Primary Historical Sources: Do they Hold the Answer?
Authored By
Hilary S. Lyman
Supervisor:
Olga Bonfiglio, Ph.D.
Department of Education, Kalamazoo College
Kalamazoo, Michigan
A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Kalamazoo College
Completed
Spring 2006
Dedication and Appreciation
My Senior Individualized Project is the result of a number of individuals who have offered me support and guidance in various ways throughout my four years at Kalamazoo College. I hope each of you know how much I appreciate the dedication you have shown to myself and to my development.
My Parents - for everything - without you both I would not be the woman I am today.
Ross Bower - for recognizing my independence and individuality and allowing it to blossom.
Dr. Olga Bonfiglio - for your constant advice and belief in my abilities, both as a person and a teacher.
Dr. Charlene Boyer Lewis - for showing me that history is so much more than a textbook and that I too, am a historian.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Why History?5
Part I: Who Else is Talking About This?10
Part II: My Own Investigation15
Part III: Student’s Introduction: What is a Historical Document17
Part IV: What Happened? Are Students More Engaged
When Primary Historical Sources are Used?20
Conclusion: How Does Primary Sources Change the Role
of Educators? Is this the Answer to Why Students Believe
“History Sucks”?26
Introduction: Why History?
“Hilary, you need to pick out a children’s book this time. Your dad and I don’t have time to read the books like you picked out last time.”
“But mom…those are the only books that are interesting! They don’t have anything like that in the kid’s section.”
“Why do you like those adult books so much?”
“Mom, they are like a fairytale…except it really happened. People actually went through that!”
I did not end up getting an adult book that day. Instead, for the next few birthdays I received every history book for children you could ever imagine existed. I got caught countless times doing the “flashlight under the sheet trick” as I read about Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie. There was one series of books in particular I remember. Each ten page volume chose a different figure and would tell their background starting when they were a child. I loved these books because I could relate to the lives of the individuals who became famous. They enjoyed walking in the woods, so did I! They kept a journal, which told of all their dreams…me too! With these books, history continued to become more real to me. It was still a fairytale, I could still close my eyes and imagine what people looked like, but I knew that these individuals had feelings and emotions. I knew these people of the past were just like me.
At the age of seven or eight, this realization, although simplistic, has kept me motivated in the study of history. Even as school progressed and it became “cool” to hate history, I always remember closing my eyes as I read a chapter and trying to put myself into the situation. I could never understand why students hated history. What other subjects could you learn about other cultures and major events that changed the way we live? It was like an enormous story and as more events took place, we were getting to work on the next chapter of the book. As I talked to my friends and shared my analogy with them, the “Hilary, are you nuts?” look was returned. I realized at this moment that not everyone shared my view of how interesting history was. But I still could not understand it. Most kids grow up loving stories; they get read to before bedtime, by grandparents and siblings. What changes? What prevents students from seeing history asa story?
For the remainder of high school, I continued to see the story in my head and enjoyed reading history. I had given up finding an answer to my question, after all as long as I liked history it did not matter that others hated the discipline. This solution to my question worked all the way until the end of my first quarter at Kalamazoo College. It was at the beginning of winter quarter that I realized “maybe all those years of playing school in my basement really did mean something.” I decided I wanted to be a teacher. But how am I going to teach students a subject that by the time they are in my classroom they absolutely despise? How can I make students see the story that is taking place? In order to answer these questions, I needed to determine how it is that students decide “history sucks”.
Part of the answer to this question was revealed to me almost as soon as I got back into a high school classroom. No one makes it exciting. My history teachers in high school really did not do much to make it exciting. I remember the usual read the book, do the worksheet routine. How I was able to turn history into a story and make it exciting was beyond me. I enjoy history, but even I was overtaken by boredom as I sat in these classrooms. If teachers cannot interest someone in their discussion who already enjoys history, how do they expect anyone else to listen? I decided this is where the first answer to my question may be. In order to interest students, I need to make the idea of history exciting. It was a great realization, but an almost impossible task. How could I, while staying within the curriculum guidelines and the state and national standards, make history exciting? I continued to grapple with these questions during my sophomore and junior years at Kalamazoo College. I was in and out of classrooms observing, reading the textbooks available to the students, which definitely lacked in excitement. I was taking on the impossible task of how to hook these students. Part of the answer came to me while I visited relatives over Thanksgiving break last year.
I had two Thanksgiving celebrations last year, and I began to notice that the adults seemed to have something in common. Multiple times during both celebrations, they discussed programs on the History Channel. How do we go from hating history when we are in our teens and twenties to then discussing it at dinner when we hit thirty or forty? I started replaying the conversations. What interested my relatives in history? What had hooked them? The answer finally came to me, they related to the programs. Whether it was talking about their parents who had served in World War II, or it was discussing what it was like in the Vietnam era, history was real to my relatives. The history that was replaying on the History Channel was one that they had experienced. It interested them because they could remember living through the era. Students of history need to know that they can relate to what is being taught. History needs to mean something to the students, other than “a bunch of dead white men who told us what we should do”[1].
The ideas that students need to connect to history and that teachers need to find a way to make it exciting are two interrelated topics. As a teacher, it becomes my job to get past the monotonous, boring chapters within the book and find a way for the students to see that history is more than just “dead white men”. Even as a student who always enjoyed history, understanding this idea was like turning over a new leaf in my own study of history. Throughout my own high school experience, our study of history mainly centered on the major battles and the men who fought in them. I never realized what an integral part both genders and all races were in the formation of our past. My first United States History class at Kalamazoo College allowed this concept to become a reality.
I walked into History of the United States Part I in my sophomore year. I had always enjoyed U.S. History; learning about the background of the country that I grew up in had made history more real. However, when I walked into Dr. Boyer-Lewis’s class and a portion of our reading assignments were dedicated to reading primary sources, it astonished me. Not only were they primary sources, but they incorporated every gender, class, and race into the “history in a box”. This idea of learning through primary source work was a new idea to me, it changed the way I thought of history. The fairytales that I had created out of history when I was a child were now a complete reality; the characters now had a voice. When I realized how accessible many of these documents were, due to a research paper I had to write, I was sold on history as a discipline. The idea of having so many sources right under my fingertips to understand and analyze was, and is compelling. My task was now to transfer this same excitement and understanding onto a room of students who come to me despising what I teach.
It is a daunting task to stand in front of a room full of students only a few years younger than me and explain to them why they should learn about the history of the United States. I was immediately met with the usual teenage attitudes of “this is stupid”, “they are all old and wrinkled”, “it’s soooo boring”. In my head all I could think of was: What am I getting myself into? How am I going to change these pre-conceived notions of history as a subject? As I caught myself getting discouraged, I began to think about what I had realized as a student of history. I saw history as a story, part of which I was allowed to contribute. I saw historical individuals and groups as the characters in my story. This idea allowed history to become more alive. I also began to think about the idea that my relatives were enjoying history because it was linked to them and their lives. But how could I bring this into the classroom? How would I engage the students in a way that allowed them to see what history has the ability to encompass?
Part I: Who Else is Talking About This?
The idea of bringing historical documents into the classroom is not a completely new idea. As students ourselves in elementary, middle, and high school, within our history classrooms the walls were usually decorated with a copy of the Declaration of Independence or maybe a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. But “too often, primary sources are perceived as long, dry, boring documents that students will never even look at, let alone read.”[2] It becomes a tricky balance for educators to uncover and incorporate documents that are more accessible and interesting to students. These valuable resources incorporate fascination into education. As I set out to teach, my goal became one of connecting students to the past by allowing the realities of history to be more accessible and interesting. In working towards this goal I hoped to open my students’ eyes a similar idea that Ken Burns expressed in his foreword he wrote for Ordinary Americans.
We must in our historical excavations be more like emotional archeologists, exposing to modern air not just the dry facts of life before us, but the moving undercurrent of real human affections and failings. History, especially personal, ordinary Americans’ kind of history…is alive, breathing, contemporary. This is the way history should be told.[3]
There has been a transformation in the field of history in the last five to ten years. In this transformation there has also been a parallel event of educators recognizing the need to move away from a lecture-based classroom and instead to incorporate students into their own education. This movement has included an increased use of historical sources into the classroom environment. With a “hands-on” classroom, students have been given the opportunity to make history “alive, breathing, and contemporary.”[4]
Incorporating students into their own education requires that students feel more a part of the history that they are learning. Becoming a part of what you are learning usually means that a teacher needs to hook students in some way. Once the students are hooked they can move on to find their own quest for knowledge. Primary sources especially those that deal with “average” individuals allow for a deeper, more complete understanding for students. As Howard Zinn notes, “If history is to be creative to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past…”[5] The “hidden episodes” are key to hooking students and providing an avenue for them to discover their own history. Part of Howard Zinn’s idea regarding “A People’s History” is making the past something that individuals can feel. It gives them facts from which to draw on their emotions. It is this emotional side of history that is often missing from history textbooks.
A recent study involving the teaching practices of the Holocaust confronts the idea of what we are teaching our students and why. It looks at various methods used and their effectiveness and why, as educators, we choose to use them. Part of the survey asked teachers why they incorporated the Holocaust into their topics. Almost 90% cited that “its lessons apply to our lives today” and it “makes students more aware”[6] The very reasons we are already choosing to teach our students certain topics lie in the relevance that these topics have to students and their development in our world today. By simply making statements such as these educators are already halfway to using primary historical sources in their classrooms. However, how are teachers ensuring that they make their students more aware of realities and what effect do these veteran teachers believe it is having on the development of our youth?
This same study, conducted by the United States Holocaust Museum, also questioned these same educators to find out what resources they were using to teach students about the Holocaust. The results are promising, however, many educators also provided interesting questions that need to be answered by the future educators in the field of history and more generally social studies. The findings of the study showed that 69% used both films and first-hand accounts. An equally large percentage, 68% used photos and other historical documentation.[7] These numbers are promising in that educators are using more resources than their textbooks. These resources are giving students knowledge and emotion that textbooks are not able to incorporate. However, upon further investigation into these practices we find that these numbers are in part deceiving.
The Holocaust is a topic in history that has become studied by subject areas beyond history, students are exposed to it in multiple settings across the curriculum. However, there are many topics in history where this is not the case. It is important to discover whether these educators are using broad sources of materials in these areas as well. Are teachers still realizing the importance of connecting students because it is still “relevant in our lives”? In my research regarding the use of sources outside of the Holocaust and other major events, the numbers almost reverse. We see the number of educators who rely on their history textbooks close in on 70% and those who are using photos or other documentation drop into just under 30%.[8] Why is it possible to see such a decline? Although research on answers to this question is rather slim, I have a number of possibilities that I discovered myself as I was completing my student teaching.
The first explanation that I believe may lead to such a decline in use of primary sources is due directly to time. Teachers usually are involved in the classroom on average from 7:30-3:30 everyday. A number of schools in recent years have began hiring teachers who are able to assist in after-schools activities whether it is sports or clubs because districts do not have the money to pay for outside individuals. This often takes up the initial few hours directly after-school. By the time many educators finish their day it is often dinnertime. Finding source material can often take hours to find just the right piece that will fit into their lesson plans. For many teachers there are not enough hours in the day to complete all of these tasks. It becomes much easier to use the textbook for harder-to-find source material. For topics with multiple resources teachers do use more primary material. Time may be one constraint for a educators ability to use primary sources, but through my own experience I discovered another possibility.
In recent years access to primary sources has dramatically increased with the increased importance and reliance on the Internet. Although there is classroom technology that can transfer the images from the computer screen on to a large projector, it is expensive and many districts do not have the money to purchase these machines. Often smaller districts have only one or two machines for the whole school that forty different teachers must share. This makes the use of primary sources material difficult. During my student teaching, I did not have access initially to a projection machine. I instead spent countless hours searching for documents that I could transfer to overheads that in the process would not lose the key details relevant to the document. Due to the fact that I am a history major and had to explore primary documents on multiple occasions, I was able to narrow down websites and materials much quicker that those who may not have been exposed to the same resources. Although these are only two possible explanations for why primary sources are not incorporated into history classrooms, it still does not elude the fact that multiple studies have found that these documents are useful in “making connections clear for students…and serving as tools for initiating class discussions, encouraging research, and prompting writing activities”[9] - all pertinent to maintaining a successful classroom. In my own research during student teaching I found similar reactions when students were presented with material that had the capacity to provoke emotion and reality. Student could go beyond the textbook and bring something more to history than simply, “it sucks!”.