SQUEEZING DOCUMENTS:
Close Reading of Primary Sources

We will break some rules. Participants will act as students; they will act as teachers; they will act as students again. We will focus narrowly on specific documents, ignoring, at least for the moment, the broader historical context. We will analyze, we will criticize; we will build, we will tear down, and we will build again. We will use American Memory as our home base, but we will look elsewhere on the Internet for other resources. We will work within a given structure; we will create our own designs. We will orient ourselves backward, that is, we will work with the end in mind. The end, in this case, is to get the teacher to all but disappear, and allow the student to ask the right question of the right document. But don't disappear quite yet: there is work to be done.

We will use three methods of inquiry. We will combine these to focus narrowly on and query two primary sources around a lesson plan. The first method involves formulating Document-Based Questions, or DBQs. The second method is asking The Essential Question. Finally, there are my Four Questions that I ask of every document.

Objectives

At the end of this workshop participants will be able to:

• read a primary source document closely and "squeeze" it for meaning;
• judge the value of a document as the basis of instruction with their own students;
• generate a rough checklist or rubric for applying that judgment to documents across a variety of media and type.

Tasks in brief

In this workshop, participants will:

• walk through a complete lesson plan as students would;
• evaluate the merits of the lesson plan from the point of view of the teacher;
• make suggestions for customizing the lesson plan;
• closely analyze various sets of primary sources;
• query those documents according to the guidelines of DBQs, EQs, and the Four Questions;
• make suggestions for modifying and/or extending those tools;
• form judgments as to the usability of the various documents in their own classes.

Resources

1. Document Based Question Web site, Peter Pappas, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, East Irondequoit Central School District, New York
2. Essential Questions: The Keys to Authentic, Inquiry-Based Learning - An overview of the technique designed by Ted Sizer
3. By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s American Memory
4. Map Collections: 1500-2003, American Memory
5. By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943, American Memory
6. Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, American Memory
7. An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera, American Memory

Note: Arnold Pulda, teacher, School, Worcester, Massachusetts developed this workshop.