Special full-text reprint with embedded links of the "Homepage" column
"Teaching with Primary Sources" (p. 11) exclusively on KQWeb
Debbie Abilock, Editor
"I love history," confesses Sarath, an archaeologist in Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost, ". . . the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story." In the novel, a forensic anthropologist returns to her native Sri Lanka to team with Sarath in a search for proof of government involvement in "organized campaigns of murder." Evidence is everywhere. Just as in Pompeii and Hiroshima, "the most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization." Yet both scientists struggle with a true reading of evidence-one believes truth comes to light through the "bones and sediment," the other is convinced "it's in character and nuance and mood." For the author, historical truth lies in their intersection.
Practicing historians use firsthand stories or direct evidence to reconstruct not only what happened in the past, but what meanings can be derived from such artifacts. "You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multi-colored taffeta and every time we look at it we can see a different hue," writes Milan Kundera. But until recently, K-12 students and perhaps many of their teachers understood history as textbook collections of facts to memorize. Digital libraries like the American Memory collections at the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration collections of primary sources profoundly changed my teaching of history when I teamed with a humanities teacher to create Turn of the Century Child. Our students were able to examine speeches, journals, songs, photographs, oral histories, and other objects of material culture previously accessible only to scholars. The construction of knowledge was at the heart of our teaching. Analytic and interpretive skills, essential to historical literacy, were as vital to teach as the search strategies that allowed access to the documents and data.
In this issue Patrick Rael outlines basic concepts and strategies for teaching students to become skilled in analyzing primary sources, while Susan Veccia's Web links tour at KQ on the Web points to lessons, activities, and instructional support materials at the American Memory site to support your own professional growth. Passion and enthusiasm for historical inquiry is palpable in the writing of Karen Needles, John Munnell, and Rosemary Fry Plakas. Teachers Monica Edinger, Laura Wakefield, Alison Westfall, and Laura Mitchell offer us a glimpse of the richness of the possibilities for teaching with primary sources. Such education is essential in a democracy, according to librarian Frances Jacobson. For SLMSs looking for lessons learned in staff development, both Lee Ann Potter and Susan Veccia provide advice about the design and implementation of teacher training.
As pedagogy changes, publishers are producing specialized print compilations of primary sources such as the Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America Primary Documents and UXL's American Civil Rights and American Civil War, and also CD-ROMs such as Encarta Africana, which contains the Library of Black America, a collection of novels, slave narratives, poetry, and other works written by African-Americans between 1773 and 1918. Gale's History Resource Center is an ambitious effort to integrate primary source materials with other databases of scholarly journals and newspapers as well as secondary resources such as encyclopedias and biographies. More than four thousand Web sites describing worldwide holdings of "manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar" are in the process of being digitized. They are referenced at Repositories of Primary Sources.
Support for teaching with primary sources is provided by professional resources such as Kathleen Craver's Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in History (Greenwood, 1999), David Kobrin's Beyond the Textbook; Teaching History Using Documents and Primary Sources (Heinemann, 1996), Monica Edinger's Seeking History: Teaching with Primary Sources in Grades 4-6 (Heinemann, 2000), and Donald Ritchie's seminal work Doing Oral History (Twayne, 1995).
In Intelligence Reframed, Howard Gardner reasons that "literacies, skills, and disciplines ought to be pursued as tools that allow us to enhance our understanding of important questions, topics, and themes." For students this process of understanding becomes their model for approaching other core issues using analysis, evaluation, and comparison. We can expect no less of our future citizens.
Finally, I'd like to introduce the newest member of the Knowledge Quest team, Dennis LeLoup, media specialist at Sycamore Elementary School in Avon, Indiana. Dennis was appointed associate editor at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. His primary role is to work with the many groups that comprise the AASL community-including sections, committees, task forces and affiliate organizations-to develop content for publication in Knowledge Quest. Welcome Dennis by e-mailing him with suggestions at dleloup@surf-ici.com.
Debbie Abilock, Editor, is the Assistant Head of The San Francisco School, San Francisco CA.
Copyright © 2000 American Association of School Librarians,a division of the American Library Association.