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TED 467 Secondary Teaching Methods

Dr. Jeff Sapp

Why use primary documents?

Develop critical thinking skills…

Primary sources are snippets of history and life. They are incomplete and often come without context. They require students to be analytical, to examine sources thoughtfully and determine what else they need to know to make inferences from the materials.

A high school student states:

“I learned that in order to do history, one must be objective and be able to look at a puzzle of historical events and put them together in order.”

Understand all history is local…

Local history projects require students to “tell their own stories” about familiar people, events, and places. Memories from an adults’ perspective provide a rich glimpse of history that is not available in a textbook. What evolves is the sense that world history is also personal family history, which provides a compelling context for student understanding.

A middle school teacher reports…

“…finding information about topics that are of importance to our local history is invaluable. Students are excited by the fact that our local history is archived nationally in the Library of Congress American Memory collection. This gives their immediate cultural area importance in their eyes.”

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Acquire empathy for the human condition…

Primary sources help students relate in a personal way to events of the past coming away with a deeper understanding of history as a series of human events.

A high school teacher reported that…

“In sharing the Whitman hospital letters, I clearly saw a sheen of tears in students’ eyes and noticed an avid interest in Civil War soldiers as ‘people,’ not simply as pallid historical figures.”

Consider different points of view in analysis…

In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to making inferences about the materials. “Point of view” is one of the most important inferences that can be drawn. What is the intent of the speaker, of the photographer, of the musician? How does that color one’s interpretation or understanding of the evidence?

A high school teacher states that…

“Discovering that two people seeing the same primary source differently creates a kind of dissonance that opens up the meaning of the source and creates new understanding in learners.”

Understand the continuum of history…

It is difficult for students to understand that we all participate in making history every day, that each of us in the course of our lives leave behind primary source documentation that scholars years hence may examine as a record of “the past.” The immediacy of first-person accounts of events is compelling to most students.

A 6th-grade teacher states…

“Comparisons of events of the past to events of our students engages them in meaningful ways and helps to bring a content area alive.”

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Library of Congress American Memory

Los Angeles, 1909

Ansel Adams’s photographs of

Japanese-American

internment at

Manzanar

Mission San Fernando Rey de Espana, 1936

Mathematics Mathematics

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Using Photos & Other Visuals To Teach

Most textbooks today are full of colorful visuals. But all too often these visuals function primarily as window dressing. They make the text more entertaining, or at least more palatable. But only occasionally do visuals do more than offer simple pictorial reinforcement of ideas already presented in the text. In many cases, they pander to the visual orientation of the young while doing little to help young people master the challenges of the visual media that dominate their lives.

By way of contrast, my approach to using visual materials emphasizes their unique strengths as historical documents. Visuals can focus students on the symbols and metaphors in editorial cartoons, the dramatic qualities of certain photographs, the potential of many images to make abstract ideas more specific and concrete, the implicit biases and stereotypes in certain images, their emotional power and their ability to invoke the spirit of a time and place.

Primary Documents

Students will empathize with having one’s possessions taken away

Twenty Pounds

3. 2. 1.

1936

1938

2005

Antisemitism Students will see that Antisemitism is currently on the rise

Introduction of Primary Documents

Students’ understanding of the Holocaust will be enriched by touching Gerda’s private documents

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Using Photos & Other Visuals To Teach

Most textbooks today are full of colorful visuals. But all too often these visuals function primarily as window dressing. They make the text more entertaining, or at least more palatable. But only occasionally do visuals do more than offer simple pictorial reinforcement of ideas already presented in the text. In many cases, they pander to the visual orientation of the young while doing little to help young people master the challenges of the visual media that dominate their lives.

By way of contrast, my approach to using visual materials emphasizes their unique strengths as historical documents. Visuals can focus students on the symbols and metaphors in editorial cartoons, the dramatic qualities of certain photographs, the potential of many images to make abstract ideas more specific and concrete, the implicit biases and stereotypes in certain images, their emotional power and their ability to invoke the spirit of a time and place.

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