(Download) "Building Historical Thinking Skills in the U.S. Survey." by Teaching History: A Journal of Methods # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Building Historical Thinking Skills in the U.S. Survey.
- Author : Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 196 KB
Description
As a history educator I am constantly reminded of the gulf between how I think about history and how my students think about it. Sophisticated historical thinking, Sam Wineburg has suggested, involves using the facts of history as knowledge that is "organized in interconnecting networks of meaning and significance," of, he suggested in an earlier article, as "subtext." Historians have disciplined themselves to see the connections; students are just beginning this training. (1) To bridge the "breach," I have found that a project-based approach that teaches some basic disciplinary skills, primarily critical thinking and writing skills, increases student involvement in their history courses and aids retention of the material. This method has students working in small groups of no more than four students each. Within each group, students discuss the assignment and develop in-class written responses to six problem sets during each semester. I use a primary source reader to provide students with documentary evidence, but because the questions and problem sets that are included in readers often require more work than can be accomplished in a single class period, I have developed my own procedures for their use. The project workbook I use is William Bruce Wheeler and Susan D. Becker, Discovering the American Past, but any set of documents, photographs, advertisements, and the like from any source, including the World Wide Web, can be used. (2) For instance, in one project I have assembled five short pleas for abolition in the Northern states circa 1770s and 1780s from the documents in "The American Journey Online." (3) My criteria for the project material is that there should be about ten to twenty pages of evidence that students should read and examine outside of class, and thus come prepared to work with their group-mates in analyzing and writing about the evidence.