Building Students' Historical Literacies

Learning to Read and Reason With Historical Texts and Evidence

Jeffery D. Nokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000542981
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Curricula nella didattica

How can teachers incorporate the richness of historical resources into classrooms in ways that are true to the discipline of history and are pedagogically sound? Now in its second edition, this book explores the notion of historical literacy, adopts a research-supported stance on literacy processes, and promotes the integration of content-area literacy instruction into history content teaching. Providing an original focus on the discipline-specific literacies of historical inquiry, the new edition presents a deeper examination of difficult histories and offers new strategies that can be applied to all genres of historical inquiry. Nokes surveys a broad range of texts, including those that historians and nonhistorians both use and produce in understanding history, and provides a wide variety of practical instructional strategies immediately available to teachers. Featuring new examples and practical resources, the new edition highlights the connection between historical literacies and the critical reading and communication skills that are necessary for informed civic engagement.

Equipped with study guides, graphic organizers, and scoring guides for classroom use, this text is an essential resource for preservice and practicing teachers in literacy and social studies education.

Part I Exploring the Critical Literacies used in Historical Inquiry

DOI: 10.4324/9781003183495-1

Literacy is central to the work of historians. They ask questions about the past, read about how others have answered those questions, seek evidence of many genres, apply thinking strategies and habits of mind, read and analyze evidence, construct interpretations, make claims about historical events and conditions, substantiate their claims using evidence, and communicate their interpretations through argumentative writing and speaking. This book explores the critical reading, thinking, and writing strategies used by historians as they engage in historical inquiry. Its purpose is the help history teachers introduce these literacies to young people in order to help them become more critical readers and more skillful writers and speakers. An argument that I make throughout this book is that the skills and habits of mind that historians use during inquiry have applications for the reading and writing required for civic engagement in the 21st century. Students who possess these critical reading skills and who exhibit these habits of mind engage in historical inquiries with greater zeal and learn history better. But more important, they are equipped with tools necessary to negotiate the internet, social media, and polarized news outlets—the sites where individuals research the controversial issues of today.

Part I of this book explores the concept of historical literacies. In Chapter 1, I describe my experiences as a middle school and high school history teacher, testing out historical inquiry lessons in my classroom and discovering through trial-and-error practical and engaging instructional methods. I also describe my transition into life as an educational researcher where I have continued to learn how to help students use critical reading strategies during historical inquiry. In Chapter 2, I contrast traditional history instruction with history instruction that engages students in historical inquiries. I propose that teaching young people the critical reading strategies associated with historical literacies prepares them for civic engagement. In Chapter 3, historians become models of reading, thinking, and writing. I describe the texts they read and create and the skills and habits of mind they use as they engage in inquiry. Chapter 4 explores ideas for teaching historical literacies to young people. General research on literacy is used to identify tools for building students’ historical literacies. In Chapter 5, I continue to explore the question, what is history? I contend that until students understand how historical knowledge is constructed, they will be unable to participate effectively in historical inquiry. Finally, in Chapter 6 I discuss critical intertextual analysis. Using a model lesson that includes a variety of genres of historical evidence and a range of strategies and habits of mind, I provide a vision of critical reading that could be the long-range outcome of programs that build historical literacies.

By the time you have finished reading the chapters of Part I you should be able to do the following:

• Contrast the methods and impact of conventional history instruction with those of historical inquiry and historical literacy instruction and summarize the research-based support for the latter.
• Compare and contrast the roles of evidence, secondary sources, tertiary sources, and public histories and describe methods of promoting historical literacy with each category of resource.
• Analyze the concept of historical literacy, considering Freebody and Luke’s four roles of the reader (code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text critic), and describe how and why barriers to students’ historical thinking can be minimized when a teacher supports students in each of their four roles.
• Describe and demonstrate historians’ strategies and habits of mind for working with evidence, accounts, and traces.
• Explain the steps of explicit strategy instruction and tell how it is different from implicit strategy instruction.
• Define the notion of epistemic stance and contrast the typical epistemic stances of students with the epistemic stance required for sophisticated historical thinking. Describe instructional methods that help students assume a more sophisticated epistemic stance.
• Make connections between the strategies essential in historical literacies and the strategies needed for informed civic engagement and explain how teachers can help students transfer historical literacies to informed civic engagement.

These objectives should result in teachers who are better prepared to build students’ historical literacies and engage them in historical inquiries.

1 Why Teach Historical Literacies Evaluating the Source and Context of This Book

DOI: 10.4324/9781003183495-2

Will reading this book be worth your time? The purpose of this chapter is to convince you that it will. You should begin to see how the historical literacies presented throughout the book serve a vital role in preserving democracy by informing civic engagement.

As you read this vignette, consider the similarities between the way historians investigate evidence and the way individuals should conduct online research and use social media responsibly.

Several years ago, as my family sat around the dinner table, two of my sons who competed on the high school cross-country team had a conversation about sugar. One had recently tried to eliminate sugar from his diet. He thought that doing so would improve his performance as a runner. However, after cutting sweets, his times did not improve. The younger brother had a sweet tooth and would never sacrifice sugar. In recent weeks, his times had improved, and he had started to outpace his older brother. Did the consumption or nonconsumption of sugar have anything to do with their performance on the track? During the dinnertime discussion, the younger brother tried to convince the elder that sugar was good for a runner. He made a compelling case, comparing his sugar-enhanced times to his brother’s stalling performance. Going for the knockout punch, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Within a few minutes, he found a website that stated unequivocally that sugar was an important part of a young runner’s diet.

Up to that point in the conversation, I had remained a silent listener. I was nearly convinced that runners needed sugar. Then I asked to see my son’s phone. The site he had found had a professional appearance, with images that gave the impression that it had been created by a nutritionist or someone in the medical field. Taking his phone, I searched for information about the creator of the website. Eventually I found the name of the organization responsible for the webpage. Searching for more information about that organization, I eventually found that it was affiliated with one of the major producers of soft drinks in the United States. Both boys could understand the problems associated with making decisions about sugar consumption based on evidence provided by one of America’s largest purveyors of sugar. Undaunted, my sugar-consuming son went back to his phone to search for a more authoritative source that would support his argument.

This book is about historical literacy. But the applications of its content extend beyond the reading, thinking, and writing that occur in history classrooms. It is intended for history teachers, but the impact has the potential to reach beyond schools. The literacies described in its pages can enhance young people’s ability to engage in historical inquiry. These same literacies, with minor adjustments, can also advance their capacity to wisely research current issues using the Internet, use social media responsibly, and distinguish bias in the telling or retelling of a news report. For young people (and old people) who turn to their cell phones to answer all types of questions, the ideas of this book might save them from minor or major mistakes. In a democratic society in which individuals increasingly research political issues online, the critical reading and argumentative writing strategies described in this book are of existential importance. History classrooms that teach students to approach texts with mild resistance, cross-check information found in one source with other sources, provide evidence-based substantiation for claims, and seek alternative perspectives when researching, prepare young people for informed civic engagement in the 21st century’s polarized environment. These critical reading strategies that are exhibited by historians, if taught in history classes, have the potential to solidify history’s indispensable place in the curriculum, a position debated in the 21st century (Alterman, 2019).

Two of the most basic historical thinking skills are sourcing, considering the source of the information one receives, and contextualization, thinking about what was happening when a document was created. So it is important to introduce myself to the reader, sharing something about the context that motivated me to write this book. In this chapter, I describe my growing interest in the critical thinking associated with historical literacies and historical inquiry throughout my 30-year teaching career. I describe some of the experiences I had as a middle school and high school history teacher, experiences that ground my understanding of history teaching in the practical realities of the classroom. I also describe some of my experiences as a researcher as my understanding of historical literacy and historical inquiry have evolved. I introduce the major themes of the remaining chapters of this book to help the reader follow my logic in putting this book together in the sequence that I have.

historical literacies: the ability to negotiate/read and create/write the kinds of texts that are valued in history, including the ability to gather and weigh evidence from multiple sources, make informed decisions, solve problems using historical accounts, and persuasively defend interpretations of the past

Historical Literacies in My Classroom

What insights for teaching historical literacies can you gain from my teaching experiences?

My interest in the critical reading strategies that I now call historical literacies began early in my teaching career when a colleague of mine gave me a collection of documents related to the Boston Massacre to use with an eighth-grade U.S. history class. Being a young teacher, I was happy to try just about anything that I was given. I gave students the documents as I received them and assigned students to try to figure out what really happened at the Boston Massacre. Then I stepped back and watched students work. The documents presented conflicting evidence that at first perplexed these 13- and 14-year-olds. I was not much more familiar with historical reading than the youngsters were. But I instinctively knew that the perspective of the eyewitnesses, American or British, loyalist or patriot, made a difference in their account of the event. I tossed that concept to the students to consider, and their debate gained energy and sensibility. Even an inexperienced teacher like me could see that something special was taking place that day. The level of engagement was high as students argued about the trustworthiness and relative value of the different accounts. Many students became passionate about their interpretations. Some contested the minute details of the event. The students’ excitement in learning during a challenging reading task was something I had not witnessed before in my classroom, which typically involved textbook reading, lectures, and documentary videos. The students learned a great deal through the activity, but I learned even more—I caught a glimpse of what a history classroom might be like if I engaged students in historical inquiry.

historical inquiry: opportunities for students to explore authentic questions about the past, with space to construct their own interpretations, support in their use of evidence, and a chance to share their ideas and receive feedback.

Over the next several years, I began to collect activities like this Boston Massacre analysis—activities during which students would sort through primary source documents and attempt to answer a historical question. My teacher instincts told me that this was good teaching. I soon discovered that when I planned and structured the activity correctly, with an interesting question and the right documents, graphic organizers, and student groupings, engagement was high. And students learned the historical content better. I gained a clearer understanding of what inquiry looked like—something I had rarely experienced personally as a student. However, in the days before the internet, it was extremely time-consuming to find primary sources, and I, as a typical teacher, was expected to serve as a student government advisor, assistant basketball coach, mock trial team coordinator, and on multiple committees. Regrettably, most of my lessons followed a more traditional format with students listening to me lecture. But in my heart, I...