Incorporating the information reviewed this week, identify some of the benefits of integrating primary documents into the curriculum.
According to Ruth W. Sandwell in her Using Primary Documents in Social Studies and History,
primary documents can be used in a variety of ways to benefit student
learning while still being applicable to the necessary curriculum
expectations. Some of the activities that Sandwell proposes are:
"Seeing Myself in the Future's Past", "Personalizing the Past", and
"Using Multiple Sources", among other suggestions. I will discuss all
three briefly, identifying their specific benefits.
Seeing Myself in the Future's Past is, in my opinion, a good way to teach students about how to understand historical perspective and its value. The activity asks students to review how they might seen by historians hundreds of years in the future. They are asked to list the documents that would be left behind to provide evidence of who they were and what they believed, and how they acted. The activity requires students to view how this evidence might be interpreted or possibly misinterpreted. I think this is a good exercise to demonstrate to students the value of primary resources and the benefits and problems they provide for historians that are far removed from the events which they detail.
Personalizing the Past is an activity that I think is provides students with a means to building empathy with historical figures. Artifacts such as diaries, personal letters, interviews, even ancient graffiti can all provide insights into the personal thoughts and activities of people from the past. By allowing students to study these primary resources we open up a door to the past that reveals human emotions and passions that are often easy to overlook when studying history. By understanding the personal details of historical figures students are better able to appreciate the human involvement with historical events so they can develop a better grasp for what it was like to live in a particular time period.
Finally, I think the Using Multiple Sources activity is an excellent way to demonstrate to students the variety of contrasting opinions that have existed throughout history. Sometimes history can be viewed as a linear set of events without any significant derivation throughout its gradual development. However, finding multiple primary sources with conflicting points of view can easily dispel this latter belief. Demonstrating to students that the people of the past often disagreed about social and political issues that we might take for granted today is a good way of showing them that history involves conflicting points of view which has taken many forms both in their developments and resolutions to their conflicts. For instance, multiple sources depicting the views on First Nation's peoples by European settlers would be a good way of demonstrating to the class the inherent racist views of most colonists towards the indigenous people's of Canada. Connections could then be made to the Indian Act and who these views helped to shape that legislation.
Seeing Myself in the Future's Past is, in my opinion, a good way to teach students about how to understand historical perspective and its value. The activity asks students to review how they might seen by historians hundreds of years in the future. They are asked to list the documents that would be left behind to provide evidence of who they were and what they believed, and how they acted. The activity requires students to view how this evidence might be interpreted or possibly misinterpreted. I think this is a good exercise to demonstrate to students the value of primary resources and the benefits and problems they provide for historians that are far removed from the events which they detail.
Personalizing the Past is an activity that I think is provides students with a means to building empathy with historical figures. Artifacts such as diaries, personal letters, interviews, even ancient graffiti can all provide insights into the personal thoughts and activities of people from the past. By allowing students to study these primary resources we open up a door to the past that reveals human emotions and passions that are often easy to overlook when studying history. By understanding the personal details of historical figures students are better able to appreciate the human involvement with historical events so they can develop a better grasp for what it was like to live in a particular time period.
Finally, I think the Using Multiple Sources activity is an excellent way to demonstrate to students the variety of contrasting opinions that have existed throughout history. Sometimes history can be viewed as a linear set of events without any significant derivation throughout its gradual development. However, finding multiple primary sources with conflicting points of view can easily dispel this latter belief. Demonstrating to students that the people of the past often disagreed about social and political issues that we might take for granted today is a good way of showing them that history involves conflicting points of view which has taken many forms both in their developments and resolutions to their conflicts. For instance, multiple sources depicting the views on First Nation's peoples by European settlers would be a good way of demonstrating to the class the inherent racist views of most colonists towards the indigenous people's of Canada. Connections could then be made to the Indian Act and who these views helped to shape that legislation.
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