Myra Zarnowski's teaching and writing about how to use literature as the core of a history program has been transformative in our thinking about how we can use literature to teach more than the "generic reading skills" Sam Wineburg writes about. The ideas in her books, Making Sense of History and History Makers, helped us increase the rigor of our teaching literacy in the content areas.
Since a primary goal of our grant was to have teachers learn how to use primary sources largely available through the internet and in local museums, we extended our study by providing teachers with corresponding primary documents available through the internet, books, and museums to enrich our study.
Railroads appear briefly on the fifth grade New York State Social Studies curriculum. A brief search on the internet for information demonstrates that this topic provides rich conceptual and thematic connections beyond the story of the immigrants who helped build the nation's rail system. Primary sources that can be used to teach the railroad include broadsides, advertisements, folk songs, photographs, diaries and letters.
The development of railroads spurred transportation and communications across the growing nation and helped to consolidate national identity. It also proved to be an invaluable resource during the Civil War. The darker side of railroads include the implications for concentration of wealth during the Gilded Age, heightened tensions and violence between Native nations and the US, and the use and abuse of railroad labor.
To begin, learners studied a set of documents on the impact of the railroad and used the See/Think/Wonder protocol from Project Zero's Visible Thinking website (http://pzweb.harvard.edu/vt) .
Students then broke up into small groups to analyze document sets created from materials available online and excerpts from trade books on the impact of the railroad on Chinese Laborers, Irish immigrants, Magnates, Native Americans, Trade and Transportation, and Anglo Settlers. They used the criteria of teaching historical significance described in Making Sense of History to guide their discussion of railroads and US history. Links and references are attached as a word file.
Children today are so used to the speed of modern life that they find it hard to imagine life when four miles an hour was considered "high speed." The development of the Erie Canal was really a turning point in US history. A vast and contentious government funded project, "Clinton's Ditch," as it was known, became the nation's first super highway linking the farms and produce of the developing midwest and the urban and international markets available on the Eastern Seaboard. It also provides a logical point of entry for teaching students about how to determine historical context.
I discovered Myra's chapter on teaching historical context at the same time I discovered Martha Kendall's engaging book, The Erie Canal. This book is beautifully written to allow students to identify literary techniques that establish historical context. These include the "Extended Now and Then Contrast," "The Mid-Narrative Jolt," "Sensory Descriptions of the Unfamiliar," and "Thought Experiments." These techniques are described in detail in Making Sense of History. After trying out the ideas described in the book, teachers identified additional authorial craft that might be used to highlight historical context including using questions to encourage tentative thinking and quirky anecdotes to highlight a key point and to portray the humanity of the participants in history.
We began by examing some photographs from a JackDaws kit on the Erie Canal. Each group was given a separate set of photographs and asked to note what was familiar and what was unfamiliar. Participants filled out a t-chart (in the attached file) to note their observations. These observations were shared with the class. Having built some prior knowledge and some relevant vocabulary, students then broke into groups to read sections from Kendall's book. Their purpose was to identify different techniques the author used to create a sense of the historical context. We began this portion by demonstrating the point through a shared reading activity. Finally, students wrote a letter from themselves to a child living along the Erie Canal. All guiding sheets, as well as a list of references, are included in the attachment.
Teachers often have students read historical fiction as part of units of study in social studies. For many students, historical fiction can be an engaging entry point into distant history. It can also pose challenges. Frequently, students are confused by what is truth and what is fiction. Additionally, many struggle to use visualization, an important comprehension strategy, when reading about the distant past.
When we read historical fiction with our students to learn about history, Myra Zarnowski suggests four basic questions that can be used to guide student thinking:
1. How does this book help me to understand daily life in the past?
2. Could the events described have happened? How do I know?
3. Which events really happened? How do I know?
4. Which characters really existed? How do I know?
The common challenge faced by many young students in beginning this work is the lack of prior knowledge of the topic or era. In order to build needed prior knowledge, we used primary documents, informational texts and museum collections to assist children in understanding and critically reading Phoebe the Spy and New York City during the Revolutionary War.
Claire Moore, a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, led us in an exercise in which we studied excerpts of Phoebe the Spy that described setting. We then visited a colonial house in the museum's collectin to examine artifacts that might have been similar to those that Phoebe encountered. A sample excerpt and the worksheet Claire devised are attached.
Teachers also spent time completing a three column chart, titled Fact/Fiction/I'm Not Sure to separate out the fact from the fiction as they read Phoebe. Although most teachers had read the book frequently, this exercise caused them to read with a new purpose and they found many pieces of "information" that they had overlooked before. Using their questions and a set of primary and secondary sources, they created a question-answer book as described in Making Sense of History to reflect new learnings. Instructions and templates are attached.
Often, when we use biographies in the elementary classroom, we use them to teach about the lives of important people and what qualities or characteristics they had that influenced their lives. In her books History Makers and Making Sense of History, Myra Zarnowski challenges us to use biographies as tools in teaching critical reading. By reading across biographies, as we have written about in the section on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and by identifying the different perspectives of people who interacted with the main person whose life we are reading about, we can consider how different authors give us different insights into a person's life and how different people in history might have viewed that person.
Another advantage of teaching biography in this way is that we can focus on a key force in history, in this case the abolition movement, in a way that provides access for the diverse learners in our classrooms. We chose Douglass and Truth to study because there are books about them that are written at various readability levels -- from lower level texts at an L or M level up to the narratives they wrote about their own lives.
As groups of learners engaged in the sets of biographies, they were asked to first identify the different voices in the narrative and to see if they could determine, together, what this person's role was in society. For example, in reading about Sojourner Truth, we met Master Hardenbergh who was a rich New Yorker who owned slaves. We then wondered what thier thoughts and opinions on abolition might have been and identified evidence in the texts that supported our initial ideas. Since Master Hardenbergh as a slave owner, we thought that he was pro-slavery since he made money from selling enslaved people. Finally, we thought about what he might have said about young Isabelle. Readers spent some time reading the various texts together and completing the attached graphic organizer on voices in history.
Groups then wrote books on the person they studied. Using Nikki Grimes' book Talkin' About Bessie as a model, we wrote introductory pages that established the person and the context, and then wrote pages on what different individuals in this person's life might have said about the person we were studying. Greater description of this activity is in chapter 5 of Making Sense of History.
An interesting twist that arose during tihs process happened in one group that was studying about Frederick Douglass. This group became quite fascinated by the story of Sophia, the woman who taught Douglass to read. Over the course of her life, she changed from questioning slavery to becoming adamantly pro-slavery. Instead of writing a book about the different perspectives on Douglass, this group decided to write about Sophia instead. Sharing the outcomes of these discoveries added to the group's overall understanding of the complexity of US societal views on slavery and abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.
The voyage of the Corps of Discovery is a topic rich with possibility for the elementary school learner. In addition to geography and the natural resources of the American continent, this narrative provides opportunities to learn about the early years of our country's history and to go beyond the simple narratives of Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark to address how diverse peoples and individuals played roles in this unfolding story.
We began with a brief overview of the historical context and then read the letters from Thomas Jefferson to Meriwhether Lewis and then from Lewis to Clark that launched the journey. Since the Corps was charged with exploring "the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, ...may offer the most direct & practicable wter communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce" (Thomas Jefferson was still searching for the elusive Northwest Passage) and to learn about the people and resources in the west, we focused on three key elements in this study.
1. While reading excerpts of President Jefferson's letter to Meriwhether Lewis and reading portions of trade books, we determined the goals of the Corps and the historical context of the time. We wrote up and illustrated brief summaries of this context using a template that is attached below.
2. We conducted scientific observations of animals as described in a lesson available through the Smithsonian's education website. To do this, we studied one of Clark's journal descriptions of an animal and then practiced the skill of description by visiting and studying relevant dioramas in the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.
3. We broke into groups to study native cultures that the Corps encountered. Groups visited dioramas and museum displays of cultural artifacts from a nation in the Plains Indian Hall at the AMNH and then read about the Corps' encounters with these people in various trade books and on line (a resource list of websites and books is attached.) As a result of this study, we sketched out a story board of an event we read about and then wrote a letter to President Jefferson describing what we learned.
To synthesize our learning, we used a lesson we found in Making Sense of History on adding to a historical account. I took excerpts from David Adler's A Picture Book of Lewis and Clark and we added information we learned to the text. This process required the learners to pull together information from across the unit of study. It also made visible the process of how we bring prior knowledge to a text to understand and question it.