although Weinberg (2001, 2011), Bain (2006), Hicks et al (2004) and others offer critical responses to the need for more pertinent skills to be taught in secondary classrooms, their work leaves out an essential perspective that factors into any student’s interpretation of history: their own perspective. I believe that it is essential for students to understand who they are, as individuals, and how their individual identities are informed by social factors, such as group membership and power. The student’s unique perspective—the way they are situated in the present and how they perceive it—has an enormous impact on their perception of history (Kincheloe 2001; Bakhtin 1982). The focus of my inquiry question highlights the particular task of “first-person reasoning” because it allows students to examine and represent the “lived experience” (Kincheloe 2001) of individuals in history. I have borrowed heavily from critical literacy tools more typically used in English classrooms to design lessons that allow students to bring their own perspectives into the classroom through specific exercises. They also provide structure for students to negotiate their own perspectives with others in the room, and in the histories they read, hear, and examine. Through writing, speaking, and dramatization activities, students examine both what they know from their own lived experience and the experiences of individuals in history. My inquiry focuses on the use of two perspectives, in particular: 1) the student taking on the perspective of a real or imagined individual in history, and 2) the student as themselves, examining the past and present. Wolk (2003) writes: “The purpose of critical literacy is not to tell students what to think but to empower them with multiple perspectives and questioning habits of mind and encourage them to think and take action on their decisions through inquiry, dialogue, activism, and their daily decisions about how to live so that they help make a better world” (102). Significant research supports the notion that students learn well when given the opportunity not only to consider the perspectives of others, but to borrow those perspectives during in-class dramatizations such as debates or tableau, or first-person writing assignments, such as writing a “letter home” from the perspective a soldier experiencing trench warfare for the first time during WWI (TCI 2004; Zipes 1995). Unlike third-person reasoning, wherein students write about a perspective or event, first-person reasoning requires students to identify how a certain event or situation might look, or feel, from the perspective of an individual for whom it was “a lived experience” (Kincheloe 2001). “People may enact different possible identities by trying out novel uses of languages, narratives, or images to shape or transform social relationships in particular spaces” (Beach et al, 47). Through these real experiences experimenting with real and imagined identities in the classroom, students employ “historical thinking” to learn how they might make sense of the present, future, and distant past. I believe that no quantity or chronology of facts can construct meaning as resonant as a student’s first-person experience of history.
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