Big Ideas in Literacy – History/Social Studies

What is meant by disciplinary literacy in history? How can the discipline of history inform literacy instruction? To answer these questions, this unit looks at what history is and what historians do to make sense of history.

Disciplinary literacy in history refers to a broad set of reading, writing, and thinking practices that are aligned both to the work of historians and the approaches they take to such work. When used in the social studies classroom, disciplinary literacy activities can support students as they learn valuable thinking and literacy practices. These include:

• Learning to ask questions
• Critiquing sources of information
• Considering multiple perspectives
• Judging the quality of evidence
• Forming reasoned opinions

So, then, what do historians do? In short, historians ask questions and review a variety of historical sources to make claims about the actors and events of the past. In other words, they investigate and interpret the past by researching documents and artifacts—receipts, diaries, paintings, stories—in order to answer the questions they have.

By teaching with practices that approximate the work of historians, teachers can achieve three goals. They can:

• Teach content through the investigation of primary and secondary sources
• Develop specific literacy practices in reading and writing that promote historical interpretation
• Support analytical ways of thinking about the past

Reflect: What disciplinary literacy practices, if any, have you used in your own classroom instruction?

Because historians investigate the past, much of what they do is detective work—they search for evidence and clues that will help answer questions they consider worthy or significant. They pore over documents, texts, and artifacts in order to re-create and make sense of a past event. They work with emerging ideas and develop hunches along the way, making connections between the past and present. To do this kind of work, historians think in certain ways. Such ways of thinking are habitual for historians and are called habits of mind.

While there are many habits of mind that a historian might possess while doing history, these units focus on a few that relate to teaching history using methods that promote literacy:

• An orientation toward inquiry and asking questions
• The role of interpretation and argument or narrative
• The use of sources as evidence for making claims

History is an inquiry into events and people in the past, which are unfamiliar to those in the present and must be understood through research. History, as undertaken by historians, is not simply the study of dates and facts, although knowing such background information is important. Rather, history is a process of asking questions about the past and making reasoned conclusions about what is known. By doing so, historians can begin to understand why people in the past acted the way they did or why certain events happened.

What one historian might write about the past is not necessarily the same as what another might write. Since evidence of every perspective and every detail of the past simply does not exist, historians are limited to working with what artifacts do remain. Therefore, they write different arguments—sometimes in the form of narratives—because of their differing interpretations of evidence within the historical record. In doing so, historians note the causes of past events, what has changed or remained the same over time, how people of the past viewed their world, and significant turning points that affected the decisions people made in the past. By doing all of this, historians develop interpretations about the past—what happened and why—and communicate them to others.

In the same way that historians investigate the past by developing their own questions, researching historical artifacts, and making conclusions about people and events of the past, teachers can adapt such practice for the classroom through careful structuring and planning.

As a way of supporting students in developing literacy and using the historian’s habits of mind, class investigations give students opportunities to learn the historical practices involved in inquiring about the past. By framing the learning of history as investigation, teachers can model and have students participate in the process of learning history and developing interpretations about the past. The remaining sections of this unit will focus on the practices necessary for creating engaging investigations.

In order to frame an investigation for students, it is important to understand the component parts of an investigation. These components include:

• Essential historical questions that guide the inquiry
• Background knowledge that informs understanding
• Multiple and varied sources that represent different perspectives to analyze as evidence for making claims
• Opportunities to write claims in response to essential historical questions

Reflect: Have you used investigations in your classroom instruction? If so, how have you prepared your students to investigate a history or social studies concept (e.g., cause and effect, problem/solution, important people)? If not, how would you prepare your students?

One model of a class investigation that introduces students to investigating sources is a strategy called Opening Up the Textbook. This kind of lesson shifts the role of the textbook from being the source of one true story to being one historical account among many. By challenging the textbook, students might also come to see that history is open to different interpretations, making room for authentic investigations. One way to do this is to take a textbook excerpt and compare it with another document—another textbook excerpt, a primary source, etc. A few ways to open up the textbook include:

• Comparing two textbook excerpts
• Using a primary source to challenge a textbook’s account
• Identifying people or voices who are not present in the textbook
• Expanding the narrative of something that is only briefly mentioned in the textbook by investigating additional sources
• Identifying the ways the textbook uses language to describe events and actors in the past

Explore: Read about the Opening Up the Textbook [PDF] strategy.

The remaining sections in this unit deal with the materials necessary for creating investigations in the history classroom: creating framing questions, developing background knowledge, and selecting and adapting historical texts as sources of inquiry. While these sections present the component parts of an investigation in a linear fashion, it is important to remember that these steps take place in an iterative process. That is, developing questions, selecting sources, and identifying learning goals might all take place together gradually. For instance, even if there is a really great essential question to investigate, there may not be available sources to address such a question. Therefore, once sources are identified, essential questions may need to be changed or new essential questions may need to be established in order to align them to the evidence provided in the sources.

Video and Reflection: Watch Reading Like a Historian as an example of using investigation and interpretation to promote literacy. You may want to take notes on the questions below.

• Before you watch: What ideas about using investigation and interpretation to promote literacy have you incorporated into your teaching? What questions do you have about using investigation and interpretation to promote literacy in your classroom?
• Watch the video: Observe how Lili Velo uses investigation and interpretation to promote literacy in her classroom.
• Reflect: How might you incorporate any new ideas from this video into your own teaching?

Historians often approach their work by first identifying a problem space they find significant and worthy of investigation. Such a problem space might include figuring out what happened at a specific time and place, what qualities characterize certain people over time (e.g., leaders), or the reasons that caused events to occur. Regardless of the problem space, historians begin their investigations by asking questions. For teachers, however, the pathways to forming questions may not be as emergent as they are for historians. While teachers may be motivated to create their own investigations based on the desire to understand something, they may also begin by coordinating investigations with topics identified in state standards or established curricula.

Because investigative history, by definition, inquires into the past, questions play an integral part in the process of student learning. In fact, questions play two roles:

• They can be used to frame a unit or a single lesson. (For the purposes here, questions frame individual investigations.)
• They can be used to highlight controversy or problems for students. Questions can both frame and advance an inquiry. That is, questions can be used to provide an overarching structure for an investigation. Once the investigation is underway, questions can be used to prompt students to think deeply about the complexities of the topic under study.

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) College, Career, and Civic Life C3 Framework distinguishes between two types of questions that can be both teacher- and student-generated: compelling questions and supporting questions. Compelling questions focus on enduring issues and concerns. For example, “Was the American Revolution revolutionary?” In contrast, supporting questions focus on descriptions, definitions, and processes on which there is general agreement. That is, supporting questions focus on the content needed to fully consider the compelling question; for example, “What were the regulations imposed on the American colonists under the Townshend Acts?” For the purposes of this course, compelling questions are used to frame investigations. These compelling questions here are called essential questions.

In forming essential questions, it is important to consider a few aspects. The best questions to guide inquiry are complex and debatable and require students to analyze texts and move beyond a summary. These questions are not answerable by a simple yes or no, and there is typically a range of possible answers to and multiple interpretations of the questions. However, in some instances, it may be appropriate to frame questions for students in a dichotomy (either/or) so that students recognize that their role is to make an argument, rather than summarize information.

Examples of good essential questions for investigations include:

• What happened at the Boston Massacre in 1770?
• What characteristics make for an effective leader?
• What is the proper role of government?
• Should Martin Luther be considered a hero or heretic?
• How does technological change influence society?
• What makes places unique and different?
• Why did the boycott of Montgomery’s buses in the 1950s succeed?

Video and Reflection: Watch Blended Learning: Purposeful Instruction to learn more about using questions to frame and sustain inquiry. You may want to take notes on the questions below.

• Before you watch:  How have you used questions to frame or focus students’ learning? Can these questions be answered in multiple ways, or do they have one right answer?
• Watch the video: Consider how Andrea Gambino Rhodes frames questions so that they are open to multiple interpretations or responses. How does her use of questions help sustain inquiry?
• Reflect: Write one to two paragraphs in response to the following questions: What would be a good essential question to guide an upcoming unit of study? How can you write or phrase the question so that it is complex and debatable and pushes students to analyze texts rather than purely summarize?

Explore: On the Historical Thinking Matters website, there is an investigation of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956. Consider the essential question, “Why did the boycott of Montgomery’s buses succeed?” What makes this type of question effective? What characteristics of good essential questions does this question exemplify?

As with all classroom lessons, students are more likely to be successful if they have developed prior knowledge of the topics at hand. However, in studying history and social studies, it is not reasonable to expect students to have prior knowledge of the expanse of all human history or the human experience. Therefore, in order to support students, teachers need to help them make connections to prior knowledge and to develop new knowledge to support the investigations.

As noted before, one of the reasons for using investigations in history and social studies classrooms is to teach content in an engaging manner. Even though teachers might ask students questions for which they already know the (consensus) answer(s), they do not want to give away the whole story before students have a chance to investigate it for themselves. Therefore, developing background knowledge with students sets up the investigation. But this does not simply mean giving students background of a historical time period or going over an event in excruciating detail. Background knowledge here includes all the information critical for helping students make sense of texts, consider an author in light of the essential question, and situate the texts within historical context. It is a matter of providing just enough information for students to dig in and learn more from the texts.

Reflect: How have you developed students’ background knowledge during your own instruction? How do you determine what prior knowledge is relevant?

Developing background knowledge can take many forms: reading from a secondary source, watching a video, listening to a lecture, working with or creating a timeline, and using various graphic organizers or other ways of sorting information. All relevant content knowledge that can inform an interpretation of the texts should be considered here. Most importantly, developing background knowledge of the historical context in which a source was written or of the author who wrote the source is paramount.

Explore: Consider these examples of ways in which background information can be developed.

• This video can be used to develop background knowledge: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• Two teachers talk about developing and using timelines to support students’ background knowledge: Teaching with Timelines and Digital Timelines [PDFs].
• A teacher talks about preparing a lecture to support students’ background knowledge: Making Every History Lecture Engaging [PDF].